Interview: playwright Lucy Bell on ‘Pulling Out’

Leo’s 17. He’s got college, a healthy right-swipe-rate on Tinder… and a six-month-old. He’s on the triple shift of school, work and night feeds – and wants to be a dad in every sense.

That’s if his baby’s mum will let him. Or her mum, or her stepdad, or his mum.
‘Pulling out’ didn’t work too well as contraception – but is it his best bet now?

Inspired by frank and often funny accounts of young dads trying to go the distance, Pulling Out is a spirited look at teenage parenthood from the male perspective. It’s brought to you by Documental Theatre, an award-winning Devon-based company producing new writing “inspired by interviews with people at the sharp end of public policy”.Here’s playwright Lucy Bell to tell us more.

So, how did you come to write Pulling Out?

Before I started out playwriting, I researched and shot footage for BBC documentaries, filming with teen mums at a Pupil Referral Unit in Wrexham. I was struck by the cruel fact that a lot of the mums were trying to break away from their parents, but the hyper-dependency of a newborn meant the opposite thing happened.

I remembered how, being a teenager, I felt like I was painfully visible…frizz, acne, flab and social inadequacy floodlit for all to see. I started to wonder what it would feel like to be a teenage boy with a buggy. And the more I read about this overlooked group, about how desperate the vast majority of teen dads are to be engaged fathers, and what a positive effect early parenthood can have on their outcomes, the more interested I became.

So, can you tell us a little of Pulling Out’s storyline?

Although myself, the director (Stephanie Kempson) and the cast (Bob Yates-Tily, Jenny Davies) have been spongeing up all this background, the play is first and foremost a suspenseful, character-based drama. Leo is finding his feet as a dad, but his mum, stepdad, the baby’s mum, her mum and her stepdad all have separate agendas. Everyone wants a piece of the pie! The story rattles along at clip with lots of car-crash humour. It has sometimes been hard to keep a straight face in rehearsals, particularly during Leo’s attempts to be a sensitive birth partner.
It is brilliant to be working with such a talented team. Steph, Bob and Jenny have all come through Bristol Old Vic’s Made in Bristol scheme. Bob is in Closer Each Day, the Wardrobe Theatre’s improvised soap opera; Jenny has toured Spill for Propolis Theatre, and Steph directed my play Score, which won an award, toured to Southbank Centre and was selected for A Nation’s Theatre Festival at Battersea Arts Centre. We have also brought in B-boy Joel Daniel as choreographer.

Give us some of the context behind the play.
Teenage parenthood has been a hot topic for policy makers for decades: and yet it’s a slippery sucker when it comes to effective social engineering. At the start of the current decade, Torbay Council had the ninth highest teen pregnancy rate in England and Wales. They launched a whole load of initiatives to bring this down, only for teen pregnancies to double in response.
More recently, since the rise of social media, teenage pregnancy has inexplicably halved across the globe – prompting pundits to speculate whether teens’ hands are just too busy on their phones. It was fascinating for me to talk to young dads in Lambeth (through Young Dads Collective) and Cornwall (through Brook Young Fathers) about their dodgy birth-control methods and labour horror stories. Some spoke of having to watch their kids grow up via friends’ social media feeds, while others were quietly impressed by the incredibly mature friendships they now enjoyed with their ex-girlfriends. I spoke to a young dads’ practitioner about his campaign to get dads registered at the birth, and a nurse at a secure training centre about how she trains teens for fatherhood using computerised dolls.

Do you think some preconceptions could be changed here?
The idea of the feckless young man impregnating the neighbourhood is way off beam. The biggest predictor for teenage pregnancy isn’t poverty, but being in a long-term relationship. Anecdotally, teen parents, like middle-aged couples, are most often caught out by the withdrawal method.
Amazingly, a young dad can be penalised 12 weeks of benefits if he brings a child in his care to a job seekers’ appointment – so the state plays a part in discouraging guys from helping out. Research at Leeds University has shown that an overwhelming majority of young dads want to be an important part of their children’s lives, whether or not they get on with the mum, and more research by the Fathers Institute showed that young dads from deprived backgrounds are involved in less ‘delinquent’ behaviour than their childless peers.
But there are absolutely no records of how many young dads are present at birth or included on the birth certificate…as if even the statisticians expect them to fade off the scene. This information is important, because if your name isn’t on the birth certificate you have no legal rights to your child.

And what wider impact do you hope the play might have?
We have run a Twitter campaign (#PullingOutQ) with people sharing memories of their dads; hilarious stories of shot-putting with house bricks, putting out tent fires with cans of coke, and collusion in truancy on sunny days. It has made me realise that this rich tapestry of memory and identity is lost to the child if a (willing) teen dad isn’t kept in the loop.

What’s next for the show?
Our dates at the Wardrobe are funded by Arts Council England, and as part of the project we are learning more about Forum Theatre. This means being able to re-run scenes from the play and have audience members jump into the story as characters and take things in an entirely new direction. There will be a Forum Theatre session after the Saturday matinee (2pm, March 11), before we take the play to young men in youth custodial settings. We have all worked in offender settings and expect the Forum part of the visits to either land like a lead balloon or be total anarchy.

Pulling Out is at the Wardrobe Theatre from Wednesday, March 8 to Saturday, March 11. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.thewardrobetheatre.com/livetheatre/pulling-out