Lynn Benfield, the repressed PA to Steve Coogan’s insufferable announcer Alan Partridge, doesn’t always get the recognition she deserves. Most people only know Lynn by her first name. On TV, she’s always by Alan’s side, quietly tolerating his self-absorbed behaviour. Plymouth-based playwright Laura Horton finally puts her centre stage in her new show, Lynn Faces.
Though Lynn rarely voices her displeasure, her face betrays her true feelings: disgust, bewilderment, discomfort. Horton, a big Partridge fan, always felt an affinity for Lynn and loved these expressions. “You get moments where there’s something inside her waiting to explode. But she’s so controlled, she never lets it go,” Horton says. “I really identify with that, that kind of masking and being afraid of being stupid.” She and a friend would put on their best “Lynn faces” to greet each other, and in her 20s she even began a photography project to capture different interpretations of Lynn’s face on camera.
In Horton’s play, the main character, Leah, decides to form a punk band before she’s nearly 40, with Lynn as her muse. The story is set during the band’s first gig and unfolds in real time. As the friends chat and rehearse together, Leah reveals more about a relationship she’s just escaped. Her friends have always found this partner charming, but the details that emerge paint a darker picture.
The story is apparently based on Horton’s own experiences. Years ago, she got chatting to feminist punk star Viv Albertine after seeing the Slits frontwoman on a panel. When Horton mentioned a few details about her then-partner, “[Albertine] was like, ‘This doesn’t sound good, you should read my book, it’s about how I got out of an abusive relationship.’”
Horton was confused. “He was so impressive to me, so charismatic, and I was so impressed by 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 behavior wasn’t criminalized until 2015. While the term “gaslighting” is now part of our lexicon, the reality of what these relationships look like can be murkier. For Horton, the transition from a dazzling romance with a magnetic man to one in which she was riddled with doubt, fearful of his sudden aggression, her self-confidence shattered, was slow. “I felt worthless when I got out of that relationship,” she says. “It’s taken years and years to fully understand it. … I’m still discovering things.”
I want to look at how people are affected by narcissists – how do you find hope and joy after a narcissist?
The musical element of the play was inspired by another moment in Horton’s life, when, grieving over a breakup, she decided to form the Felicity Montagu Band, named after the actor who plays Lynn. Nerves scuppered the project (“I always dreamed of being a drummer, but because I’m so shy, I could never do it”). But the idea stuck. For Horton and her character Leah, forming a band felt cathartic: “She gets some of her power back.”
While Horton wants to highlight what coercive control can look like, “because I think it’s important for people to understand,” she hopes the tone of the piece is encouraging. “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 being in that relationship?”
The piece balances the heavier subject matter with comedy. The band will be dressed in half-Lynn, half-punk outfits. Horton has scoured thrift stores for the perfect outfits, pairing Lynn vests and blouses with fishnet stockings and denim. Their songs are “really bad,” Horton says. “One of them just screams ‘Fat cow’ [a classic Lynn quote]. None of them can play an instrument. It tends towards awkward, embarrassing, British humor.”
Horton makes her acting debut as a “grumpy drummer” who answers an ad and carefully reveals her own toxic relationship with a woman. Horton drew inspiration from Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir, which chronicles the slow escalation of her ex-girlfriend’s abuse, plus a situation Horton found herself in. “I had to report something that a woman had done to me and I wasn’t taken seriously. I thought that was really interesting.”
I loved writing. But I didn’t have the confidence to do it.
Getting on stage is Horton’s challenge to herself. “I was so shy and quiet in primary school. If you’re not outgoing, people don’t see your value.” Shyness also hampered Horton’s writing ambitions. “I had a little plastic theatre and 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 hometown as a doorman at Plymouth’s Theatre Royal. Growing up, the city was viewed with “snobbery”; its cultural offerings were limited, parts of it neglected and run-down. While more funding and support is needed, Horton says, “there’s underground stuff bubbling up in music, poetry and theatre. It’s a city that doesn’t celebrate its value, but it should.”
She volunteers with local charity Millfields Inspired, which teaches children about different careers. Horton helped children write monologues and then recorded actors reading them out loud. She plays them back and says: “You could see the joy: ‘I wrote that!’. Some people feel like they can’t do creative things. It’s important to show children what they’re capable of.”
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That got her into the theatre’s marketing team, and from there she became a publicist in London’s cultural scene. Still, “I looked at writers and thought, I want to do that.”
In her mid-thirties, she had taken a playwriting course and was writing things in secret. During the pandemic, she finally got serious. In a full-circle moment, in 2021, she staged three short plays for her old employer, the Plymouth Theatre Royal – one of which was Breathless , a semi-autobiographical show about a woman struggling with hoarding disorder. On her return to Plymouth, Horton had to confront her compulsive clothing collection.
After years in PR, she carefully considered how much of herself she wanted to put into the piece and its promotion. “They say you should write from the scar, not the wound. With Breathless, I didn’t feel like I was making myself vulnerable,” she says. “I wanted to take away the shame of hoarding. A lot of people were saying, ‘I’m hoarding,’ and I didn’t realize it. So it was the right thing to do. But it was very intense.”
In the aftermath of Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer , which saw his alleged stalker identified and now suing Netflix, Horton has been thinking 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 someone else in an uncomfortable place?” She’s also aware of the personal toll of reliving traumatic memories: “I’ve seen people in Edinburgh have breakdowns.”
Horton took Breathless to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2022. It won the Scotsman’s Fringe First and BBC Popcorn Awards, earning Horton an agent and a tour. “I love Edinburgh, but there are two sides to it,” Horton says. While there are opportunities, it’s hard to experiment when there’s so much money at stake. “I’ve worked on projects as a publicist and you know their parents gave them $30,000 to take their play to Edinburgh. People shouldn’t be vilified for that, but the problem is there’s no demystification,” she says. “People feel useless when they can’t get things off the ground … I don’t come from a wealthy background. I can’t ruin myself financially.”
Last year, however, she finally quit PR and, in lucky timing, became artistic adviser at Plymouth’s Barbican Theatre. “Sometimes you just have to jump into the black hole and think, ‘Something’s going to get me,’” she says. Although she didn’t have the connections to get her way into theatre, Horton feels “really lucky” to have witnessed her mother’s struggle to make it as a writer. Babs Horton published her first novel at the age of 50. “She’s a working-class Welsh woman. She was stubborn, worked in a psychiatric unit and wrote on the side. Seeing that was inspiring.”
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This year, at the age of 70, Babs is doing her first show in Edinburgh, In the Lady Garden. Her mother’s presence in Edinburgh made Horton determined to bring Lynn Faces this year. “This is very special.”
As with Breathless, where Horton created an accompanying podcast to spread knowledge about hoarding beyond the theater, she hopes to raise awareness of compulsive control beyond Lynn Faces. Seeing friends break free from their own controlling relationships underscored the power of knowledge. “Anyone who’s been in a situation like mine might feel seen—and hopeful,” she says. “It’s going to stay with you, but you can heal.”
Lynn Faces is at the new Diorama theatre, London, July 28, then Summerhall as part ofEdinburgh, August 1-26: tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/lynn-faces