INTERVIEW: Sarah Vickers

Continuing her desire to push North Eastern stories to the fore, Sarah Vickers’ new play, Chilli Con Carne, is performed at the upcoming Newcastle Fringe Festival. 

Created with Messy Kind, a production company with a basis in authenticity, it’s a story about a complicated love triangle between Ash (played by Sarah), Sonia (Tor Lighten) and Tom (Charles Maddison), and focuses on how difficult love truly can be and the impact of grief.

However, the original story of Chilli Con Carne was different, as Sarah explains: “I initially just wrote something because I really liked Pinter and those sorts of kitchen sink talk-y plays. I wrote a two-hander between a man and a woman,” Sarah tells me over Zoom, “it was a similar premise but it’s changed quite a lot.”

The mention of Harold Pinter caught my attention, and it’s clear his famous style of realistic drama impacted her style of writing. When you look at Betrayal, one of Pinter’s most iconic plays, you can see how the inspiration developed. As Ash and Sonia’s young queer relationship comes to a painful end, complex feelings of love, grief and regret resurface ten years later as Sonia returns to Newcastle to discover Ash’s ‘wonderfully normal life’ with fiancé Tom.

there’s something so peaceful and enjoyable about sitting in a theatre and watching people in front of you

She describes Chilli Con Carne as “something that I want to do, that’s an interesting drama, that’s entertaining. It’s not a big personal piece, or political piece, or anything like that, because I personally don’t feel like I have the mind to do that and do it justice!” She mentions that she had realised what she had written for the part of Tom was “quite sticky. I hadn’t developed him enough because he was just a tertiary character, he was just somebody that existed to be an obstacle for the two women.”

Chilli Con Carne will be performed at Newcastle’s Alphabetti Theatre, a hub of theatrical activity and a place that Sarah feels connected to. “After moving back up north from London, I wanted to really connect with the local theatre scene, and I found it quite hard to get into! When we said we were doing this and we were going to take it to the Camden Fringe, I had a look at the dates for the Newcastle Fringe.” The Newcastle Fringe is a fairly new festival, so how can it be used for writers? “I’d quite like to use these as a more in-depth R&D, see what kind of feedback comes back from audience members and see if we could develop it into something bigger.”

I ask about the looming implications of our future AI overlords and how that may affect the acting and writing industry. “There’s always going to be enough fight in all of us to fight against it.” It’s that humanity that we can’t live without stories. “I think that theatre needs to be protected, because you have streaming platforms and even cinema’s kind of dying, and even TikTok, and there’s something so peaceful and enjoyable about sitting in a theatre and watching people in front of you.” 

What’s next? There are ideas coming up, but nothing is set in stone yet. “I just like telling stories,” says Sarah. And what could be more human than that?

Sarah Vickers’ Chilli Con Carne is performed as part of Newcastle Fringe Festival at Alphabetti Theatre from Thursday 18^th – Saturday 20^th July.