Phoebe Waller-Bridge has bought a flat in London and handed its use to playwrights at the start of their careers, with no rent to pay. Whoever moves in covers the bills and nothing else.
The Fleabag creator, 41, is the anchor donor of Writers’ Block, a new theatre pilot aimed at one of the oldest obstacles in British drama: the price of a bed in the capital. Organizers say she purchased the property for the scheme and added what they called a “generous financial contribution” on top.
Why this one is personal for Waller-Bridge
Her own career shows how long a London stage start can take to pay off. In 2007 she co-founded the small DryWrite theatre company with Vicky Jones. Fleabag began as a short piece at the London Storytelling Festival on 25 November 2012, grew into a one-woman show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2013, and reached television only in 2016.
Put another way, the show that made her name spent four years on small stages before a broadcaster picked it up. That road ended with three Primetime Emmys in 2019, for lead actress, writing and best comedy series, and overall deals with Amazon Studios in 2019 and again in 2023. She is now developing a Tomb Raider series for Amazon.
How Writers’ Block works
The donated flat is the centerpiece, but most of the scheme runs on spare rooms. Working with Omnibus Theatre in Clapham, south London, Writers’ Block pairs playwrights with hosts willing to let a room or property at a steep discount. Heartstopper actor Alan Turkington already does this from his Camberwell flat. “I was very lucky to afford a flat in the late 90s and have tried to pay some of that privilege forward, especially now when rents are abhorrently high,” he said.
The model is borrowed from the Adopt a Playwright Award, which Sofie Mason and Diana Jervis-Read launched in 2008. The same two founders started the Off West End Theatre Awards, known as the Offies. Their older program has placed 55 writers so far in affordable London rooms, timed around meetings, rehearsals and opening nights.
They cite figures from the Sutton Trust and a UK creative-industries research center showing that 16% of creative workers grew up working class. In practical terms, that is roughly one person in six.
Who else is paying in
Waller-Bridge has company. Jack Thorne, co-creator of the Netflix drama Adolescence and writer of the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child stage play, is contributing money. So are James Graham (Ink, Quiz, Dear England), Happy Valley creator Sally Wainwright and The Crown writer Peter Morgan. Martin McDonagh, Waller-Bridge’s partner and the filmmaker behind The Banshees of Inisherin, is also involved.
Thorne’s sharpest line was about who gets to write at all: “If you’re from privilege your biggest problem is what to fill a page with, if you’re not, so much of your struggle is about the need to survive.” His own start, he said, depended on a brother in Croydon who housed him for five years.
Graham, who remembers sleeping on friends’ floors and working call-center and bar shifts between drafts, framed it as a class problem the industry keeps skipping. “We don’t need grand gestures, just someone to open a door and help us keep going,” he said.
The flat is a pilot, so it houses one writer at a time. Organizers have not yet named who will move in first, or how long each stay will last.
Further reading
Image: Scottish Government, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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