The Cult Of Katz

Lally Katz has been screening her calls. It takes a couple of attempts before she answers the phone. “I accidentally think I joined this cult yesterday,” she launches headlong into an explanation on call number three, “so when the phone rang and I didn't recognise the number I thought, 'Oh no!' Because these people asked me if I would buy this theatre ticket yesterday and I didn't ask what theatre it was and then I think it was sort of this cult and I was worried that they were already calling me, I'm so sorry!”

Where exactly this cult intersects with theatre isn't clarified in the harried explanation Katz gives, you're just swept up in it. Though, the mile a minute approach she has when discussing life and writing for theatre, and the blurry lines that rarely separate them, certainly pose her as a worthy candidate to be the leader for one such cult; her excitement for theatre is enough to whip you too into frenzy.

During our conversation Katz will return frequently to the odd intersection between life and writing, how, for her, each informs the other. That tight-rope balance seems to have reached its culmination with Stories I Want To Tell You In Person. Katz was initially commissioned by Belvoir to write a play about the financial crisis, travelling to America to research it. The play soon became about financial analysts consulting psychics, then about Katz consulting a psychic, then about Katz… And so the plot thickened.

“Most of it is to do with writing,” Katz explains, “which sounds boring, but my whole life since I've been about 16 has been a mixture of writing and life; like I'm never sure what's real and what's pretend and a lot of time my relationships end up becoming fodder for writing and I'm never sure if I'm doing something because I want to do it in real life or because I want to write about it. So the questions for the psychic were kind of about that, I guess.” When the research money ran out Katz kept going back to New York, the overseas jaunts now partly for the play, partly personal, always psychic.

The interview with Katz has felt more like the days before Skype, when a frantic and expensive call from overseas gave you a five-minute window with which to tell the family what you've been up to. Fitting then, that when asked how she feels about getting on stage herself for this show, she responds: “I'm missing a filter about sharing things, I think. I've always shared things, really quite quickly told people things that maybe aren't appropriate, maybe some people would keep secret, and for some reason it doesn't embarrass me or anything.”