The art of disguise.

Sasha Hails writes. Sasha Hails creates. She tells us of the never-ending need to do both; to tell her stories and to tell ours. We also talk about how to hide in plain sight…

Who are you?

I know I’m Sasha Hails.  I know who my parents are.  I think that the best thing about life is that you never really know who you are.  I think that goes hand in hand with being an artist.  With the kind of work I do, I’m rediscovering what I want to say and who I am, alongside whatever is happening in my life at the moment.  You have one person who you know that you’re going to be with throughout your life, one person who you can’t get away from and that’s yourself. I quite enjoy having a bit of mystery.  I quite enjoy the fact I don’t actually, completely, fundamentally know who I am and I can surprise myself.

It’s like Shakespeare says – a man plays many roles in his time. I’ve been a mother, then there were the student years, the young years.  I’ve played several roles in my life, but I’m always excited to find out who I am and what I need to say and who I’m becoming.  I think we’re always in transit.

How do you do what you do?  How did you get to where you are?

I started out as an actress.  That was always my dream. I was working professionally since I was 18.  Three months out of the traps of drama school, I was pregnant with my first child  and then I had three more in my mid-twenties (which is an odd choice for a performer to make and it was a choice!) I wanted to be an actress and I had these three kids. I was really desperate to be a mum.  Obviously. But, I never stopped needing to create. As acting became harder (because we didn’t have much money at that point.), I started to write. I started to write for the children.  I was writing stories for kids’ telly, stories for radio.  Any time they were asleep, I would feel that absolute need to write, to create.  I kept acting as long as I could and I do still occasionally do it.  But, strangely, the need to perform and to connect, viscerally, with an audience (which I had as a young woman) sort of was replaced by my daily life and my love for my kids.  They were my audience.  They were what I could pour all of my absolute need to connect into.  So, I was able to sit down and write in a way that I was wouldn’t have been able to before I became a mother.  I could pour my creativity and my need for connection to people and for - I guess – translating and processing of the world, into writing.

Now my kids have grown up!  Although the writing is going really well – lucrative but also, artistically fulfilling – without the girls there at the end of every day and the family life, I now find I need to connect again.  So, who knows what will happen next!  I’m missing that personal, visceral connection to people and the world.

I did act with my children.  I was one of those mums.  For me, mothering was a hugely creative and necessary experience and I did pour my creativity into it.  When I could, I took my girls with me.  I did a film with my first baby (“Regarde La Mer” by François Ozon). I performed on stage, pregnant, a lot at that time.  My second child was on The Bill with me.  I took the three girls on a tour.  We performed “A Winter’s Tale” together, with a wonderful director called John Dove.  I played Hermione and the girls play Mamillius.  We toured England for six months.  For me, that was a dream fulfilled.  It was like the real old travellers lifestyle.  There I was, with my three girls, rocking up in my old Volkswagen Golf, them helping to set up the set, on stage at night, being loved by the actors, performing Shakespeare outside.  For me, that was the dream, the travelling family, the travelling players.

Having children was not a barrier.  There was no decision to make.

For me, there was no decision.  I kept trying to act.  Partly, it’s financial.  Partly, it’s what you can afford at the time.  I think if I’d been massively rich, I probably would have hired a nanny and carried on acting.  For me, to mother those kids and to find something to do that wasn’t on the stage, was stronger than to leave every night at to perform at bath time - or take off on a film set for months.  But that’s just me. And I judge myself for it.  Part of me thinks – why?  I just presented the highlights of creativity and motherhood to you.   There were days when I sat there, thinking “what have I done?”  I think what drives me is my creativity. It took me about ten years to get a career going in writing that could actually support me properly.  The thing about writing is that you can do it at any point - alone.  But then there’s that need to share it with other people, to share the stories, and to get recognition.  There were days when I’d written something I thought was wonderful, but no one wanted to read it or it was rejected.  There were days when I thought “what have I done?” and my friends, who had set off on the starting blocks with me, were getting accolades here, there and everywhere and having their work recognised.  Of course, mothering is fantastic and I love my girls, but (I thought) I’ve totally not fulfilled that other side of myself.  Luckily, I stuck with it.  I need to continue to express myself so much.  Slowly, slowly, things worked out.  There were great times, but there were really tough times.  Turning up to acting auditions with breasts leaking, when you’re supposed to be playing the ingénue…

I hadn’t really thought of myself as a writer because I wanted to act so much. Although improvisation had been the base of a lot of my work.  It was just that need, when the girls were asleep at night, or when they were in bed or if I was sitting in the park. I would just start writing.  Initially, I think, to just write things for myself to perform.  And then I started making extra money on the side, doing script reports for people.  Reading these film scripts and TV scripts and thinking – I could do that! When I was young I was the kind of person that couldn’t sit still. But I got tired – as you do when you have kids. Suddenly, I found that I could sit still, for hours at a time.  And, actually, that meant I could write.  That was the gift.  I wrote a screenplay (that’s never been made, but became a brilliant calling card that people loved), I wrote a radio play that was never made, I wrote a stage play that was never made.  These three things that I started to write, I put out in the world.  I started to win little competitions.  I then started hiring myself out to write for other people.  So, very quickly, I found myself on a radio show called “Westway” and would write regular episodes for them. The girls were growing up and I needed more money.  I started to write for Holby, Casualty and Eastenders.  They were wonderful shows to write for and it was brilliant for technique.

But - I was lending my voice to others.  I feel that I am still emerging.  When you say “who are you?”  I feel really quite lucky to be here, because it’s quite an exciting place to be.  I still haven’t quite expressed myself or been able to share my absolute vision.  I’m getting the opportunity now, but people haven’t seen these things. I feel that I’m actually writing me and what I want to say. It’s very exciting, finding out what that is.

My daughter is a writer.  She’s twenty-five and writing her own plays. I look at her and I think – wow, your voice is there.  That’s you.  I always hid.  I hid behind the characters of Eastenders, the characters in Casualty.  Malory Towers.  I do adaptations of things.  I feel very happy investing myself in others and communicating parts of my experience – in disguise, I guess.  Which, perhaps is like acting, because you’re in disguise when you act.  And I feel that, right now, I’m on the cusp of saying – this is what I want to say and this is who I am.  Who knows if people will really like it or not!  But I’m finally being given that opportunity.  I finally feel that life has given me space enough to myself to go – who am I?  What do I want to say?

The forced hiatus – the “magic” – of the pandemic has made the performing world pause.  What has it done for you, as a writer? Have you, or did you stop at all?

I find myself alone, for the first time in my life.  That’s both frightening and exhilarating as I have always had to do my work alongside the craziness of family life.  Suddenly I don’t and it’s quite amazing.  It feels like a test but it’s also quite extraordinary to have that time to consider things.  I thank the lockdown for that because, when the world locked down, I said to myself – this is a huge global changing event.  If I can’t change my own life as I’ve been wanting to for some time – if I can’t do that, at this time of change, then who am I?  I’m not someone that I want to live with for the rest of my life.  I have to make a choice.  Will my next twenty-five years be more of this?  Or am I going to have the courage to step out?  And the pandemic gave me courage.  If we’re going to be forced to look at ourselves like this, I need to look at my own life.  And I need to have the courage. The pandemic gave me time and it gave me courage.  It left me with myself.  I think I have often run away from myself.  Hiding in other characters or plays or something I’m writing, hiding in my children. Suddenly, I thought – time to re-think.  I’ve spent time with myself, perhaps for the first time since Sunday afternoons as a child.

Do you have any idea (yet) how this might affect your writing – not only for others, but for yourself?

I’m hoping, that if I discover enough pleasure and excitement in the writing – I always believe that’s what transmits or transfers to readers or an audience. 

Pre the pandemic, two amazing things happened in the world which have totally re-calibrated my attitude to ‘who are you’. If you’d asked me that a few years ago, I would have answered “I’m a mother, I’m a sister, I’m a friend, I’m a writer, I’m an actress”.  A list of things that are attached to other people.  I think the two amazing things that happened were #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter.  Also, at this particular moment in time in our industry, there was a massive shift.  We TV writers signed a petition demanding that there was more diversity, and also more space for women, as TV writers and artists, and it actually feels as though that was listened to.  I know for sure, that a couple of jobs I’ve got recently are because I am a woman.  I am an older woman and a diverse woman.  I ‘pass’ for diverse because my granny was Indian and my mum’s Jewish.  I never really considered myself that, but other people tick that box for me, I’m not going to complain.

Before, I might have shied away from writing about myself because I might have thought it wasn’t interesting – I feel that these subjects, right at the moment, have been validated by the world.  Or at least by our cultural world in the UK or the people who are employing us – me. They are saying, “no, we do want that story. We do want a story about how you didn’t know you weren’t British and what it was like to be brought up, thinking you were a white, English girl when, actually, you weren’t quite and what that might have meant for you.” I wasn’t really interested in that before, but if you are – actually, it’s quite interesting!  I’d hidden that from myself because it wasn’t. 

Is this about permission?

I guess.  Permission and validation, in a strange way. What I find interesting is what I need to express, what I need to say. I think – why do I want to say that?  Why do I want to tell that story? What I write is not necessarily my story.  It’s not autobiographical. I’m in everything but it’s where imagination meets experience. (I don’t know who said that – that’s someone famous, that’s not me…!) 

Do you ever think “this bit of who I am” is strong enough to take over the story, to BE the story?  Is that interesting enough for you to feel that it is interesting enough for us?

Definitely.  But in disguise!  Definitely.  There are things where I feel – yes, we really need to talk about that, but I would put it into other characters.  Partly because I feel that I can be freer with it in disguise.  It makes it more accessible, in a way.

How has the journey of your art engaged your voice – personally, artistically, politically?

Becoming a mother politicised me.  Struggling as a young-ish mother and not having much money, just absolutely awoke me to what other women were going through, how difficult life was. Spending a lot of time with my kids, in the local community – yeah – it really politicised me.  It made me want to fight for women. 

My writing has slowly more and more become political.  Now, I would say, everything I’m writing is quietly political, but it’s very much to do with women’s politics or feminism.  Even Mallory Towers (we’re on our 3rd series on CBBC) is about a quiet feminism shown through the prism of these 1940s girls finding their identity and voice. I feel as though a lot of my work is about the female struggle and what we choose to do with our lives. I’ve always written mostly female characters without thinking about it because that was my experience.

The MeToo movement triggered an empowerment for women and that I found very exciting.  It feels like it opened the possibility for women to tell their stories and for that to be recognised.  What began as women telling their stories about being aggressed by men has turned into women telling their stories and giving permission and showing interest in what our stories are.  It just feels to me that women have been silenced for so, so long.  There are so many exciting stories. It’s about equality and finding an absolute balance.

Who are you?

I’m still Sasha Hails.