Interview: Lucy Bell, ‘Scaffolding’

Ahead of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024, we’re chatting with a range of creatives who will be heading to the city over August to find out more about their shows. Today we’re chatting with Lucy Bell about Scaffolding.

Can you tell us a bit about you and your career so far?

I’m 49 with three kids; hardly an overnight success, but God loves a trier! 

Like a lot of writers, I’ve done a load of random jobs badly: model maker, TV researcher, dinner lady, teacher. I was a military wife for seven years (which was definitely outside my skillset).

I started writing plays inspired by the funny things I heard teaching in schools and prisons. Documental Theatre has grown with the help of some brilliant people (not least co-director Naomi Turner). It’s a tough getting reviewers and programmers down to the Far South West, so its brilliant to see our work cutting through to national and international audiences at Edinburgh. I’m going to have to try not to be too intense and frighten people.

What is your show about?

Aargh. My mind goes blank when I’m asked that! When you write a play it becomes this whole other world in your head. Here is the blurb written by someone pithier than me – Sheridan is having a bad day.

Her church is closing, Adult Social Care are on her case and she can't work out what ingredients she needs from Homebase to make a bomb. With no one else to turn to, she climbs the scaffolding around the leaking church steeple with a few questions for Whoever Is In Charge.

Starring Suzanna Hamilton and from multi award-winning Documental Theatre, Scaffolding is an explosive show about strength, love and community and the most unique of two handers. 

What was the inspiration for Scaffolding and what’s the development process been to get to this stage?

I guess I’m fascinated by the beliefs people might have deep down – that they might not even be aware of – and the ways these surface when the shit hits the fan…

My teenage daughter has severe learning disabilities and is only partially verbal…And we live in rural Devon…near a church… I did make some of it up, honest! 

Seriously, though, being part of the learning disability community down here is a roller coaster as you run the gauntlet of public services closing left right and centre. I do feel a bit like I’ve stepped through a portal and found a tribe of the most brilliant, colourful, brave, hilarious people on the other side. In Sheridan (played by Suzanna Hamilton) I wanted to create a character who embodied that near-demented but incredibly optimistic mindset – someone who is both totally isolated but incredibly connected at the same time. And I wanted to make a show that showed how loyalty can be radical.

What made you want to take Scaffolding to the Fringe?

We’re going because we were awarded one of the Pleasance’s Edinburgh National Partnerships and are getting some amazing support from Bristol Old Vic’s literary team. It would have been too terrifying otherwise!

Apart from seeing Scaffolding, what’s your top tip for anybody heading for Edinburgh this summer? 

Go see the shows of my talented Devon buddies, Babs Horton (In the Lady Garden) and her daughter Laura Horton (Lynn Faces). Don’t wish to reinforce the stereotype that everyone in Devon is related but they actually are! 

Why should people book Scaffolding? 

It’s really funny, and you don’t quite know what will happen from one moment to the next. If you haven’t connected with your soul by the end of it, you don’t have one!

When and where can people see Scaffolding?

It’s on 5.30pm at Jack Dome, The Pleasance. Follow the yellow signs!