An Interview with the Team Behind Little Sister
What happens to a family when a tragedy becomes public property? In Alice Flynn’s Little Sister, the answer is a cocktail of pitch-black comedy, deep-seated sibling rivalry, and the unsettling whispers of Irish folklore. Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Playwriting, Flynn’s script, originally developed with Broken Silence Theatre, is finally hitting the stage at The Glitch.
Two decades after a teenage girl vanishes, leaving behind nothing but an empty chair at the dinner table and a life defined by public inquiry, a bloodied woman appears on the doorstep. It’s a premise that feels ripped from a true-crime podcast, but in the hands of director Liam Rees, it promises to be something far more visceral.
We sat down with Alice and Liam to talk about the “true crime” industry, the weight of childhood secrets, and why, after twenty years of searching, the truth might be the most terrifying thing of all.
For someone who hasn’t heard of the show yet, how would you describe Little Sister in one easy sentence?
Flynn: If someone you loved came back from the dead, how certain are you that you’d recognise them?
This play was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Playwriting back in 2021. How has the script evolved since then, and what was the initial spark that connected “true crime” with “Irish folklore”?
Flynn: It’s had a few rewrites, this version is the 7th draft, so it’s changed a lot since I first sent it to Women’s Prize. It’s tighter, slicker, and I feel like it’s just naturally evolved as I’ve evolved as a writer.
Regarding the initial spark, it actually came from a real life John Doe (who went by the false identity of Peter Bergman) who was found in Sligo back in 2009. The man had gone to great lengths to ensure that he was unable to be traced, and it’s likely that if his body weren’t carried in by the tide, he would have simply vanished. He clearly did not want to be found, and we’ll never know why he chose to end his life.
There are so many details of his case that feel almost supernatural, and the way people talk about the final sightings of “Bergman” in documentaries is almost mythical. One particular account from a couple who saw him alive on the beach, disappearing into the sunset, just immediately made me think of stories like Tir Na Nog and The Children Of Lir.
I was watching a lot of True Crime content at the time, and began to wonder how the families must feel about their missing or deceased loved ones’ final moments being turned into stories. We see this mythologisation happen a lot in high profile cases, particularly with Madeline McCann, and you can see echoes of both Madeline and Peter’s stories in Little Sister.
Strangely enough, a year or two after I wrote the initial draft, there was a real life incident where a woman claimed to be Madeline McCann, and even targeted Madeline’s sister in a bid to ingratiate herself with the family. The fact that something like this has now happened in real life speaks to just how far people are willing to go to insert themselves into True Crime narratives, without any concern for who gets hurt by
that. I wanted to draw attention to the families of the victims in cases like these, and ask the audience whether our obsession with finding answers is really about ‘the truth’ or just a desire to have a conclusive, satisfying ending to the story.
The play deals with a very “contained” tension – a woman on a doorstep and two sisters inside. How are you using the intimate space of The Glitch to heighten that sense of claustrophobia?
Liam: The Glitch is a real gift of a venue as it’s in the round which allows us to trap the characters in the world and drama of the play. It feels like a rollercoaster that simply will not stop until you reach the end which I love.
The play asks if the truth even matters after two decades of silence. In an era obsessed with true crime podcasts and “solving” mysteries, do you think we’ve lost sight of the human cost of these stories?
Flynn: In some cases, yes. We’ve all heard the discourse around Netflix’s Dahmer. However, for YouTubers and Podcasters, it’s not always clear cut. There are plenty of well researched True Crime podcasts out there that take a forensic approach towards these crimes, but they can still inadvertently cause harm, even just by getting key details wrong or speculating on the possible motivations or even mental states of those involved.
I think, for me, the line is how personally involved the creator/s get, and whether they’re honest about why they’re covering these cases. There are some excellent True Crime podcasts (All Killa No Filla is a favourite of mine) that take a well researched and balanced approach to discussing these cases and are open about the host’s motives and personal biases. But, there are others (particularly on the YouTube Makeup & True Crime community) where it’s clear that they’re primarily making these videos because sensationalised content gets clicks and they’ve got a Hello Fresh sponsorship to hit deadline for.
You’ve both worked on shows with quite “apocalyptic” themes (Flynn’s 1000 Ways The World Will End… and Liam’s The Enlightened). What draws you both to stories about people at their breaking points?
Flynn: For me, using apocalyptic (metaphorical, or in 1000 Ways… case literal) scenarios is a good way of externalising big feelings. The root of 1000 Ways… was essentially ‘Sometimes the end of a friendship feels like the end of the world’ and it’s as simple as that. I also live with BPD, so I feel quite drawn to characters who experience emotional extremities. It’s much more interesting for an audience to see things pushed to their absolute limit than to play it safe, in my opinion.
Liam: I’m not sure if it’s a conscious choice for either of us, as artists we’re simply responding to the world we live in and every day feels like we’re on the brink of the end of the world so it’s almost inevitable that those feelings will seep into our work. I’ve noticed a definite theme in my work around how we make sense of extremely chaotic times and that’s a large art of what drew me to Little Sister – all the characters have versions of the truth that they want to believe but we never really know for certain who is right.
Flynn, your previous work like Sluts With Consoles has a very sharp, modern edge. How does the “pitch black comedy” in Little Sister compare to your earlier writing?
Those two in particular are very different scripts! I would say that Little Sister is much more rooted in reality than Sluts With Consoles, which takes more of an absurdist approach to the subject matter. Both pieces explore ideas around loneliness and escapism, so they are thematically similar in some ways, but Sluts With Consoles wears its heart much more on its sleeve. Little Sister is more subtle in its humour, I think, and the script gets a lot darker.
Without spoilers, how literally does the Irish folklore manifest in the play? Is it a haunting presence or a metaphorical one?
Flynn: We tell stories because they are our way of explaining the things we don’t understand. For a child whose sibling has inexplicably vanished overnight, where else would they turn to make sense of that? Fairy tales definitely haunt Bridget and Sally’s lives, and references to the Irish stories I grew up with are woven throughout the text. We obsess over true crime for the same reason we used to obsess over stories about demons and monsters; telling stories about these dark and frightening things is our way of
making sense of them.
Liam: As a director, I love the fact that theatre is basically magic – we all collectively agree to believe an actor is someone else and the art form only exists because the audience chooses to believe in it. I love using the audience’s imagination to fill in the gaps as it makes the magic feel so much realer – I’m not going to spoil how this manifests onstage but it’s going to be rooted in theatricality.
If the ‘disappeared’ sister Shona had a playlist from the year she vanished, what would be the lead track?
Wake Me Up When September Ends by Green Day. I think she’d relate to this desire to just disappear out of existence, just for a short while, to delay the inevitable reality of what’s to come.
Thanks to Alice and Liam for their time. Little Sister is playing at The Glitch until Sunday 1 March.
