Lucy Prebble’s Dramas of High Anxiety

Prebble started her career in the theatre, but she’s now equally well known as a television writer. She worked on all four seasons of “Succession,” Jesse Armstrong’s satirical drama about media moguldom; with her close friend Billie Piper, she created the wickedly disorienting British series “I Hate Suzie,” which Prebble wrote and Piper stars in. In “Suzie,” Piper is a former teen pop star who undergoes a mental-health crisis after a scandal. Piper was herself a teen star, but the show also draws on Prebble’s experience of navigating high-pressure workplaces as a young woman. Prebble was just twenty-two when her first full-length play, “The Sugar Syndrome,” was produced in London, winning several awards. She was still in her twenties when her second play, “enron,” about the implosion of the Texas-based energy company, was a hit in the West End. Prebble, who is now forty-three, told me, “All I know inside is that I much prefer being older to being younger, and that’s nice, because I wasn’t expecting it. Everything culturally has told me, ‘You’ll hate this. You’ll be an invisible crone.’ And, actually, I much prefer walking into a room and not having the assumption be that I am somebody’s assistant, and then having to apologetically make clear that I am not.”