Katherine Tempany on It Wasn’t Like That
Fifteen years is a long time to tell yourself a story. But what happens when you repeat the facts out loud, and your own certainty begins to fracture?
Coming to the Lion & Unicorn Theatre later this month, It Wasn’t Like That is a razor-sharp, darkly funny, and quietly devastating one-woman play that forensically dissects sex, memory, and workplace power dynamics. Sitting at a cafe table, the protagonist Alex revisits her past relationship with her former corporate CEO, using surviving text messages as both her defence and confession as she tries desperately to prove everything was “fine.”
We sat down with writer and producer Katherine Tempany to talk about the dangerous intimacy of being seen, the complexity of staging a one-woman show, and the fragile nature of memory.
The play centres on a story told for fifteen years before the protagonist begins to doubt herself. What drew you to explore the friction between remembering an event and replaying it forensically out loud?
It actually comes back to one of the central ideas in the play: that some stories change in the telling. I was interested in how memory doesn’t shift because the facts change; it shifts because the meaning of the facts changes when you say them out loud (either to yourself, or to someone else). The show’s protagonist, Alex, has carried the story for fifteen years in a way she could live with – messy, embarrassing, romantic, reckless, but ultimately something she chose. But as she begins to tell the story out loud, the story changes shape, almost as if she’s finally hearing it from the outside for the first time.
The forensic quality came from wanting to look at the gap between remembering and understanding. There isn’t a single neat moment where everything becomes clear, but rather it’s an accumulation of things: a look, a message, a pause, a boundary that is stated but not fully accepted. So when Alex lays those things out, the old version of the story begins to collapse. She isn’t trying to rewrite the past – just to understand it.
Given that Alex is looking back fifteen years, it places the original events right around the early 2010s. How much did the shifting cultural conversations over the last decade regarding workplace ethics, age gaps, and consent influence how you wrote Alex’s retrospective realisation?
Very much, but I didn’t want the play to feel like Alex was simply applying a modern framework to an old experience and deciding retrospectively what it was. I was more interested in how shifts in culture give us language for things we may have already felt but couldn’t quite name.
The early 2010s were a very different atmosphere, especially around work, drinking, hierarchy and boundaries. A lot of things were easier to dismiss as messy, funny, embarrassing or just ‘what happens’ when you’re young and in an office. So Alex definitely walked away from the experience feeling like that. But the wider, shifting conversation around power, consent, age gaps and workplace dynamics changed the questions she was able to ask of it.
So her realisation isn’t so much that she discovered a tidy contemporary verdict on her past – it’s more unsettling in the sense that she’s interrogating why she understood it one way for so long, and why it sounds different in hindsight. And I think that’s what interested me. Not certainty, but the discomfort of being allowed new language and perspective, and how that alters the story you thought you knew. Stories can change in the telling, but they can also change because the world around the story changes.
Alex uses surviving text messages as evidence, defence, and confession. How did you approach using modern digital artifacts to show the messy, blurred boundaries between an older CEO and a twenty-year-old junior employee?
I was very interested in how text messages feel evidentiary and forensic, but they are actually emotionally unreliable. They preserve words, but not context or subtext. They don’t hold tone, atmosphere, body language, what happened just before or just after.
For Alex, the messages become proof and defence at the same time. She can point to them and say ‘Look, I was pursuing him. Look, he said no here. Look, I was reckless’ – but she can also point to the same messages and say ‘this does not reflect what happened five minutes before I sent that message’ or ‘wow, he was really careful when it came to any form of communication that was preserved’, which in itself is insidious. And that’s the deeper thing the messages reveal: the play isn’t really about a line being crossed. It’s about a man who understood that keeping someone permanently at the line was more effective, and more deniable, than crossing it. The texts where he says no aren’t proof that nothing happened; they’re part of the architecture of what did.
That contradiction felt very important. Digital artefacts can look clean, but the reality is often a lot messier. I liked that coldness of the texts against the messiness of the memory. I didn’t want the texts to function as a smoking gun – I wanted them to behave more like fragments: pieces of something Alex keeps arranging and rearranging, hoping they’ll finally tell her what the story was. But the messages do not solve the story, they make her hear it differently.
The play is described as both “darkly funny” and “quietly devastating.” How difficult was it to find the humour in a story that ultimately deals with a heavy, isolating imbalance of power?
It was difficult, but the humour felt necessary because Alex is funny. She doesn’t experience herself as tragic, but more embarrassed, chaotic, ashamed, desperate to both plead her case and the case of the CEO, Julian. The comedy comes from her trying to control the story before it controls her.
I was careful not to make jokes about the imbalance of power itself. The humour comes from Alex’s moments of deflection: the drunk texts, self-interruptions, terrible decisions where she hears herself and flinches. But in a way, that’s also what makes it sad. She makes herself entertaining so she doesn’t have to sit with the full weight of what happened.
Alex addresses the audience as if they are an old colleague who was there when it happened. Why did you choose this specific framing device, and what does it demand of the audience?
The framing came from wanting the audience to be more than spectators. Alex addresses them as someone who was there, or at least adjacent, because these situations rarely happen in a complete vacuum. They happen, as in the play, in workplaces, at after-work drinks, in spaces where people can feel something is slightly off, but maybe can’t name it.
The audience becomes an old colleague across the table. Alex is asking them to listen, but she’s also asking them – did you see this? Did you know? Did you understand it?
The audience isn’t being blamed or labelled as complicit, but they are being placed inside the culture of looking away, minimising, or not having the language for what they’re seeing. For me, that demands a kind of active discomfort. The audience has to sit with Alex’s uncertainty and watch her unravel it in real-time, rather than solve it for her or hear a clean version of it. They become witness, judge, friend and bystander all at once.
It’s also an enormous ask of a performer – there is nowhere to hide in direct address, no scene partner, no set to absorb a moment if it doesn’t land. Zandalee Clarke, who plays Alex, holds the single chair for an hour and must make the audience feel personally addressed rather than performed at – which is exactly the tightrope the play needs. Alex has to be charming enough that you lean in but also unreliable enough that you start checking her story. Zandalee does both at once.
When the lights go down at the Lion & Unicorn Theatre, what conversations or self reflections do you hope the audience is having on their way home?
I would hope that the audience is asking themselves uncomfortable questions rather than arriving at a neat answer. The play isn’t designed to let anyone off easily – not Alex, not Julian, and not the people around them (in this instance, the audience).
I’d like the audience to think about the situations they may have witnessed and not fully seen or understood at the time. Workplaces are full of dynamics that people half-see. Things people notice but don’t interrogate. And often that’s because these things are only legible in hindsight.
I also want people to reflect on imbalance more broadly. Not every power imbalance looks like obvious coercion or grooming. Sometimes it looks like attention, mentorship, approval, even flirtation. Sometimes it feels good which is why it’s so difficult to name. That’s really what the play is circling: how power can work through pleasure rather than fear.
With Alex, I don’t necessarily want the audience to land on “victim” or “complicit”. Alex herself never lands there – her most honest line in the play is “I don’t know where I am in it” – and I’d rather the audience leave sharing that vertigo than resolving it on her behalf. Because she was an adult, and she did make choices. She pursued him at times. But she was also twenty, junior, and being drawn into something by someone with far more age, experience, status and control. I hope people leave asking: how much choice is really available when the playing field is that uneven?
Our thanks to Katherine for giving up her time to chat. It Wasn’t Like That plays at Lion and Unicorn Theatre from Wednesday 24 to Friday 26 June.
