Imagine if I started the show like that.
The show I'm bringing is called ‘I'm a Phoenix, Bitch’.
You have to say it like that.
It's about like the worst year of my life.
In 2015, my life kind of burnt to the ground
and I lost my mind, I lost my partner, I lost my home
and my son got very, very, very ill.
And it was just one of those years where everything,
you thought you were swanning along just fine and everything just fell apart.
My therapist said that in order to be able to get over the trauma I sustained,
I needed to learn how to tell the story of it
in order to be able to process it and let it go really.
It's easier said than done with post-traumatic stress disorder
but she taught me an excellent technique,
a psychotherapy technique called rewinding
where you watch events in your life back
as if you're watching them on a film.
One step removed to keep yourself safe.
This is the one that people don't talk about.
This is the one that people start to get really like
‘Oh God, how do we even begin to talk about postnatal mental health?’
And then it's the story of what happened
and then very importantly, it's the story of my recovery from that.
In a house, a cottage really,
on a hill in deepest darkest Oxfordshire.
The site of my trauma as my therapist likes to call it.
So, this show is about motherhood, it’s about trauma recovery,
it's about mental health,
it’s very specifically about postnatal mental health.
On the day that I found out I was pregnant,
something inside me shifted
like tectonic plates
only I really felt the rumble.
People will often say in the UK especially,
“Oh God, I cried my eyes out, but I also really laughed hard”
And for me, it's very important to do that
because I do tackle quite big subjects
like I've done men's mental health and suicide,
alcoholism, sexually transmitted infections.
You know, I don't shy away from anything,
cancer, I did a musical about cancer.
So, my aim is always to make it very light until the last possible moment.
Officer, is that you?
It’s me from on top of the hill.
Something is in my house.
Me and my son are in grave danger.
No, I’m alone.
I feel like I’m drowning.
I got really obsessed with sort of female depiction in film.
So, there’s kind of the femme fatale,
there's the sort of blonde bimbo sort of Brigitte Bardot,
there's the hippie mom and a lot of the show is about
why as women particularly, you choose to play a role in your life
and sort of project out well-being
as opposed to pay one's self self-care and well-being.
Because I've been seeing so much weird stuff,
I couldn't be sure that it was real.
But Tim saw it too and that told me that it was real,
it was something horrible and that it needed attention.
It's very rare to see one woman on a very…
on a very large stage with all the bells and all the whistles.
Tim and I begin to hurtle in separate directions immediately,
impossible to hold on to one another.
Nobody’s fault.
We decided that we definitely can't occupy the cottage at the same time anymore,
that he will go and live with his mum and dad down the road
and will begin shift work at the hospital.
Yeah, I love this show.
It’s probably the show I love the most out of everything I've made.