Congratulations to Darwin alumna Katherine Moar, whose second play, Ragdoll, opens at London’s Jermyn Street Theatre on 9th October.
Inspired by the real-life trial of Patty Hearst, the play imagines the relationship and shifting power dynamics between an heiress, Holly, and her lawyer, Robert, in 1978 and again in 2017. While the spark of its characters was drawn from life, the play is a work of fiction, to a far greater extent than Katherine had previously attempted.
“For Farm Hall I had a roadmap,” she says, referring to her debut play, which opened at the Jermyn Street Theatre in March 2023, before touring, culminating in a West End run at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket.
“Ragdoll was much more fluid. It was liberating, and really exciting, to be able to rely on my imagination.”
Farm Hall was based on an extraordinary real-life scenario, in which six of Germany’s top nuclear scientists were detained in a house in the Cambridgeshire countryside following Hitler’s death. The play follows their response to the news that the United States has succeeded in building and using an atom bomb, the ambition which had evaded them. The house was bugged throughout their detention, and Katherine used the transcripts of the men’s conversations as a starting point for the play.
“I came to know those characters so well, that it feels almost like a betrayal to abandon them now to write about someone new!” she says. “I sat with them for so long.”
She wrote Farm Hall in 2017 during the third year of her undergraduate degree at Edinburgh University, where she studied History. While preparing to stage the play through student drama societies, she also sent it on spec to numerous theatres.
“Most of them I never heard back from, but then Tom Littler, who was then at the Jermyn Street Theatre, got in touch and said he wanted to stage it.”
In the meantime, Katherine completed an MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science at Darwin, before beginning a PhD at King’s College London, where she is now in her third year.
“I’m looking at public perceptions of Churchill and how those have changed, talking to curators of his memory including his family and museums.”
A break from teaching responsibilities over the summer has allowed her to take an active role in rehearsals for Ragdoll.
“I’ve been much more a part of the rehearsals this time round, and it’s really interesting to see how open and collaborative it is. On the whole the director, Josh Seymour, understands and interprets the script in the same way as I did, but when, occasionally, an actor has delivered a line differently to how I had heard it in my head, it’s quite exciting. You think ‘oh, of course that’s how they would have said it!'”
Ragdoll will be at the Jermyn Street Theatre from 9th October-15th November. Tickets are available here.
