The writer Julia Cranney spoke to Damon Fairclough about her new play, Attachment.

What is Attachment about? 

It’s about a scouse woman called Mat – I describe her as a ‘Nan kid’ because she’s been raised by her Nan. Her Nan’s now passed away and she’s very isolated from the rest of the world, but over the course of this play, we join her on her journey from total isolation to vulnerability, and finding power in that vulnerability. 

I also think it’s a love story that goes in a number of different directions, including with a little boy who blows her life wide open. 

Where did the idea for Attachment come from? 

I’ve been around residential care homes and the care system since I was about 15 – not as a resident, but I did become familiar with them. It’s something I’ve always been interested in, and that led to me looking at our adoption system. I was interested in shining a light on a system that really needs to be changed. 

In Attachment, we look at a relatively new system called ‘early permanence’, which is where kids are matched with a family who facilitate contact with the birth family as soon as they come into the care system. The family are foster carers, but there’s always the potential that they could eventually adopt the child. 

It’s ‘riskier’ for the adoptive family because you run the risk that the young person is going to go back to their birth family, but it has better outcomes for the young people. Though we shouldn’t reveal much more, because this journey is at the heart of the play! 

How did this idea start to become a play? 

I originally developed this idea for Warp Films as a TV concept, but telly is a long and winding road. Something else got made that was connected with adoption, so for my piece, it was a case of right characters, right story, wrong time. 

Then an independent theatre producer called Toby Parsons asked if I was interested in creating a one-woman show, and if I’d got any stories I’d be interested in telling. I thought this idea would work well as a one-woman piece, so that’s where the stage version began. 

And now it’s coming to the Everyman! 

Yes! I was born in Oxford Street hospital which doesn’t exist now but was literally behind the Everyman. I even got married on Hope Street. It’s been a dream theatre for me, and I’ve always wanted to find something that could work here.  

I trained with the Everyman young writers’ programme many years ago, and I’ve done readings of other plays with them. So I sent them Attachment after I’d written it, and they were interested! 

You’ve mentioned that Attachment is a one-woman show, and Mat is definitely the focus of the play. Could you share a few insights into her character? 

I’m a neurodiverse writer and I’m particularly interested in autism in girls and how that is portrayed on stage, so I think Mat is very autistically coded. Once she lost the connection with her Nan – who was the person who most understood her – she pulled herself in to protect herself. She’s built up these really strong walls around herself, and over the course of the play, we see how those walls are knocked down.  

Does the character draw on people you’ve known in real life? 

I originally interviewed lots of families who’d gone through the adoption process, so Mat isn’t one person who I met – she’s an amalgamation of lots of different people. I do think she feels very scouse though – there’s something about her character, her humour, her self-sufficiency. It’s a real strength, but there’s vulnerability underneath it. 

What do you think are the play’s key themes? 

The terror and elation of intimacy is one theme, and it’s also about a journey to family – an unconventional family. It’s about parenthood, and fundamentally, it’s about a mother’s love – about what that can do, what it can overcome, and how it can change us. 

It’s also about the risks that we take for love, because it makes us so vulnerable. At the beginning of the play, Mat meets a man and gets into a car with him. You make yourself vulnerable when you take that step, and you have to be vulnerable to consider doing something as massive as adoption. 

Why did you write Attachment as a monologue? 

I’m interested in the fact that there’s a ‘Disneyfied’ view of adoption – people who adopt are often put on a pedestal, but it’s so hard to be on a pedestal because when you’re asking for help, nobody’s there on your level to help you. So I wanted to put those voices and experiences on a one-to-one level, and the Everyman stage was born for monologues – making eye contact with your audience, that confessional thing. Hopefully our audience will feel totally engaged with Mat as they go on her journey with her.  

How would you sum up the mood of Attachment? 

I think it’s bittersweet, honest and heartfelt. There’s real humour in it too – scouse humour! 

Finally, who do you think will enjoy this play? 

I think it deals with a lot of universal experiences, so you don’t have to be an adoptive parent, or any kind of parent, to have experienced loneliness or isolation from family.  

Mat has a really clinical experience of life at the start of the play – she literally works in a pharmacy and doesn’t want to talk to anybody else. Anyone who’s allowed themselves to be vulnerable will connect with her journey I think. And I hope also for parents and for adoptive parents, hopefully it’ll allow them to see their story on this big stage – a story we haven’t really got to see before. We might have seen work about the journey to adopt, but I don’t think we’ve seen the aftermath as much. 

Our care system is ridiculously underfunded, and I was reading just recently that adoption and kinship carers support grants, which were already too little, have been cut again. These people, who are so vulnerable, are picking up the pieces for an underfunded service because we assume that parents’ love will fill that gap. I hope Attachment goes some way to starting conversations around our system, and perhaps how it can be changed for the better.