"I could not face being around everybody else drinking. I felt really resentful because they could manage their drinking, and I couldn't."
Helen Jeffery is a theatre writer, performer, director and creative facilitator from Merseyside. Four years sober, she has written a play, ‘Buckled’, about being sober in a world that definitely isn’t. She spoke to Alex about her own experiences, ‘Buckled’ and writing workshops.
Alex: Can you tell us a little bit about your play?
Helen: My name’s Helen. I’m a writer, performer, director, and creative facilitator. I live in the Northwest of England, and I’ve been sober for four years. I often use my own lived experience in my creative practice.
I produced my first play almost ten years ago, which was based on my own experience of postnatal illness. My current play, Buckled, is not autobiographical, but it reflects my own experience of navigating sobriety in a world where everybody else is drinking – because staying sober when everybody else is not, is tough.
Alex: How did you do it?
Helen: I was fortunate in one way. I had decided I was going to do Dry January in 2021. I found it incredibly hard, which was the wake-up call I needed. But we happened to be in the second phase of lockdown, so in a way, not having to go out helped. I was able to just stay in on my own, having lots of early nights.
Suddenly, you have all this time on your hands when you don’t drink. I was like, Oh my God, what am I going to do with my evenings? So I spent a lot of time going to bed early!
About seven months later, with the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, it was like being hit in the face. I remember walking through Birkdale village, which is full of bars and restaurants, and thinking “I have to go home”.
I could not face being around everybody else drinking. I felt really resentful because they could manage their drinking, and I couldn’t. I was still carrying quite a lot of shame about it, so it probably took about a good 18 months before I felt in a happy place with my sobriety and ready to start writing this play.
I wanted to write a play to address the issue of how drinking is so embedded in contemporary society. I started formulating the ideas as pieces of spoken word. The play actually begins with a poem called The Niggle because that’s what a lot of people have – that niggle that won’t go away. You tell yourself it’s not a problem. You don’t have an issue. You could stop whenever you wanted. But you don’t. You don’t stop. You go at every opportunity there is.
I started performing spoken word about my sobriety, and there was a change in tone. I started to celebrate my sobriety. The poems took on a different tone – if I don’t want to drink, you don’t have to ask me why etc
Alex: How do you think this play has impacted your recovery or sobriety?
Helen: It’s about that sense of community. When you start writing, you’re on your own, but then you start sharing your ideas with other people who start talking to you about their own experiences.
I do a lot of work with different community groups as a facilitator, and when I share the fact that I’m sober, it opens a dialogue. When you have an issue with a substance, that’s when you realize that essentially, we’re all the same.
I started doing early sharings of the play as a work-in-progress,inviting people who were interested in the subject matter to come along. I asked if they wanted to see a play about these subjects.
The answer seemed to be yes. But the work shouldn’t be preachy, and it mustn’t tell people not to drink. I would never do that anyway because audiences are far too clever for that. I didn’t want it to come across as a piece of cringey Theatre in Education, you know, like Legs Akimbo [from BBC TV series ‘The League of Gentlemen’].
I wanted the piece to feel like a really good night out. It’s got a brilliant soundtrack, mostly indie and rock from the 1990s. Music is really important, but it’s linked to drugs and alcohol. I’ve tried to incorporate songs in the piece from artists who were addicts or alcoholics themselves – Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix.
The show was first performed at Shakespeare North Playhouse in 2024. I ended up playing one of the parts, and at the end of the show, people wanted to come and talk to me. They wanted to hold my hand, hug me, and talk about family members or their own recovery. Allowing people to see those experiences reflected on stage is needed. I think we need to see these kinds of stories on stage as well, you know?
Alex: Who are the characters in the piece?
Helen: We’ve got Maggie, who is 50 and six months into recovery. She hasn’t seen her son Callum for six months because the last time they met, she really embarrassed him. She turned up drunk to an event that was really important to him. He basically said to her, I don’t want to see you again until you stop drinking.
Callum is due to get married, and obviously, we know weddings are associated with a lot of drinking!
At the start of the piece, she says she stopped drinking and expects him to be please but he’s not. In fact when he asks her ‘for how long?’ and she says six months, he’s pretty pissed off with her because he’s like, Why? Why couldn’t you do this when I needed you to, when I was growing up?
She thinks he’s going to be really pleased for her, but actually, it just brings out all this childhood trauma. He used to literally sleep by his mum’s bed for fear that she was going to choke, and he carried a lot of shame and guilt around her drinking.
I wanted to show that Callum has grown up with the stigma of being a child of an alcoholic. Having to deal with kids from school saying things like ‘I saw your Mum stumbling out of the pub’- and the impact that had on him.
The third character is Callum’s best friend from school, Ruby, and she’s on the way to developing a drinking problem but won’t admit it. In some ways, she is a bit like my younger self – so I have a real empathy with this character. Everything’s going wrong in her life, and what she hasn’t realized is that the common denominator is alcohol, but she’s using it to cope with all the things that are going wrong in her life.
Alex: Can you tell us a bit about Sober Scribbles?
Helen: Sober Scribbles came out of a discussion after a show at Shakespeare North last year. It was part of a festival of new work at the Unity Theatre in Liverpool, and we did a Q&A afterward. Somebody said they’d be interested in doing some writing workshops, but unfortunately, a lot of writing poetry and spoken word events take place in spaces where there’s alcohol.
I came up with the idea of Sober Scribbles, which would be an evening event for people who are sober or sober-curious and wanting to change their relationship with alcohol. I’ve run seven Sober Scribbles sessions so far – some live and some online.
My next course is starting on the second of April, and it’s an introduction to playwriting online for beginners. It will be six hourly sessions weekly, and I’ll guide people through the process of starting to write a play. It’s open to absolutely anyone – no previous experience of writing for stage is needed.
Buckled will be performed at:
The Atkinson in Southport on 20th March,
53Two in Manchester on 21st March,
EHU Arts Centre in Ormskirk on 27th March and
The Old Electric in Blackpool on the 28th March.
For more details visit: https://linktr.ee/HelenJeffery
