Interview with Beth White by Phil Cook (Part 1)
I meet Beth at her "office" in Soho, the Curzon Cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue where she tells me “They let me hold meetings here in the bar sometimes because I look fairly harmless… they’ve told me that they’ve had problems in the past with the local Triads… but I guess I wouldn’t get confused for a Chinese gangster very often” She’s more Italian looking in certain lights… long brown hair, big dark eyes, a love of a good vino. And at just 24, she is already showing the talent and the determination needed to be one of the more interesting and diverse new writers, writing screenplays and short stories, as well as working as a freelance script editor and film journalist. A Cambridge graduate with a rather esoteric degree in Theology covering everything from Sufism to the genesis of Genesis (not the band), she has a voracious appetite for films, books, writers… and sometimes it’s just a little hard to keep up with the way her mind speeds along. And even as we talk she sits on the edge of her seat, as though ready to dash off on a tangent at a second’s notice, her hands carving out the air as she makes her point.
Last year Beth won the RE:Creation Award for Writing for Theocracy, which, typically, she wrote in a frantic blur in one afternoon and led to her working for Dazed and Confused magazine writing about male circumcision amongst the Xhosa tribe of South Africa. Theocracy is the frank but lyrical tale of a woman with a rather bored attitude to sex who meets the stereotypical tall dark handsome stranger who may or may not be more than he seems. Theocracy is dark, edgy and slightly magical, with poetic descriptions of couplings all across London, including a rather memorable ‘group love in’ on the bridge by Embankment station.
"But its not just sex in Theocracy, its not just for titillation… Actually a lot of the scenes imply a laissez faire attitude, mundane sex with mundane people. Of course this led to people coming up to me and asking if I was bored of sex!” She laughs when I try to ask her the same question and refuses to be drawn into her personal life. Of course having read Theology I was interested to try to compare her to the main character who is a little free with her charms… a coy way of saying she makes Samantha from Sex in the City look like a nun. I ask if she minds the comparison, if the four girls with expensive shoes were an influence?
"Not as much as some journalists have quoted me as saying! But I think it’s a useful short hand now. Pop references mean I can say "Samantha" and you have a picture in your mind instantly. The deeper levels are there if you want them. But really I had tried to create a character that I’ve met sociably many times. She’s confident, intelligent, attractive, but doesn’t know why she is doing what she is doing anymore. And the story is about the discovery of something deeper. If I had to pitch Theocracy in a sentence, it would be; the story of a god of love, who has forgotten that she is divine, has become just a love god and then is suddenly reminded of her divinity. And we’re back to my Theology degree again. A sprinkle of Hinduism, a dash of Paganism et voila!"
» Part 2
