Why I wrote Private View

Musings in the week I open my writing debut at Soho Theatre

Have you ever been in a relationship that started out like a Richard Curtis rom-com and then spiralled into a terrible codependent nightmare? Yup. Me too, babes. At the beginning, it’s wild. It’s such a thrill. You want to spend literally all your time together. You’re glued to your phone, experiencing a delicious flood of dopamine when they text. In fact, your text flirting repartee is practically Oscar Wildean in its sharp, dry wit. You barely sleep, because you’re constantly having sex. Your friends never see you – they think you’ve moved abroad, or become a spy, or died – your new relationship is so all-consuming.

It’s intoxicating, love like this, in a very literal sense. It feels like you’re getting high – and in a way, you are. You’re evolutionarily programmed to chase after this hormonal cocktail – dopamine pleasure receptors firing like a slot machine, oxytocin flooding through you ‘cos you’re spending so much time naked next to them, adrenalised from the lack of sleep and the thrill of the mutual, flirty chase. Your internal drugstore, going haywire.

Patricia Allison and Stefanie Martini in Private View (Credit Madeleine Penfold).

But intensity like this is not sustainable. After a while, you start to ask yourself, ‘Do I even know this person?’ Why did I move in with them after four dates? And you barely recognise yourself – so immersed, so enmeshed are you within the relationship, you hardly even feel like a separate person any more.

I’m fascinated by how we romanticise relationships like this. We’re socialised to believe that real love is all the more real for being the more intense. The more grand the gesture, the further you run in the pouring rain, the louder the boombox outside your love object’s home, the truer your true love is. After several obsessive, compulsive, profoundly intense relationships like this, I started to wonder: should love really feel like this? Because it doesn’t feel very safe.

Private View is my attempt to explore the intensity of this kind of queer relationship and interrogate the flips of power that happen within them. The play goes to some dark places, and I’ve tried to be unafraid of this in the writing. I think, often, with love stories that are dark, we find it comforting to sit in the world of black and white, of ‘abuser’ and ‘victim’, of good and evil, of right and wrong. But I think often, it’s not that simple. And this can be really scary.

As we’ve been making the play, I’ve been interested in showing a kind of trapeze of abuse—where problematic dynamics are co-created, where power shifts under your feet, where the lines are blurry at best and sometimes totally dissolved. Messy. Chaotic. Sometimes frightening. Because relationships can be like this. And I think it’s so important for art to talk about these dark and frightening places – to help us unwind or escape these dynamics when we find ourselves there.

Almost from birth, as people who’ve been socialised as female, we are spoon-fed stories of love as codependence. Disney princesses, fairy tale heroines, and – yes – Richard Curtis rom-coms. What I want to do with Private View is tell a different kind of love story, where a happy ending doesn’t necessarily mean a wedding. I hope that audiences find themselves reflected back in the dynamics between the characters, to be better armed against this in themselves, as they go on to love again and again and again.

Private Views runs at Soho Theatre from 27 November to 20 December 2025.
This article was originally published in QX Magazine.

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