Interview with the writer of Too Much World At Once, Billie Collins
On Climate Change…
“Early into the development of the play, I watched a brilliant documentary called Albatross, which made me sad and angry, and writing helped me to explore those feelings and give them some direction. Climate crisis is a complex, frightening reality that threatens everybody and everything, and there’s a real challenge in finding ways to talk about it that keep people emotionally engaged, whilst not letting them turn away.”
On Coming of Age…
“I write about teenagers a lot. Partly because it feels about two minutes since I was 16, but also because I think that in-between place is such an exciting and infuriating place to be. I spent a lot of time as a teenager (as a lot of teenagers probably do) feeling like something was horribly wrong but not being able to say what. I think there’s a lot of that in Noble. So, in Too Much World I was thinking about what it means to ‘grow up’ – how wonderful it is, and how much it hurts.”
On Family Dynamics…
“My family are very tight-knit, and I love thinking about the rhythms, in-jokes and unspoken codes that come with that. Some of the lines in Too Much World are Collins-household-verbatim (“I’m not dad-bashing!”). Noble’s family are facing a total communication failure. During R&D, one actor said exasperatedly: “they’re just not talking to each other!” Fiona says she feels like “everything’s spinning away.” She’s doing her best to hold it together, but I think love can get you in trouble. Often the depth of feeling you have for someone – family especially – can make it hard to act in their best interests.”
On Queerness and Rurality…
“I grew up a geeky gay kid in a small, semi-rural coastal town. Whilst a visible LGBTQ+ community would’ve been nice; I think rural spaces can reframe what it means to be queer. To be comfortable in your own skin, on your own terms. In Ellis, we have a queer kid who is has no qualms about his identity and is unapologetically himself, cobbling together his identity without a set template. It feels like a joyous and rebellious thing to do.”
On Mental Health…
“It’s hard to talk about the climate crisis without also talking about mental health. And – to be honest – mass death, displacement and destruction do all sound pretty worrying. Cleo is an incredibly bright young woman with a history of anxiety and panic attacks. On Bird Island she is totally isolated, and suddenly her conviction that there is hope for the planet is completely uprooted. I’m interested in how she navigates that, but also in how mental illness affects families, and what it means to support someone whilst coping with your own perfect storm.”
‘Too Much World At Once’ plays at Theatre by the Lake on Mon 20 March, find out more here.
Billie Collins is a writer from the Wirral, based in Manchester. Her debut play, ‘Too Much World At Once’, has been developed by Box of Tricks Theatre, following rehearsed readings at the Stephen Joseph Theatre and HOME Manchester. She is currently an Associate Artist at Oldham Coliseum Theatre and is working on a new stage project with ThickSkin Theatre, as well as ‘Rathbones Antiques’ – an original children’s animated series in development with Toastie Animation, funded by the BFI’s Young Audiences Content Fund. Billie has previously written audio drama for BBC Sounds, been shortlisted for the 2021 Papatango Prize and selected for Film Hub North’s 2020 Script Lab.