Interview: A sprinkle of feminine rage with Lucy Heffernan
Interview by Clare O’Rourke
Lucy Heffernan is one of those people who you’d be lucky to strike up a conversation with at a house party. A conversation where you’d want to sit in the backyard on some plastic chairs, away from the loud music, and get into each other’s history.
At the start of our interview, I asked Heffernan some silly warmup questions to break the ice.
For example, I found out that her favourite singer is Julia Jacklin. In March, I spent quite a lot of money flying to Brisbane to see Jacklin at The Tivoli so I couldn’t contain my excitement when I heard this (I'm the kind of person who’s conversations tangent endlessly, so I’m very proud to say that I didn’t let this distract me and I stayed on track for the 30-minute interview). From what I later discovered about Heffernan, this answer makes total sense. She and Jacklin share this ability to be vulnerable and raw in their respective art forms, and this is what makes them both so magnetic.
Mostly her answers to my warmup questions revolved around Fleabag, like when I asked which fictional character she would be best friends with.
While the play I’m interviewing her about is a self-confessed “ode to Fleabag,” the comparison between Heffernan and Phoebe Waller-Bridge isn’t a necessary one. Heffernan is a force of her own. She’s eloquent, commanding (even on Zoom in the kitchen of her Eastern suburbs Sydney abode), humble, and yet totally knows her worth.
Party Girl, Heffernan’s one-woman show, interrogates the side of women that mainstream entertainment often glosses over or misconstrues. She wants to illustrate that women can be fallible, we can be dysfunctional, we can be chaotic, and: “we can’t have it all.”
“The more mess and chaos in theatre, the better. [We’re] never fully prepared for life and if you can be exposed to that idea in the content you consume then you realise that life is not perfect and linear.”
This is something I’ve been talking about in my social circles for some time; the fact that the content we watch often lets women down but when we see ourselves represented properly, it’s invigorating.
I asked Heffernan if she’d watched Netflix’s Beef because, to me, this is the most recent example where viewers get to see a leading woman crack under pressure. Whilst she hadn’t seen it, Heffernan reinforced that her show breaks down the question: “how are women supposed to behave in the real world?”
“Party Girl comes from a place of being treated with disrespect and being underestimated and we need to tap into that female rage [in theatre].”
The main character in the show is Fairy Sprinkles, a woman who works as a fairy at children’s birthday parties for a living and in her personal life is a full time carer for her mother who deeply struggles with her mental health. Throughout the show we join her as she attends kids parties in Bondi and all the way to the western suburbs of Sydney, as she paints a cheerful smile on her face despite her complicated personal life.
The play also incorporates many theatrical forms, including musical numbers and stand-up comedy.
“I want to keep the audience on their toes.”
When she first wrote the play in 2019 it was a straight monologue but she wanted to further explore how she could tell the story creatively:
“It’s been so important in shaping the show, giving it structure and disrupting it as well because you have this character talking about fairies but then [she] pulls out an electric guitar and sings a rock song. It just gives this other layer of excitement [and] it takes people by surprise.”
Thinking about the logistics of a one-woman show gives me head spins, and with the added pressure of the theatrical modes constantly shifting I’m basically drowning in sweat. And it’s not without her fair share of nerves that Heffernan is performing this technically complex and semi-autobiographical piece to a hometown crowd:
“With a one-person performance you have these moments before you go on where you hear the audience come [into the theatre] and think ‘why am I doing this to myself? This is so dumb!’ You feel like running away.”
She says all of this with a reassuring grin, one that tells me that, on some level, she secretly thrives off those pre-show jitters.
Off the back of a successful run at the Adelaide Fringe Festival and some regional performances in Newcastle and Wollongong in 2019, she’s looking forward to showing it to her friends, family and colleagues in Sydney.
“I hope it’s special,” she says, with a quick raise of the eyebrows. This is where her humbleness seeps in, and I see the vulnerable side to this confident artist.
Party Girl will be opening the TAPE OVER Festival at KXT on Broadway. The festival has been produced by the all-female team at Purple Tape Productions, lead by Lily Hayman and Tyler Fitzpatrick, who aim to spotlight female and non-binary playwrights and actors.
“Lily and Tyler are bad fairies themselves, you know what I mean? They’re real and funny and not perfect like me. They’ve got this fantastic vision… and I’m so proud of everything they’ve achieved.”
In the spirit of the TAPE OVER Festival, I wrap up our conversation by asking her for the one piece of advice she’d give any aspiring female and non-binary artist. She looks away from the laptop for a few beats, deeply pondering the question. Throughout the interview, her answers have been so considered and introspective and this is no different – you can tell she doesn’t take this kind of question lightly. She says:
“Beg for forgiveness, not permission.”
I love that quote too. For Heffernan, this means not waiting for scripts to be sent to her, but instead taking the bull by the horns and creating her own work.
I hung up the Zoom call feeling very inspired and warm, and weirdly craving fairy bread from those childhood parties I used to attend.
Party Girl plays at KXT on Broadway as part of Purple Tape’s TAPE OVER until 20 May 2023. Find tickets and information here.
Image provided by Purple Tape Productions
Clare (or Yeah the Clare to her friends) enjoys life’s most random pleasures – a jar of (Aldi) peanut butter and Season 4 of Succession (#teamTom). Spotify told her that she spent an outrageous amount of time listening to music in 2022 and she’s out to break that record in 2023. She feels most creative when running or just before falling asleep.
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