‘I experienced everyday sexism while reading Everyday Sexism’: how Katie Arnstein turns anger into laughs
Katie Arnstein greets you at her theater shows by cheerfully handing out sweets. “I want to thank you, take away the fear for myself and immediately start a conversation with the audience,” she explains. After all, there are so many other ways they can spend the next hour of their lives. “It cost money and time and during Covid brought the risk of travel and a confined space. It's generous when people are with me. And if they don't like it, they've eaten rhubarb and custard.”
The shows have been carefully curated by Arnstein, who has emerged as one of our most compelling storytellers, with her gentle but never sentimental explorations of hard topics. Her first three productions formed the It's a Girl! trilogy about sexism and sexuality. Her latest play, The Long Run, is a bracing account of her mother Jane's treatment for colon cancer. It is essential to put the audience at ease: “I have never changed my mind because someone shouted at me. But I do when someone speaks softly to me.'
The starting point for The Long Run was the time she spent with her mother in radiology: “I was in a panic for two months.” In the waiting room she saw a man escorting his neighbor, who was being treated for a brain tumor and had no one else to drive him. Arnstein began building a show about strangers helping each other, weaving a fictional plot about an elderly gentleman in the hospital training for a marathon.
This provided the opportunity to write about the London Marathon, Arnstein's favorite day out. She has watched it almost every year since moving to the capital from the West Midlands. “I can't run in front of a bus, so it's really remarkable for me. People cheer for strangers!” The Long Run, directed by Bec Martin, incoming artistic director of innovative London theatre New diorama, has a traverse stage with the audience on either side, as if spectators were at a marathon. It feels like we are carrying both Katie and Jane (who never appears and yet is vividly evoked) with us.
Jane, a retired headteacher, has enthusiastically promoted Katie's career, including approaching a major agent on her behalf. “I woke up one morning and got an email she had written,” Arnstein recalls with wonder and horror. In the letter, Jane defended her daughter's amazing performance as a magical blue cat in a Christmas show. Arnstein was honest on the phone, “Mother, just as I didn't try to get you a head position, please stop trying to get me a job!” She laughs. “Mom is a big fan of the strong email.” There is silence and she looks nervous. “To have you Have you heard of her yet?”
With The Long Run, Arnstein wants to reshape the way we talk about cancer. “I hated that it was a 'battle' that she could 'win or lose'. I hated the “fighting” terminology and the talk of “beating it”… because I don't think you can lose to it. I think you can get the time and treatment you need and deserve, or you can't. My mother did that – and I am so grateful – but if someone doesn't, it's not their fault. They didn't 'lose'.”
Cancer Research is supporting the show, which will go on tour next year and will hopefully also visit the Edinburgh festival. Arnstein received widespread praise in 2019 with Sexy Lamp, the middle part of her trilogy, named after writer Kelly Sue DeConnick's test on the value of a drama's female character. (If you can replace them with a light bulb and the plot still works, then it fails the test.)
With sparkling puns and ukulele songs, Sexy Lamp playfully revisited Arnstein's early experiences as an actor, but added some devastating examples of the industry's cruelty, including an audition where she is constantly asked to take off more clothing. Her shows come from personal experiences, she says, adding that sometimes real life wouldn't be believable.
Consider the time when she experienced everyday sexism while reading the book Everyday Sexism by Laura Bates. “This group of men came on the train, sat around me and passed around a bottle. They said, 'Oh, are you a feminist?' They took the book away from me and I felt like I was six years old. The carriage was full and no one got in. I had my hair in a bun and when they got out one of them grabbed it and pulled my hair out. I was really shocked. As I waited for the bus home, there was a man on crutches yelling at a woman. I said, 'Please don't shout' – and he hit me on the back of my legs with his crutches. I wanted to talk about that trip, but no one believed it, so I had to rein it in.”
That story was included in her first show, Bicycles and Fish. There were seven spectators at the first performance in 2018 at London's Vault festival – “and I was related to four of them”. The following year, Sexy Lamp won an award at Vault, which provided financial backing for an Edinburgh run. “Lightning in a bottle,” she marvels. She even made a profit in Edinburgh. The final part of the trilogy, Sticky Door, about a year of sexual encounters, took place in 2022. That time “I only lost £400,” she says, with a knowing laugh about the dangerous marginal economy. “People say, 'Good job!' but imagine being robbed and taking £400!
Vault Festival, an essential launching pad for theatrical talent that gives artists an edge box office split, is endangered. Even over the course of a short career, Arnstein – who is 32 – has exacerbated conditions in the industry: “All theaters talk about a last-minute booking culture (with audiences). There are not many pre-sales, so the financial risk is greater.” She finances her work through a mix of jobs. “This year I have been a waiter, a miller, a childminder and a customer service representative” – and it has been that way since she left the Birmingham School of Acting (now Royal Birmingham Conservatoire) in 2012. What was her first acting gig? “A pantomime that toured the northern garden centres.” To make it even more glamorous: “I was also the driver. The most humiliating thing was when this boy came up to me at the end, pulled my dress and said, “I didn't like it.”
Disappointed with the scripts she had as an actor, she started writing – and she now does that for other artists. Her first TV monologue, the darkly comic Wolverine Woman, was produced for BBC Three's series The Break. It stars Olivia Swann who, with a door key held claw-like between her fingers (“Shout out to Hugh Jackman!”), tries to get home alone after a day at work. This, as Swann wittily says to the camera, involves the “edge-of-your-seat, heart-in-your-mouth thrill,” as well as safety strategies learned at Brownies.
Arnstein is delighted with Swann's performance. “I knew I wanted the main character to be funny, to seem like a strong woman and yet be vulnerable in that situation. I wanted people to think about whether their best friend was being followed home, or their sister.” Arnstein, the eldest of three sisters, drew on memories of the safety speech girls gave at her school while the boys were taken to a movie in another room. Too often, she says, the problem is put to women to solve. “There is no separate session for boys on how not to follow people home.”
As a solo theater artist, her own working conditions can be precarious and unpredictable, in an industry that is slow to protect freelancers. Arnstein studied drama in the days before intimacy coaching and is scathing about the student roles she had – mostly written by male playwrights. “In my third year I played a grandmother and a 90-year-old girl.” She laughs and adds, “I don't want to brag!” She grins remembering the advice she took to do an acting show in a bra. Too often, aspiring actors are asked to test their limits, she says, instead of finding their voice.
Writing her own roles is powerful but complicated, she adds. “I do shows about taking up space, but all the time I feel like I don't deserve to be there.” One solution is to read the rave reviews she has written for her own performances. No, the ego hasn't landed – this is the sage advice from her friend, playwright Jon Brittain. “He said if you have a day where you're stuck, you should write a review of your show. I did it for Sexy Lamp: 'Katie Arnstein wrote a show about this and it makes you feel…' Then you get a blank page and you're like, 'Okay, how do I make that happen?' Then you just work backwards.”