Fleshing Out The Historical: Katherine Moar on Writing, History and 'Farm Hall'

Katherine Moar is on a roll. Her debut play Farm Hall was produced by Jermyn Street Theatre in last April, securing her an Offies nomination for Most Promising Debut Playwright right away, and tonight it makes its name known to the West End. While secrets bubble on the Theatre Royal Haymarket stage, Moar finds herself wading between a PhD on the public perceptions of Winston Churchill and her first theatrical commission from Hampstead Theatre. Already, her career is off to a blazing start. Yet, when I ask her to recall her first-ever piece of writing, Moar chuckles with barely concealed embarrassment.

“The first thing I properly wrote was fan-fiction,” recounts Moar: a 300-page Game of Thrones fan fiction for her best friend Emily’s 16th birthday, with the two friends as characters in the Six Kingdoms. “We would spend every lunchtime when we were at school planning what would happen next in the story and I would write it up during History lessons, when I was meant to be concentrating. It was long, and embarrassing, and sometimes I read it for fun and cringe."

It's the political possibilities of the King's Landing in Westeros that engrossed her more than the pages of her History textbook, Moar claims, but the subject of History was not going to leave her side any time soon. After pursuing History and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh for a year, she switched to a major in History. Soon she found herself in Georgetown University for an exchange program in her third year – a year that was going to change her life forever.

“While I was at Georgetown, one of my professors mentioned the existence of the Farm Hall transcripts. I thought they sounded so interesting. I took them out of the library, read them all in one evening, and the first thing I thought was this would make such a good play,” says Moar.

The following summer, she returned home to Bath and wrote the first draft of her debut play – aptly titled, Farm Hall – while working at the Jane Austen Museum. “I would think about characters while I was in the museum. And then I would rush on my break and write it down in a notebook, all the kinds of dialogue I had come up with in my head."

The company of Farm Hall. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner

But why write a piece of theatre for this story, I curiously ask? Not a movie, like Oppenheimer, nor a TV series, like All The Light We Cannot See? “I think I had a helping hand there because my dad works in the theatre in Bath. So, we always went there when I was little, a lot more than I think the average person goes to the theatre.” Plus, the Farm Hall transcripts, the textual building blocks her play's words, naturally lent themselves to a theatrical adaptation. “What I like about theatre and its emphasis on dialogue is that it kind of harnesses the same skills that my academic writing does," she adds. "Which is, you are kind of working out an argument and you want to give all sides equal room to breathe and speak."

But writing a historical play is no mean feat – especially one whose subject is, quite literally, inflammatory. Farm Hall, directed by Stephen Unwin, follows the story of six German nuclear scientists who following the fall of Hitler, were detained by the Allied forces in a stately mansion in Cambridgeshire. In that fateful summer of 1945, as some of the brightest minds in the world rushed against time to develop the world’s first atomic bomb, these scientific mavericks found themselves locked in for seven months, while their conversations were covertly recorded and surveilled by the Allies.

In a post-Oppenheimer world (a film, by the way, Moar considers Christopher Nolan made especially for her), the biggest challenge is not centring her story around the creation of the atom bomb. It's about striking a balance between historical accuracy and dramatic compulsion.

“I don’t want to downplay the history of science, the idea of a scientific power being built in this whole secret town in a desert. That whole period of history is so interesting,” says Moar in convicted seriousness. “The priority was to draw out these characters and not just have them be mouthpieces for various historical arguments."

Archie Backhouse in Farm Hall. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner

In Farm Hall, Moar's writing process meets its match in the form of her characters themselves. Whilst these scientists are depicted rather sympathetically, they were, ultimately, still card-carrying Nazi members. "If I just make my characters as truthful as possible and have them represent their viewpoints as truthful as possible, it will become clear, you know, the audience can, they can recognize the irony. They don't need you to hold their hand so much to get there," she reveals.

Fleshing out worlds for characters and representing them as flesh and blood human beings, vested with vices and virtues beyond the flattened impression of a mere history lesson, lies at the heart of Moar’s creative practice as a writer. She has her roots, Georgetown professor Kathryn Olesko, to credit for pedagogically training her to view historical figures as people first.

“That was interesting to me because you realize these were just people at the centre of all this stuff. What I am trying to write now is personal. The interest in history came in later."

Whilst studying at Cambridge, she visited the real Farm Hall, and subsequently revisited the site with the show's production team. That, too, was personal: "It was really moving. It was very helpful to give me a sense of what the house itself was like, what they could see out of the window."

She admits to imagining the Farm Hall mansion being deep in the countryside with nothing for miles around, and then being pleasantly surprised to find that it was located right in the center of the village. “It was like a village country house, with people right next door. Having been to that house did influence me. There’s references to the house at the end of the garden and things like that, which was based on me having seen that,” reminisces Moar.

Julies D'Silva in Farm Hall. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner

After this, Moar isn't done with History. Brimming with glee, she tells me about her Hampstead commission, which is based on the life of 1970s American heiress Patty Hearst and her relationship with her lawyer during her FBI trials. And if she could have one indulgent wish, she would write a play about the Rosenbergs, who were executed for selling nuclear secrets, too.

"I am totally wedded to the 20th century; it is the most interesting thing ever," she vigorously tells me. "That whole whole period in the history of science, I don’t want to downplay it, but it is like a fantasy novel."

Farm Hall plays at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until 31 August. This interview was edited for length and clarity.