The Arcola Theatre, tucked a few streets back from Dalston Kingsland’s busy market, is nearly empty when I arrive. Bedouin lamps hang from the ceiling. Pictures of past productions are displayed on exposed brick walls.
That Rebecca Lenkiewicz suggested we meet here, a former paint factory, now her “theatre heaven”, is unsurprising. Her play The Painter, starring Toby Jones as JMW Turner, opened the theatre in 2011. When the film director Paweł Pawlikowski saw it, he enlisted Lenkiewicz’s help on the screenplay of his Oscar-winning 2013 film Ida. A decade earlier at the Arcola’s previous site, also in Dalston, her first play Soho: A Tale of Table Dancers opened when the space was still partly under construction.
Most theatregoers will associate Lenkiewicz, 57, with a much grander stage. Her Naked Skin, a decades-spanning love story between two suffragettes, made her, in 2008, the first female playwright to have a new work performed on the National Theatre’s Olivier Stage. What’s striking, though, is her modesty. “Plays and films are important, but so are people,” she tells me firmly. “I wouldn’t want to feel that I existed in a bubble.”
Sitting opposite her in the Arcola bar, she appears grounded, warm, if a little reserved. She is dressed in black, with large gold hoop earrings, her dyed strawberry-blonde hair falling in neat waves around her face. She speaks in a slow, soft voice, choosing her words carefully. I have the sense that her expressive blue eyes reveal more than she would like.
A rare spring heatwave seems an appropriate backdrop to discuss Hot Milk, Lenkiewicz’s first outing as a director, shot amid wildfires in Greece. Only the second attempt to adapt one of Deborah Levy’s novels for the screen, the coming-of-age story concerns Sofia (Emma Mackey) and her mother Rose (Fiona Shaw), who travel to Spain to seek a cure for Rose’s mysterious ailment, which has left her wheelchair-bound. Against this parched landscape, the “permanent student” Sofia falls for an enigmatic German seamstress, Ingrid (Vicky Krieps).
It was a story over which Lenkiewicz “felt quite territorial” when the producer Christine Langan invited her to write the screenplay. Lenkiewicz agreed, on the condition she also direct. She had long wanted to see a film through to the end. “It’s a wrench,” she says of screenwriting. “You paint it in your own head and then you see a slightly different painting onscreen.” (One director altered her screenplay so much that Lenkiewicz asked to go uncredited.) Levy’s novel, “so incredibly female and sensual”, she says, encouraged her to make the leap.
It was no easy task. Rather than attempt to translate Sofia’s interior monologues for the screen, Lenkiewicz opted to pare back the plot and focus on Ingrid and Sofia’s stormy romance. She externalises the women’s emotions and dynamics in the burnt sienna colour grading and costumes. Sofia’s artless tank tops suggest she is little match for the bold Ingrid, dressed like a corsair in a mustard headscarf and billowing blouse.
The film unfolds as a series of dreamlike sequences, some taken from the book, some invented, equal parts fantasy and nightmare. When Sofia first encounters Ingrid, Ingrid is galloping in slow-motion towards her on horseback (at Krieps’ request, barefoot), Sofia shielding her eyes from the sun. “I wanted to invert that idea of the hero coming along on his white horse. Here we have a female Amazon coming across the beach,” says Lenkiewicz.
Gesturing towards the “legacy of being female”, her script is peppered with references to Louise Bourgeois, George Eliot and Margaret Mead. Levy herself was relatively hands-off, Lenkiewicz says. But being open to her actors’ suggestions was key. It felt like a return to her theatre roots, she says, collaboration being the main way she gains “energy”.
After the acclaim of Ida, Lenkiewicz co-wrote the film adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s novel Disobedience with the Chilean director Sebastián Lelio. Set in a stifling Orthodox Jewish community, it centres on two women whose love affair threatens to make them outcasts. The literary biopic Colette followed. Her first solo screenplay, She Said, was a forensic look at the reporting of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct by two New York Times journalists, written as they were writing their nonfiction book of the same name.
Lenkiewicz’s work is characterised by an economy of style, which is why filmmaking — with its attention to visual symbolism, fleeting expressions and poignant silences — suits her so well. In her adaptations, dialogue and emotion are adeptly distilled, “then, when there is a longer speech, it becomes more important”.
Sapphic love has become a refrain, albeit an accidental one. “It hasn’t been deliberate at all,” she says, slightly cautiously, explaining that in Her Naked Skin, the passionate affair between her two suffragettes “felt natural” in the heady environment of protest. (She was approached by a male producer about making a film version, on the condition the central relationship be heterosexual. She declined.) When I ask her about the recent wave of queer female stories on screen (Love Lies Bleeding, Chuck Chuck Baby, Bottoms), her guard lifts. “These stories have to be told even more at the moment because of the danger that freedom is in . . . Trump with his draconian, evil constraints. We really have to scream and shout against what is seen as the norm.”
As we roam the low-lit back corridors of the theatre, an acting troupe comes down the stairs, one of them stopping to greet Lenkiewicz. Somewhere in the wings, actors are singing. Before Lenkiewicz found her thespian home in Dalston, she was raised in Plymouth, Devon, by a single mother to whom she attributes her commitment to “female stories”. The middle child of five, she took the surname of her mother’s first husband, Robert Lenkiewicz, an artist who, variously, faked his own death and housed Plymouth’s homeless. Lenkiewicz’s own father was 17 when she was born, “a writer, so I felt I couldn’t do that. That was his territory.”
Her socially conscious upbringing has stayed with her. When she turned to writing aged 22, it was because of a job dancing in a sex club in Soho. The play, Soho: A Tale of Table Dancers, served two purposes: getting it “out of [her] system” and championing her former colleagues. The script was buried under “a dear friend’s lino” and only unearthed after a stint acting with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
In contrast to Hollywood’s rotating menu of “eat the rich” satires such as The White Lotus, Lenkiewicz is drawn to the stories of ordinary people. That’s partly why she took on another recent project, the film adaptation of Raynor Winn’s homelessness memoir, The Salt Path. “If someone said you can write stories about entitled people for the rest of your life or people who have nothing, then I’d go for the latter,” she says. “But everyone is fascinating, and I don’t believe that if you grew up with no money, you have a monopoly on stress. I suppose [the working-class is] where I came from, so I bark.”
Nowadays, she tries to avoid the screen industry’s “power games”. “You don’t write well when you’re scared, or when you’re not feeling grounded, or yourself.” She lives in east London with her partner, her eight-year-old and her 23-year-old stepson. Before we leave, she asks where my surname is from. (Like hers, it is eastern European.) I wonder how she feels about her surname now. “My name is on my birth certificate . . . and it’s become me,” she replies. “If I ever married, I wouldn’t change my name — that’s a given.”
‘‘Hot Milk” is at UK cinemas from July 4
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram