“The couple is a much more taboo subject than we think”

She signed “The Hour”, “River”, and recently “Eric”… Great pens of British fiction, Abi Morgan excels at probing souls and hearts. The three seasons of its phenomenon series “The Split” are available on Arte.tv.

Un couple in a street in London, Islington district. Low houses with colorful facades, disheveled flowers displaying their charms in the windows. Screenwriter Abi Morgan and her husband, actor Jacob Krichefski, walk side by side on the sidewalk and it’s quite a story. Theirs, and also a piece of ours – defunct, living, drained loves – which cling to their footsteps. She is the creator of The Split, BBC phenomenon series which turned our hearts and bonded with affection with its heroines, three sisters, two of whom are divorce lawyers like their mother, themselves struggling with their sentimental lives, cruel messes and crazy embellishments included.

She’s the one we come to meet, but we feel like we know them both a little thanks to the book Abi Morgan published two years ago, This Is Not a Pity Memoir (ed. John Murray, 2022, in English). She recounts that day in 2018 when she discovered Jacob, collapsed on the bathroom floor, the months of coma that followed and that other day when he came to but did not recognize her… « The guy who wakes up and no longer knows who his wife is: what a cliché! “, mocks the author about this devastation that sounds like a cinematic antiphon. « As a screenwriter, it was the most disturbing gift Jacob could have given me. » Life does not fear an overdose of terrifying cliffhangers, at the same time, Abi Morgan is attacked by breast cancer. A journey of fear that the couple, both survivors, now watch from the other side.

In the large, bright room that serves as her office, the screenwriter grabs the book from a shelf. She is working, with Jacob, on a film adaptation of their story and has fun with their « megalomaniac delusions » on the actors who could play them. Steeped in the same solution of caustic humor and stubborn tenderness as The Splitwe would tidy up This Is Not a Pity Memoir (which in fact has nothing to do with self-pity) in the section of survival manuals for humans in distress. She imagines it more in terms of travel guides. That’s what he had to do, « to make Jacob walk towards the memory of[elle] », reconstruct, for months, their map of Tendre, with its intersections and its places — « the jokes he told me, the series we watched together, football, his favorite foods, those physical details that connected us to each other ».

Eventually, it seems that she wrote “a love story”. Once again, let’s slip to the one who says to The Split that a series on divorce is the perfect opportunity to tell feelings that stand the test of time — “ Everything so often ends at the moment when the heroes fall into each other’s arms. So here begins the adventure… and not the least! »

An essential writer in British fiction, Abi Morgan, 56, shines with her expertise in a myriad of genres. Besides the melodrama The Split, she signed the miniseries Eric, launched this summer on Netflix, which invokes the highly televisual motif of the missing child; before, there was the history (and so clever) The Hour or the policewoman (and very haunted) River.

In the cinema, we also owe him the script of The Dame de Fer than that of Shame, fascinating dive into the abysmal solitude of a sex addict. She makes no secret of her raw material: the things of life. « What happened to us with Jacob left me so humiliated, literally: down. But I am lucky to be able, through writing, to metabolize reality. Stories allow us to live and, where necessary, survive. »

At the same time, she was writing season 3 of The Split, even in the cafes at the hospital gates, « stocked with Haribo » by its close team of collaborators. The final part of his creation bears the imprint of this inner dialogue with the violence of contingency. In a heartbreaking scene, Rose (Fiona Button), the youngest sister, speaks to her husband, who died suddenly. “ When she asks, at his grave: “Why aren’t you here?”, it’s really me speaking to Jacob at a time when I felt so abandoned… »

She, whose talents as a playwright are also applauded across the Channel, does not fear monologues. Daughter of an actress mother and a director father, theater is her cradle. “I fell asleep so many times watching Shakespeare, Gorky, Chekhov, Beckett, Arthur Miller! But unconsciously, I learned, even before knowing how to speak, to understand the world through the representation we give of it. »

The Split has so much to do with its history. « My parents divorced, we are three children, my mother raised us alone… » The speech in the very first episode where Hannah (Nicola Walker), the eldest in the family, raises a glass to the stubborn resilience of her mother (Deborah Findlay)? « It’s a speech for mine! When she divorced in the 80s, Thatcher had just given women the right to have a credit card without their husband’s signature…” And when asked about the breadth of her female characters, she immediately answers: « I always wanted to offer great roles to actresses. Back then, my mother so often had three lines of dialogue when her male partners took up all the space. I write for her. »

Certain works have the power to charge us with lives other than our own. The Split is one of those, which inscribe somewhere in our memories the cozy melancholy of the day after a party, a rushing departure for school, a fit of tears rushing down the stairs. Abi Morgan knows the closeness of the public to the series, the success of which is such that the BBC ordered, two years after its conclusion, a special double episode for Christmas, just to savor the reunion with the three sisters…

« I wanted to write about the couple because it’s a much more taboo subject than you think! We often tend to present an idealized image of our unions, when it is the place of all the contradictions. You can love your husband and feel attraction for someone else or decide to break up and suffer terribly…” The clock is ticking, we would like to know, before leaving it, where this unadorned audacity comes from. « I’m afraid I don’t have that many! Another day you might find me crying in my car…”

We insist on his tenacity, precisely, in probing the chaotic truth of feelings. If she never gives in to embellishment, we won’t catch her overplaying the darkness either. « Il There are moments in life of absolute distress, I know that well. But it is too important, both intimately and politically, that fiction cannot renounce. » To what? “Hope”, she said. This resolute aspiration which requires what it definitely does not lack: a good dose of guts.

The Split, 3 seasons available on Arte.tv until November 30, 2024.

The Hour, two seasons available on Arte.tv until October 14.