Rhiannon Neads is wearing a vivid floral dress when we meet on a sunny morning outside Shepherd’s Bush underground station. “There’s days when I don’t feel like that on the inside, but if I put something like that on the outside, it helps me to feel brighter and more jolly,” she says.
The last time I saw her she was on stage at the Clapham Omnibus theatre, dressed in a silver astronaut costume in her debut play Supernova, a 70-minute two-hander about relationships and mental health. Space-obsessed Tess (played by Neads) meets Doctor Who nerd Harry ( Sam Swann) at a fancy dress party, and they fall in love, but Tess’s self-hatred soon puts their relationship under strain.
“I wanted to write a show exploring mental health and relationships,” Neads tells me in a nearby coffee shop, “but I also was really keen to write something that was funny… I felt like it was important to show that you can be very multifaceted as a person with depression, and, you know, make jokes.” Partly inspired by her own experiences, Neads doesn’t shy away from showing the more unpalatable side of mental illness: while funny, warm and likeable, Tess can also be “really difficult and mean”. Neads found that some members of the audience were grateful to see this reality represented on stage: “It can make you a really difficult person to be around if you have depression,” she says. “We shouldn’t be scared of that. It’s OK.”
It was important to show that you can have depression and still make jokes
I ask Neads how writing about mental health affects her emotionally. “I think theatre can be very cathartic,” she tells me. “It can be very healing, but you never want to use it as therapy. You use therapy for therapy… then you can use the art to process that and connect with other people through it.” Other activities she has used to manage her own mental health include rock climbing and cross stitch.
Born in the southwest of England, Neads, who has one older brother, grew up between her dad’s house in Wells and her mum’s house near Bath. She was “terribly bullied at school for being a massive nerd,” she tells me. “I didn’t do that thing where people try and conform and fit in. I was like, ‘I am who I am and I’m gonna keep doing that. Even though you all hate me for it,’ which I think has given me some determination in life.” Neads has the same self-deprecating sense of humour as her character Tess—she says that, as a child, she was “interested in doing something in the performing arts, although when you’re a kid it’s mostly just known as showing off.”
Her showing off took her all the way to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and then a stint at BBC Radio Drama, where she met the future director of Supernova, Jess Dromgoole. Now she teaches voice acting one day a week and is developing a musical with her comedy partner Sally O’Leary for their production company Stiff & Kitsch.
She hopes to adapt Supernova for screen or radio, and its success—the play received a four-star review in the Guardian and was nominated for Off West End awards—has opened the door for writing more. The critical response inspired Neads to think: “Maybe there is something in this old writing lark…”
As Tess explains in the play, a supernova is the powerful, luminous explosion that happens in the final dying stages of a star. But as Neads and I part ways after our coffee, I can’t help but feel that she is about to go shooting across the sky. While a supernova may mark the end of the life of a star, I suspect that for Neads it is just the beginning.
