Lynn Benfield, the downtrodden PA to Steve Coogan’s unbearable broadcaster Alan Partridge, doesn’t always get the recognition she deserves. Most people only know Lynn by her first name. On TV, she is always by Alan’s side, quietly tolerating his egocentric behaviour. The Plymouth-based playwright Laura Horton’s new show, Lynn Faces, finally puts her centre stage.
While Lynn rarely voices dissent, her face betrays her true feelings: disgust, bewilderment, discomfort. Horton, a big Partridge fan, always felt an affinity with Lynn and loved these expressions. “You get moments like there’s something in her waiting to burst out. But she’s so controlled, she never lets it out,” Horton says. “I identify with that enormously, that sort of masking and being afraid to be silly.” She and a friend would pull their best “Lynn faces” to greet each other, and in her 20s she even started a photography project to capture different interpretations of the Lynn face on camera.
In Horton’s play, the main character, Leah, decides to form a punk band before her approaching 40th birthday, with Lynn as her muse. Set at the band’s first gig, the story unfolds in real time. As the friends chat and rehearse together, Leah reveals more about a relationship she has just escaped from. Her friends always thought this partner was charming, but the details that trickle out paint a darker scene.
The story apparently draws on Horton’s own experiences. Years ago, she wound up chatting to the feminist punk great Viv Albertine after watching the Slits frontwoman on a panel. When Horton mentioned a couple of details about her then partner, “[Albertine] was like: ‘This doesn’t sound good, you should read my book, it’s about me getting out of an abusive relationship.’”
Horton was confused. “He was so impressive to me, so charismatic, and I was so in awe of him.” But she says a pattern emerged. “I knew I felt bad, I knew I was unhappy. But I couldn’t see what was happening.”
Coercive and controlling behaviour only became a criminal offence in 2015. While the term “gaslighting” has become part of our lexicon, the reality of what these relationships look like can be cloudier. For Horton, the change from dazzling romance with a magnetic man to a situation where she was full of doubt, in fear of his sudden aggression, her confidence shattered, happened slowly. “I felt worthless by the time I got out of that relationship,” she says. “It’s taken years and years to fully understand … I’m still making discoveries.”
The play’s musical element was inspired by another moment in Horton’s life when, commiserating over a breakup, she decided to start the Felicity Montagu Band, named after the actor who plays Lynn. Nerves scuppered the project (“I’ve always daydreamed about being a drummer but because I’m so shy I could never do it”). But the idea lingered. For Horton and her character Leah, forming a band felt cathartic: “She’s getting some of her power back.”
While Horton wants to highlight what coercive control can look like, “because I think it’s important that people understand it”, she hopes the play’s tone is empowering. “It’s about how you find hope after abuse. I’m not interested in highlighting a powerful person and their psychology. I want to look at how people are affected by narcissists. How do you find resilience and hope and joy after you’ve been in a relationship like that?”
The play balances the heavier subjects with comedy. The band will be dressed in part-Lynn, part-punk get-ups. Horton has been scouring charity shops for the perfect outfits, mixing typical Lynn cardigans and blouses with fishnets and denim. Their songs are “really bad”, Horton says. “One of them is just screaming ‘Fat cow’ [a classic Lynn quote]. None of them can play instruments. It’s leaning into awkward, embarrassing, British humour.”
Horton will be making her acting debut as a “grumpy drummer” who has responded to an ad and tentatively reveals her own toxic relationship with a woman. Horton drew inspiration from Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir, which tracks the slow escalation of her ex-girlfriend’s abuse, plus a situation Horton found herself in. “I had to report something a woman had done to me and I wasn’t taken as seriously. I found that very interesting.”
Getting on stage is Horton’s challenge to herself. “In primary school, I was so shy and quiet. If you’re not extroverted, people don’t see your value.” Shyness also obstructed Horton’s writing aspirations. “I had a little plastic theatre and would put on plays for my mum and dad. So I loved writing. But I didn’t have the confidence to do it.” She tried creative writing at university, but couldn’t see a path into the industry and instead got a job in her home town as an usher at Plymouth Theatre Royal. During her childhood, the town was viewed with “snobbery”; its cultural scene was small, parts were deprived and dilapidated. While more funding and support is needed, Horton says, “underground things are bubbling up in music, poetry and theatre. It’s a city that doesn’t celebrate its worth, but it should.”
She volunteers with local charity Millfields Inspired, which teaches children about different jobs. Horton helped kids write monologues, then recorded actors reading them. Playing these back, she says: “You could see the joy, ‘I wrote that!’. Some feel like they can’t do creative things. It’s important to show children what they’re capable of.”
That led her into the theatre’s marketing team, and from there she became a publicist working across London’s cultural scene. But, still, “I’d look at writers and think: I want to do that.”
By her mid-30s, she had done a playwriting course and was writing things in secret. During the pandemic, she finally got serious. In a full-circle moment, in 2021, she put on three short plays for her old employer Plymouth Theatre Royal – one of which became Breathless, a semi-autobiographical show about a woman struggling with hoarding disorder. On her return to Plymouth, Horton had to face the fact she had been compulsively collecting clothing.
After years in PR, she carefully considered how much of herself to put into the play and its promotion. “They say write from the scar, not from the wound. With Breathless, I didn’t feel I was putting myself in a vulnerable position,” she says. “I wanted to draw the shame out of hoarding. A lot of people were like: I hoard and I didn’t realise. So it was the right thing to do. But it was very intense.”
With the fallout from Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer, where his alleged stalker was identified and is now suing Netflix, Horton thought even more carefully about weaving her experiences into Lynn Faces. “You should be able to tell your own story,” she says. “It’s figuring out: am I putting anyone else in an uncomfortable state?” She is also conscious of the personal toll of retreading traumatic memories: “I’ve seen people have breakdowns in Edinburgh.”
Horton took Breathless to the Edinburgh fringe in 2022. It won the Scotsman’s fringe first and BBC Popcorn awards, gaining Horton an agent and a tour. “I love Edinburgh, but there’s two sides,” Horton says. While there’s opportunity, it’s hard to experiment when there’s so much money on the line. “I worked on projects as a publicist, and you’d be aware their parents had given them 30 grand to take their play to Edinburgh. People shouldn’t be vilified for that, but the issue is that there is no demystification,” she says. “People then feel useless when they can’t get stuff off the ground … I’m not from a wealthy background. I can’t financially ruin myself.”
Nevertheless, last year, she finally quit PR and with fortuitous timing became artistic consultant at Barbican theatre, Plymouth. “Sometimes you just have to leap into the black hole and think: something’s going to catch me,” she says. While she didn’t have the connections to grease her path into theatre, Horton feels “really lucky” to have witnessed her mum’s struggle to make it as a writer. Babs Horton had her first novel published aged 50. “She’s a working-class Welsh woman. She was dogged, working in a psychiatric unit and writing alongside. Watching that was inspiring.”
This year, aged 70, Babs is doing her first Edinburgh show, In the Lady Garden. Her mum’s presence in Edinburgh made Horton determined to take Lynn Faces there this year. “This is quite a special thing.”
As with Breathless, where Horton made a companion podcast to spread knowledge of hoarding disorder beyond the theatre, she hopes to raise awareness of coercive control beyond Lynn Faces. Witnessing friends extricating themselves from their own controlling relationships underscored the power of knowledge. “For anyone who has been in a situation like I have, they might feel seen – and hopeful,” she says. “It will stay with you, but you can heal.”
Lynn Faces is at the New Diorama theatre, London, 28 July, then Summerhall as part of the, Edinburgh, 1 to 26 August: tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/lynn-faces