This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Anoushka Lucas: I obsessively watched like Dawson's Creek and Buffy and ER. I watched so much TV and I would write songs from the point of views of the characters on TV, which I can now see as a complete obvious through line to becoming a musical theater songwriter. But at the time I was like, I don't know, I just find it really easy to pretend to be, you know, Willow and Buffy for two hours and write a song from her point of view about how she feels about Zander going out with Cordelia.

[0:34] Heather Vickery: Oh hey everybody, you are listening to Was It Chance, the podcast about embracing opportunity and taking intentional risk for your creative life.

[0:43] Alan Seales: I'm Heather Vickery.

[0:44] Alan Seales: And I'm Alan Seales.

[0:46] Heather Vickery: Heather and I started off as two perfect strangers who met by chance and embraced opportunity.

[0:50] Alan Seales: Listen in as we talk with other successful people about the success they've taken to put themselves on a path to creative success.

[0:56] Heather Vickery: Yes.

[0:57] Alan Seales: Success.

[0:58] Heather Vickery: I thought we had outgrown sucks, yes.

[0:59] Alan Seales: Success.

[1:00] Heather Vickery: I don't know. I just love Beetlejuice, so I still do it. Um this is a fun little crossover, not little, it's normal length.

[1:03] Alan Seales: This is a fun crossover.

[1:08] Heather Vickery: That's what she said.

[1:09] Alan Seales: This is a fun crossover episode.

[1:12] Heather Vickery: Um I hope you're listening to this.

[1:15] Alan Seales: I really do. Fun crossover episode uh between the theater podcast, my solo pod, and Was It Chance, the podcast you are listening to right now.

[1:24] Heather Vickery: And uh yeah, so we interviewed Anoushka because um it the the because she's fucking cool.

[1:31] Alan Seales: She's in a and the content seems to fit seems to fit both.

[1:35] Heather Vickery: The like little insider baseball here that a lot of the guests will come to the podcast or to podcasts in general through press agents because someone's promoting something, whatever the case is.

[1:45] Alan Seales: And so the press agent who I happen to be friends with now was like, We really think that this person would be great for both feeds.

[1:50] Heather Vickery: And I was like, you know what? You're right.

[1:51] Alan Seales: So here we are.

[1:55] Heather Vickery: Hey everyone, welcome to a very, very special crossover episode of the theater podcast and Was It Chance? How are you doing, Heather?

[2:01] Heather Vickery: I am good.

[2:01] Alan Seales: Alan Seales, how are you doing?

[2:06] Alan Seales: I'm crushing it, man. I like these crossover episodes that we've been doing here.

[2:11] Heather Vickery: I know we have a good time.

[2:12] Alan Seales: We always have a good time.

[2:14] Heather Vickery: We do, we do. A lot of fun.

[2:16] Alan Seales: We always have maybe too much fun.

[2:18] Heather Vickery: Can you have too much fun?

[2:19] Alan Seales: Well, as long as you get your job done, no.

[2:23] Heather Vickery: Then no.

[2:23] Alan Seales: Yes? No? Maybe?

[2:24] Heather Vickery: Anyway, speaking of getting the job done, I'm a kid. Can you tell us?

[2:27] Alan Seales: I'm sorry.

[2:28] Heather Vickery: Yeah, can you tell us who's here?

[2:29] Alan Seales: All right. Today's guest is a singer, songwriter, musical theater composer, and actor, having starred in West End productions, including Oklahoma and Jesus Christ, Superstar.

[2:39] Alan Seales: Also a super smartie. She began composing music at the age of 14, has a degree in Russian and Italian from Oxford University, and to date has been nominated for an Olivier Award, an Evening Standard Award, and a Black British Theatre Award.

[2:54] Alan Seales: But wait, there's more. She was the recipient of the Best Writer Award in the 2023 Stage Debut Awards, among other films.

[3:01] Alan Seales: You can also see her in Murder on the Orient Express. And now, starting on uh wait, they say it this way in Britain, on 21st February, can be heard in a brand new original musical podcast called U.Me: The Complete Musical.

[3:16] Alan Seales: Anoushka Lucas. Holy cow, welcome to the podcast.

[3:20] Anoushka Lucas: Thank you so much. Hello, I'm delighted to be on this podcast and two podcasts and three podcasts. It's very thank you so much.

[3:29] Anoushka Lucas: It's a very odd thing about being on a podcast or being interviewed. You often hear your CV read back to you, and you're like, Yeah. That's that person's cool. I want to know her. Wait, that's me.

[3:37] Anoushka Lucas: Wait, we need we need ignorant translation, or maybe I'm just the ignorant person. Whatever, whatever we use words like lift, yeah, that means elevator and CV that means resume.

[3:47] Alan Seales: No, yes, that people say CV in the US, though.

[3:51] Anoushka Lucas: I know I'm used to that. I worked with them Americans for a year and a half on Oklahoma, so I have had to do some translating.

[3:59] Alan Seales: Thank you for translating on my behalf.

[4:01] Anoushka Lucas: CV means musical.

[4:04] Alan Seales: We do not think you need Alan to translate for it.

[4:07] Anoushka Lucas: What cracked me up is his attempt at having a British accent as he was reading.

[4:12] Anoushka Lucas: I hope it comes back. I enjoyed your description of your description, your pronunciation of Oxford University.

[4:18] Alan Seales: Oxford.

[4:20] Anoushka Lucas: Oxford. My dad used to call it Hogwarts.

[4:22] Anoushka Lucas: My teenage daughters would do. Um when I was there, my dad would send me letters addressed to Hogwarts, which so I think um Yes.

[4:29] Anoushka Lucas: It's difficult to say in a casual manner as it holds so much uh I'm gonna politely say history.

[4:39] Anoushka Lucas: People always put a funny voice on it, even when it's naturally an English accent.

[4:43] Alan Seales: What, Oxford or Hogwarts?

[4:45] Anoushka Lucas: Both, both. They're both incredibly important to my culture.

[4:51] Alan Seales: Well, uh, I think I think it's impressive. I actually want to get into the like the early, early, early growing up stuff because you were raised in London, but you spoke French before you spoke English.

[5:05] Anoushka Lucas: Yes. My mother is I was raised in London, um, in West London, in a part of London called Hammersmith or Fulham, depending where you draw the um the borough line.

[5:17] Anoushka Lucas: And my mum is uh half French, half Cameroonian, but she grew up in France and came to well, what a question. The top half or the bottom half.

[5:26] Anoushka Lucas: It's very hard to. I mean, you've really thrown me for a loop. I've got to tell your listeners, I'm so sorry that um we're recording this at um for me it's quarter past eight PM after a nine, ten hour rehearsal day of The Crucible.

[5:40] Anoushka Lucas: And so thank you for being here.

[5:43] Alan Seales: No, I'm so happy to be.

[5:45] Anoushka Lucas: My brain is not as fast as it would have been if it was 3 PM for me.

[5:49] Anoushka Lucas: So I apologize in advance. I briefly was like, what half French is my mum? And then I was like, it's a joke.

[5:57] Anoushka Lucas: Okay, so literally every other thing under my mouth is a dad joke. Just look at it through that lens, and you'll be.

[6:03] Heather Vickery: Yes.

[6:04] Anoushka Lucas: Uh so my mum's her mum was French, her dad's Cameroonian, but she was born and raised in France, and then she came to England in the early 80s, met my dad.

[6:13] Anoushka Lucas: My dad, uh he's his dad was English, but his mum was half Indian.

[6:19] Anoushka Lucas: So both my parents are mixed race, and then um they met, they fell in love, and then when they had kids, I was the first one, and my mum was like, Well, these children are gonna speak French, and then there was um there are lots of French schools in London.

[6:33] Anoushka Lucas: Well, not lots, but a few, as there are in America. There are 400 French schools around the planet Earth.

[6:40] Heather Vickery: I love that you know that.

[6:42] Anoushka Lucas: Yeah, I mean, you get sent like a lot of propaganda when you're at a French lycée across the world because they're like, This is the best school in the world, and you're like, Is it?

[6:49] Anoushka Lucas: Um have you seen Hogwarts?

[6:52] Alan Seales: Well, yeah, I try I just used to be coming from King School.

[6:56] Anoushka Lucas: I'm always amazed at the amount of people trying to get onto platform nine and three quarters.

[7:00] Alan Seales: But they do a thing there, don't they?

[7:03] Anoushka Lucas: Yeah, they do, they do. They have like a trolley going into the wall and a sign on the wall, and like a million tourists taking pictures of platform nine and three quarters.

[7:12] Anoushka Lucas: I've yet to access it, but I think that might be because I'm not a wizard.

[7:15] Alan Seales: That you know of.

[7:16] Anoushka Lucas: You just haven't been activated.

[7:18] Alan Seales: Are you sure?

[7:19] Anoushka Lucas: Yeah, maybe it's gonna come.

[7:20] Anoushka Lucas: I am a late bloomer in many ways.

[7:21] Anoushka Lucas: So maybe my wizardry will come through in my early 40s. Who knows?

[7:24] Alan Seales: So wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. A late bloomer in many ways, but you were writing songs at 14.

[7:29] Anoushka Lucas: Yeah, I well, yeah, because I was weird, I was weird. I was not doing the things that 14-year-olds do.

[7:34] Anoushka Lucas: I was blooming late as an adolescent. I um my parents were musicians, they met, they were in a band together.

[7:41] Anoushka Lucas: My dad was a drummer for years, and my mum was sort of a singer. My mum's siblings, all of them play instruments and write music, and then everyone was like broke and wanted to be a rock star.

[7:52] Anoushka Lucas: And so I grew up going to my dad's gigs. Um, so it just seemed very normal. Making music was sort of a side profession for about 50% of the adults in my childhood.

[8:05] Anoushka Lucas: So it seemed very normal. And then I started piano lessons when I was seven, and then I just my dad, you know, and my dad's there's that joke about the eldest daughter is her dad's favorite son.

[8:15] Anoushka Lucas: And I think my dad um just sort of took it upon himself to educate me about songwriting.

[8:22] Anoushka Lucas: So we were listening to like Randy Newman and Little Feat and like Jimi Hendrix and Patrick. You know, and my mum was like more into like Prince and Lauryn Hill and Cameo, and but there was just constantly music all the time.

[8:35] Anoushka Lucas: And then we got a piano, and I really took to the piano, and it was also I also grew up in a very small apartment, and there were five of us in two bedrooms, and so the piano very early on became a place where I knew that if I sat there and I played music, people would leave me alone.

[8:53] Anoushka Lucas: And it was incredibly hard to have any sort of private space in my family home.

[8:57] Anoushka Lucas: So the piano became like my sanctuary.

[9:00] Anoushka Lucas: And I sort of it continues to be in any room that I'm in, even the rooms I'm rehearsing The Crucible in at the moment, there's a piano in the corner, and I sort of it's gonna sound very pretentious, but it's a real sort of calming nervous system thing that I like wait till the end of the day until everyone leaves, and then I know I can play the piano, and I feel most myself when I played the piano.

[9:21] Anoushka Lucas: So it was very sort of it was very organic that I started writing songs when I was 14.

[9:26] Heather Vickery: So, what kind of songs were you writing though? Were you writing um like your rock songs?

[9:31] Anoushka Lucas: I mean, like the the artists you you named off are not musical theatre artists.

[9:36] Anoushka Lucas: No, no. I mean, I we watched musicals. My dad's it's a very sad story, but my dad's mum died when he was eight in 1958, and his only real memory of her is of her taking him to the pictures, and she loved MGM musicals, and my dad is otherwise like quite a cool artie, like always has like a cigarette in his hand, and once you listen to Jimi Hendrix, but and it's also quite like emotionally um he's you know, he he's not someone to like lead with his emotions, and I guess the only um time that I would see him as a child be vulnerable was when we would watch musicals and he would cry.

[10:15] Anoushka Lucas: And I was really struck by the fact that my dad cried if we watched Dumbo or if we watched Guys and Dolls, or if we watched Singing in the Rain, and and I and then he'd talk about his mum, and so they were always very um they're very revered in my household, which is quite uh, you know, the UK has an incredibly different relationship with musical theatre than America does.

[10:36] Anoushka Lucas: There's far less reverence for it, and it's also not an art form that we really cultivate or understand.

[10:44] Anoushka Lucas: Um, and I think a lot of the best British musicals are sort of outliers and doing something quite strange because we don't really know how to make a traditional American musical.

[10:54] Anoushka Lucas: But yeah, no, I mean, by the time I was 14, I was listening to like Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Amy Winehouse, Fiona Apple, and I was like, that's what I want to do.

[11:01] Anoushka Lucas: And my songs were like oddly sort of musical theatre-inflected, narrative, jazzy piano ballads, really.

[11:10] Heather Vickery: Wow.

[11:10] Anoushka Lucas: But I'd never like had a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and I'd never like taken drugs, and I'd never smoked.

[11:16] Anoushka Lucas: So what I did instead was I obsessively watched like Dawson's Creek and Buffy and ER, and like I watched so much TV, and I would write songs from the point of views of the characters on TV, which I can now see as a complete obvious through line to becoming a writer for fiction, a musical theatre songwriter.

[11:36] Anoushka Lucas: But at the time I was like, I don't know, I just find it really easy to pretend to be, you know, Willow and Buffy for two hours and write a song from her point of view about how she feels about Zander going out with Cordelia.

[11:46] Anoushka Lucas: My name is PC Lakerie Holmes in G.

[11:53] Anoushka Lucas: Yeah, they were sort of like that, but they were a bit jazz, yeah.

[11:56] Anoushka Lucas: And the other thing that happened was, I mean, this is a very deep conversation, but um I grew up in like a sort of um, there's probably a bigger chat than I have the emotional capacity for right now, but I guess I was in a very middle class.

[12:12] Anoushka Lucas: I was a scholarship kid in a very middle class environment surrounded by a very white British middle class culture, and I was really attracted to jazz, and um there was some sort of I think there was some other thing going on because I discovered that I had quite a soulful intonation to my voice.

[12:31] Anoushka Lucas: And as soon as I started gigging, people were like, Oh, you're a jazz singer.

[12:34] Anoushka Lucas: And I was like, Oh, I didn't know I was a jazz singer, I'm just singing like how it comes out.

[12:38] Anoushka Lucas: But um, so yeah, there's lots of really interesting uh things that I'll probably be unpicking for the next 40 years and will not use your podcast to unpick.

[12:48] Anoushka Lucas: Thank you very much.

[12:49] Heather Vickery: So do you still write your own music?

[12:52] Anoushka Lucas: Yeah, yeah.

[12:53] Anoushka Lucas: I uh I write I spent a very long time my that was my aim.

[12:58] Anoushka Lucas: I had no interest at all in working in theatre.

[13:01] Anoushka Lucas: Um and I didn't I fell into that.

[13:03] Anoushka Lucas: I wanted to be a singer-songwriter.

[13:05] Anoushka Lucas: I wanted to be Carole King in I actually wanted to be Amy Winehouse or Fiona Apple without paying attention to how deeply unhappy they both seemed.

[13:14] Anoushka Lucas: And I spent most of my twenties pursuing a record deal and getting sort of quite close a few times, and I had residencies at very prestigious venues in London, and I recorded some little EPs that only exist on CD form because I'm giving my age away that it was like very difficult to get them online, and then I released an album in 2019, but which uh but then at the end of by the time it took so long to release the album and was so expensive and so complex, and by that point I was quite deep into making theatre on the side, and I had quite a big shift in my mentality where I was like, I don't think I want to keep what's that Greek myth where you're like rolling a rock up the hill.

[13:54] Anoushka Lucas: That's sort of what releasing my own music felt like. And I've server Cersei's no, which which Game of Thrones character am I trying to work from? Maybe it's Prometheus. I don't know. I felt like that. It might be a Prometheus, yeah. It might be him, or is he the guy being pecked by eagles? I can't remember. I felt like the guy rolling the big rock up the hill. And I was like, I'm it's very, very um, as you probably know.

[14:19] Sisyphus.

[14:21] Thank you. Everyone's screaming at their car radios right now. Sissy Google fingers. I was gonna say I think it's like really hard to to be an art a solo artist, or you know, to like have any sort of entrepreneurial venture if you're not. I'm not particularly entrepreneurially minded. I wanted to write songs and release them. And the era that I was trying to do that, you were sort of I wasn't so good at the business side of it. And then I fell into theatre, and I was like, cool, these people in this one I could just be creative and someone else does the business side. Big win.

[14:54] So how how old were you then when you met Shay Walker? Because that did and did that sort of kick off your your um like falling into the the more like having somebody take care of the business side of it?

[15:08] Um I wouldn't say Che took care of the business side of it. But uh yeah, so I was I can't I went to Oxford, I was there for four years, I came back to London when I was 21. I had like a hundred part-time jobs, and I was gigging regularly with a band. And then I met Che when I was 23, so like two years into that, and he uh at that point was like uh he'd just come off, there'd been like a big sort of roll of success for him. He'd had a show at the Young Vic, he'd um had huge success at the Globe. Uh he was like 20 years older than me, and he was sort of a big deal, but I had absolutely no idea who he was because I didn't go to the theater. I wasn't, you know, I didn't do drama at university, I didn't do drama at school. Uh, I just wasn't interested in it. I was like, I'm I'm a musician. I met Che and through like a whole series of events, and then he was like, What do you do? And I was like, Oh, I write songs, and then he said, Well, play me a song that you've written.

[16:02] And I remember I played him a song from the point of view of Bella in Twilight about being in love with Edward. And he was like, Oh, yeah, cool, that's quite weird. And then I went away and did the and then two weeks later I got a message from him out of the blue saying, Hey, it's Che Walker, we met a few weeks ago. A composer that I have on a project has just dropped out, and I need somebody to write me a song by Sunday. Will you write me a song by Sunday? I'll pay you £100. And I was 23, and I was like, a hundred pounds. Oh my god, no one's ever paid me for a song. So I said yes, and then I like I didn't know how to record at home, I didn't know, like, he sent me a scene, and he and then there was just frankly some not very good lyrics, and I was like, Well, I'm gonna rewrite all these lyrics, which again now I would like be far more um gracious about, but arrogant 23-year-old with no understanding of theatre. I was like, these lyrics, this is award-winning playwright has written are not good, so I will write better lyrics, and then we sort of went from there.

[17:01] He liked the song, and then I ended up writing eight songs, and then we got commissioned, and then I became a theatre composer. Just became it just happened. It did really just happen. I often um was it now 36, and I've been trying, you know, I've tried lots of different routes or experienced lots of different routes of being a creative person for 15 years, and my advice to young people is always to like um be open to the people that you meet and the opportunities that arise because everything that I did was unplanned, and I was just very lucky along the route to meet people who offered me interesting opportunities.

[17:44] Was it chance? I don't know. I don't think it was chance, but I think it was opportunity. I love that you said that. I don't know if it was chance. Maybe it's just opportunity, except maybe it's the same thing. I think I've been incredibly lucky in many ways with where I have ended profession ended up professionally. And I say that also as someone who's not like, you know, it could dry up at any point, which I think is something that you know in the in the artistic fields, is that you're like, well, I'm having a good couple of years, but I know that before then I was not having a good couple of years.

[18:16] We're gonna take a quick break. Stay tuned for more of the episode. And now we're back. My my and I've been really lucky and I really recognize that. I also think as a young person, and particularly as a young woman, I'm like quite reticent to describe things that happened to me as chance and luck, because that that undermines my own work and also the fact that I was prepared or able to meet the opportunities that came my way.

[18:47] And I think what uh if I think about myself then, I was very unformed and I needed guidance and I needed people to latch on to to follow, and I needed to be in rooms and spaces that inspired me. And I was incredibly lucky to meet those people. But I also think I don't know, I think it's like a halfway meeting. Like I was coming up a mountain and some people came down the mountain and then they took me higher. Does that make sense?

[19:10] Yeah.

[19:11] It does. And and I'm here for all like I I really love all of that because so what it's a crossover episode. Was it chance is actually the show taking intentional risk for creative success? So of course you're so prepared and you've done all this work, but something in you had to go, why, yes, I will do this. I don't know if that'll work. Was there any thought? Like, oh, I I began writing musicals. Like, was there something internal you're like, well, I don't know what's gonna happen here, but let's do it. Or what was your internal dialogue there?

[19:40] Well, it's hard to remember exactly, but I I was so focused. I desperately wanted to be recognized as a singer songwriter. And that was the only clear plan that I had when I graduated from university. And I truthfully it now it's very easy, like it now feels logical that I've ended up very happy in theater, and I can see how I fit that world very well. But it it really does feel like chance, not chance, it feels like there was I know this might be the worst thing to say to your listeners, but there was no intention at all. I I became a composer by accident, then I became a musical director by accident, then I became an actor by accident, yeah, and then I became a playwright by accident. And in all of those cases, I met someone in a position of power who recognized something in me and said, Do you want to try and do this thing?

[20:37] And also the other thing to say is that it was very economically driven. You know, I don't come from money, and I was trying to pursue a creative path that had a very low sort of earning situation attached to it. And people approached me from tangential creative spaces and offered me money to do creative work. And to be really honest, I followed that path first and foremost because I was like, I need to pay my rent, and this person's gonna pay me to write songs, and nobody at Sony is going to pay me to write songs.

[21:12] Absolutely.

[21:13] And I feel like, yeah.

[21:17] Period.

[21:18] Yeah.

[21:18] And then also I think the other thing that happened is that as I've gone along, it's funny having gone to a private school and having gone to Oxford. And then for a long time I was like, oh, I've ended up in such a different place from that. I think that perhaps what those institutions did put in me was a s was a real privileged sense of fearlessness, where I was like, Yeah, I should try stuff, I can try stuff. And I look think about it now, and I'm like, God, if someone turned around and was like, Do you want to try and be an astronaut? I'd be like, What? No, I don't have a science degree. But when I was 20, obviously it's not the same thing, but when I was 22. No, it is 23, and someone was like, Do you want to be a theater composer?

I was like, Well, I don't really go to the theater, I'm not interested in the theater. Um, I don't know who any of these people are, I don't know like what their etiquette is, I don't know what downstage is or upstage is, but like, sure, that sounds fun, I'll give it a go.

[22:09] And there's a certain arrogance in that that came from my youth. But then what's funny is that I've had that sort of experience occur to me multiple times, and what I've learned from it is like if somebody offers you an opportunity to do something that they from their position of knowledge and authority believe that you can do, even if you are not sure that you can do it, if you trust them professionally and think that they are good at their jobs, say yes. Because people don't offer jobs or opportunities to people that they don't think can do them.

[22:41] That's yes.

[22:43] Okay, so earlier you said that you fell into things by accident and it wasn't really intentional, but there has to have been some aspect of all of this where you were intentionally wanting to take chances, wanting to move forward and and intentionally not wanting to say no.

[22:59] Yeah.

[23:00] I just wanted to work.

[23:01] I wanted to work. I wanted to be in creative spaces. And I wanted the real motivator for me has always been and will always be relationships. You know, I have always been platonically, professionally, romantically attracted to interesting creative people and places. And every time I met someone who was like creatively stimulating to me, I followed them. And all of the best work that I have done, whether it's with Che or with my like collaborate, my director of my play, Jess Edwards, or with Lynette Linton at the Bush, um, or on Oklahoma on stage, like the the core of my interest in things is always the people that I am going to be making something with.

[23:49] And so, in terms of intentionality, which I have quite a complicated relationship with, I think it's I think it's quite cultural as well. I hesitate to say that like I'm very British and intentionality feels very American to me. And the truth is that like I um had ambitions, but they I I really wouldn't describe myself as intentional in until I hit about 30.

[24:19] Like nothing in the oh, intentional as in like I'm gonna have an idea and follow it, or or intentional as in well, yeah, I guess that's it. So, like intentional as in here's what I want to do with my career, here's what I want to do with my life, and here are the goals I've set out, rather than just taking things as they come.

[24:38] Yeah, I think I I didn't have the power, the economic privilege or the understanding to be intentional until I was 30. And I think that the only that I had was an openness to trying things that I didn't know much about. But I was very motivated by being able to make money. And I also genuinely like never meant to be a musical theater composer, never meant to be an actor, never meant to be a playwright, and discovered a talent for these things through other people suggesting to me that that might be something I'm good at.

[24:46] And I think that goes all the way back to being a little brown girl in an all-white space and like waiting to be told what you are supposed to do. Like intentionality is such a privileged concept. You know, you need to believe that you are allowed to be the agent of yourself, which is not present in women and not present in people of color and not present in queer people until different points in life.

[25:47] So I think it's absolutely problematic, especially when you turn around to young people and say you need to be really intentional and you don't engage with like the systems that they are existing within. Not everybody at 21 has the mental capacity to be intentional.

[26:07] And you're very lucky if you decide and discover that you can become intentional.

[26:13] Anoushka, I I I am so appreciative of you saying that and sharing that. As I am super white, as we can all see, but I am queer and I am female.

[26:23] Yeah.

[26:24] Um and I think the maybe the difference was the white privilege. I'm not sure. Like I well, I don't know. Maybe I wasn't intentional until I was older. It's just good to be reminded that um we all show up from different life experiences. And yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna be listening to this over and over and over again and just keep thinking about it. And I just really appreciate the way you shared that.

[26:47] Anoushka Lucas: And um I'm sorry if it came out quite I have quite a violent reaction to um have a very violent reaction to the idea of like intentionality and manifesting, for example, which like I think there's such beauty in them once you are in the position that you can work from there. And I absolutely believe that like clarity in your ambition is fantastic. But like first you need to be like paying your rent, accepted in your social group, like sure that you're the people above you approve of you. I don't know. I think I I spend a lot of time thinking about how my creative career, I believe, is hugely, you know, one thing that is not an accident is I was raised by creative parents and I also was raised in a middle class environment in the nineties where I was told that I could go out and do anything I wanted.

Now, if I'd been w raised in like a first generation working class immigrant household, it would have been a very different thing for me to turn around and say I want to be a singer song of my turn, I'm not gonna make more than £20,000 a year until I'm 30. Just wouldn't have been an option, you know. I think I've I think I've worked really hard to get to a point where I can now be like, cool. What do I want to do? What am I good at? Where do I think I could grow? And those questions uh have all come in my 30s. That's really interesting. And and I I I came from upper middle class cis white male privilege. And I've embraced the uh opportunities that have come to me. Yeah, it's just interesting.

Um, and I'd love to I'd love to be to uh understand what's going on and be more educated along all this stuff. And I'm I'm ill I'm not being eloquent at all at this moment. No, I'm sorry. I feel like I've come down really heavy on intentionality, which I didn't mean to. I I just yeah, I just think it's such an like interesting intersectional concept. And but it's also is important. Like I've got a sister who's 22, and I look at her and I'm like, oh god, I can't she's gonna hate me when she hears this, but like I'm like, oh, I can't wait until you like figure out with clarity where you are good and where you should go. But sh but people like there are outliers at 22 who have answers to that, but like there's also a you think where you're like you you come out of like a 17-year educational system where someone tells you what to do and then you sit an exam. It's pretty hard to be like, now I'm gonna do this and it's gonna work. Absolutely.

[29:14] Alan Seales: Well, how do you choose your your projects now? I mean, and then specifically like leading to to you.me, does this sort of thing come to you? Um I mean, are you are you swatting away all the the messenger owls from Hogwarts that come to you and you know, with these job offers, or are you s going out for specific things? You're like, I'm gonna do a musical podcast now.

[29:35] Anoushka Lucas: Um a bit of I'm in I'm in a sort of like early stages middle spot, I would say. I mean, I'm auditioning and I'm well, so you.me is really specific because you.me happened in the pandemic, and I was supposed to be doing a play at the National Theatre that was supposed to start auditions on January 2021, and then we went into our second lockdown, and it was unclear if and when we were ever gonna get out of lockdown and if the theaters were ever going to open. And an audition for a radio musical came in, and they were like, this is going to happen regardless of whether or not we're in lockdown. And so obviously I was very keen just to work. Because I mean, one thing that is true of me is I do not like to be idle.

And I think a lot of the things that have come out of me are like a reflection of my ADHD and my desire to like always be doing five projects. So I was like excited about that. And then but and then I formed new relationships, you know. Like I sort of was like, oh, Theo is a great musician and this is a fun project, so yes, I'd like to go back to it. The reality of everything else is I'm definitely still auditioning for things, but now I guess the caliber of things I get invited to audition for is very satisfying and tasty, whereas a few years ago I wasn't in certain rooms, now I'm comfortably in those rooms. And the other thing is because I write plays and music, I have like quite a reasonable sense of um security is a dangerous word to use, but like I know that there's interest in the work that I generate, and so I'm like, you know, worst case scenario, I could always put on a gig or write a monologue and do that.

And yeah, and I guess overall I'm just really interested in balancing everything. Like I like, I hate doing one thing for longer than three months. So I'll act in something and then I want to write something, and then I want to be with my band, and then I also want to balance in musical theater with straight theatre, because I don't know what it's like in America, but in the UK, you can get stuck doing only musicals, and then nobody will audition you for a play. And I really like doing plays, and I really like doing musicals, and that feels like quite a quite a fine line to tread.

[31:54] Alan Seales: I was gonna ask that how how the being intentional again, going back to this word. About what you're about what you do to to decide between your projects, because you can at any point, like in 2018, you composed original songs for this show called Sparks, which was adapted to BBC Radio 4, and then you you have a debut play called Elephant, uh, which I guess that was written across the whole pandemic, right? Yeah, so like you're writing you're writing your own plays, you're composing songs, you're you just said at the top of this uh recording that you're in rehearsal for the crucible, you recording uh these radio podcasts, like again, you sounds like you just constantly have to keep moving, and I 130 million percent relate to that because yes, yeah, and so and so at any point if you have multiple options, what are you intentionally embracing to get to the next step? What are you doing to decide where the balance needs to come from?

[32:53] Anoushka Lucas: That's so good. Uh, I'm just doing my best, and I'm thinking it wrong. Yeah, I guess in terms of going back to our favorite word, intentionality, my main intention actually now and for the last year or two has been like, how do I keep all of the plates spinning? And I've had an experience in the last through Oklahoma specifically, which was at the Young Vic and Move to the West End, which was the same production as you guys had on Broadway in 2019. I guess there was a certain amount of recognition of that that coincided with my first play that I was in. And I I had a real moment where I was like, Oh, am I allowed to swear on this? I won't swear. Oh, please, please fucking swear. I was just like, oh shit, like I think I might accidentally be like, if I'm not careful, I'm just gonna be an actor.

And I don't want to just be an actor. Like, it's great that I'm um in the West End and and how fucking incredible that I've been nominated for an Olivier Award. But I really want everyone to know that I can also write songs, and I also want to write this other play, and like that feels like such a great privileged problem. But it is a problem because things come in, there's very little control, specifically as an actor. You know, as a I'm currently on the commission to write something, and there's a timeline on that, and I know what the timeline is, and I can push the deadlines depending on what's going on. We're gonna take a quick break. Stay tuned for more of the episode.

[34:20] Anoushka Lucas: And now we're back. As an actor, a tape can come in one Thursday that's a job that's like, oh my god, I would love to do this job, and I'm gonna have to reschedule the next six weeks of my life if I get it. And that makes it hard to plan. Like, for example, I'm doing the crucible right now, and I'm playing Elizabeth Proctor, which is like a dream part. Wow. But then I was supposed to be recording the beginnings of my second album last week, which I'd been planning for like two months, and then the crucible came in, and I was like, Well, I'm not gonna not play Elizabeth Proctor, so I have to cancel my band recording and move it to April, and then I have to email my agent and be like, I know that we said that it would be nice if I could try and get some screen work, but please can we not put me up for any auditions for parts that will be in April? Because then I'll have to reschedule the band, you know, and that's like the reality of my life.

[35:15] Alan Seales: That's the entrepreneural part though, right? Is you have to manage that part.

[35:19] Anoushka Lucas: Yeah, but I think that's also come from being like, I think I would go crazy if I was just an actor, because it's not good for me. Going all the way back to like the little brown girl waiting for approval and permission. A lot of the work I've done on myself as a person has been like, don't just sit and wait for people to choose you. And actually, it's great because people will choose you for stuff, but it's also really important that sometimes you choose your own place and where you want to go. So and being an actor is literally currently probably my favorite of all of them. I mean, I play music every day, but that just feels like writing a diary or having breakfast. Um it's like self-care.

I mean, I play my a close friend of mine who's also a songwriter. You know, I haven't recorded any music for five years, and he was like, Oh, how many songs do you think you've written in that time? And I was like, I don't know, like 200. And he was like, What are you doing with them? And I was like, I just write them. I feel grumpy, and then I write a song about feeling grumpy, and then I feel lustful, and then I write a song about feeling lustful, and then I feel, you know, it's very um it's for me, really. That doesn't feel like there's about 10 songs out of those 200, which I think are like, oh, I could put that out and that would be nice. My girlfriend only gets joke songs from me and is very like grumpy about you're not writing serious ones. Yeah, it's a whole there's lots of little songs, but I sort of, yeah, I've been writing songs 22 years. They come out very naturally and quickly.

[36:51] Alan Seales: Uh Nooshgar, we have a little thing we do on this show when we have singers come in. Um you've you've now spent the last 41 minutes with Alan, who I love like a like a brother. Yes. Um, but the the thing is that sometimes we just want to say, shut the fuck up, Alan. Just shut the fuck up, Alan. And so when we have musicians come on the show, sometimes they'll just add lib, you know, their own version of shut the fuck up, Alan. We're gonna do a little remix. So feel free if you feel the urge to sing that for us.

[37:22] Anoushka Lucas: Oh my god. Like, shut the fuck up, Alan, like that.

[37:29] Alan Seales: Yeah, yeah.

[37:29] Anoushka Lucas: Alan, it's a British, it's a British, a British Alan.

[37:33] Alan Seales: That's amazing.

[37:34] Anoushka Lucas: Yeah, I think that was accidentally the tune of Starry Starry Nye. But there we are. We can make it sound so beautiful.

[37:43] Alan Seales: It's one of my favorite things.

[37:44] Anoushka Lucas: It's in the UK, in the UK, when um how many production companies are there? And I I I've traveled a lot of places and not admittedly into the UK very much, but it it seems to me like it is kind of BBC or nothing. And A, is that correct? But B okay, uh there's other stuff, right?

[38:06] Alan Seales: Um, because you hear about oh, BBC one, BBC two, BBC three, BBC four.

[38:10] Anoushka Lucas: That's because it's the one that it's the BBC is state funded, we all pay for it, and it's exported all around the world because it's like the face of the UK. But we have a lot of private companies here that disoperate here.

[38:22] Alan Seales: Okay, okay. So that that kind of leads into my next question though, because uh you don't mean the complete musical. Tons of of BBC overlap, right? So um again, for us ignorant Americans, sort of um the involvement of the BBC is that like okay, yeah, we expect that, or holy crap, the BBC is involved, but then the music itself is performed by bit by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.

[38:46] Anoushka Lucas: And from what I've heard of it, the little bit the little clips I've heard so far are like it's such a beautiful, it's everything about it is beautiful and it's performed so well. You know, they recorded the first one, everybody in isolation.

[38:57] Alan Seales: No way.

[39:04] Anoushka Lucas: Yeah, and then mixed by mixed and produced by Steve Levine, and I think with some help from somebody else, Anthea Jameson. But like, yeah, it was wild because it was peak lockdown. You could not get an orchestra into a room.

[39:20] Alan Seales: Pre or post-Andrew Lloyd Weber saying, Screw you, I'm opening my show.

[39:24] Anoushka Lucas: Yeah, I mean the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra were like a huge selling point to me. I I wanted the part and I wanted to work, but I was like, what an extraordinary thing to sing on top of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. There is they're a national institution. And as for the BBC, there's a lot of people who uh there's like a big drama in the UK about whether or not the BBC is left-wing propaganda and a lot of public discourse around it between the same with NPR.

[39:57] Alan Seales: Exactly.

[39:58] Anoushka Lucas: Yeah. But um, but you know, if it is left-wing propaganda, I'm here for it. And it is it's just you grow up watching the BBC, listening to the BBC.

[40:08] Anoushka Lucas: I was recently educated. My girlfriend's not from the UK, and I was recently like talking through the BBC radio channels, and I was like, supposedly listen to like BBC Radio One when you're like 15 to 21, or 15 to 18, and then you listen to BBC Six music, and then like if you're into classical music, you'll listen to BBC Three, and then I'm like, and then something weird happens, like at a certain point you hit 35 and you just sort of weirdly start listening to BBC Radio 2 which is just Michael Bublé is like very soothing. And then like and then when you're like wanting to be intellectually stimulated and or over 45 you only listen to BBC Radio 4 and that's like those are the stages of adult life through the BBC of that I love that.

I love that I love that and then and what's actually well unusual about this too like okay so you let me I was trying to figure out you know prepping for this episode of like where it's gonna be if it's just gonna be like find it everywhere you find your podcasts which is true right so it's all podcast providers but it's also it's coming out on uh BBC World Service BBC Sounds YouTube and yeah so BBC Worldservice.com slash musical but it's also being adapted or has been adapted into a feature length animated movie it has yeah I feel like a Disney princess it's wild it's really cool it's been it's I have to really say that Simon Pitts who commissioned it and and came up with part of the book he's been extraordinarily he's pushed this project that was like his baby from this tiny inception to this big huge thing and it's such so thrilling to see the reach that it can have given that when it was pitched to me it was like do you want to audition for this radio musical and I was like what the hell is a radio musical and also like who's gonna listen to that and then even the first one BBC Worldwide Service is amazing.

[42:02] Anoushka Lucas: It's the BBC station that exists all around the world. And I got messages from people in like Malta and Australia. And like someone messaged me, I think from Chile and was like, I love your show. And I was like, Oh, people have heard this internationally. And then the added layer of the illustration or the animation. Yeah, I I haven't seen the second one. And I also haven't heard the second one. But um, I'm very excited to see it's basically a little movie, it's like a two-hour musical excursion. If you've what if you watch both of them back to back, I wasn't wondering. I was actually wondering if you've ever had a conversation with your dad, or if you have some sort of kind of knowing you didn't always grow up loving musicals, but he had that connection to his mom who had passed away when he was so young.

If there's some string there, so some uh there's yeah, there's he's been my parents. So my you know, my parents were rock and roll musicians and well, punk really in the 80s, and no one has been more surprised by my transition into theatre than my family, who have obviously heard me writing songs since I was 14, and everybody in the family, including both my younger sisters, it was just an unquestioned fact that I was gonna be a musician, and my slow transition into being an actor has been met with like great encouragement, but like fundamental bemusement from my family who are like, You have no you you have never displayed any interest in this thing that you've now made your career, and I think they're quite surprised by it.

[43:38] Anoushka Lucas: And my dad, and my dad is like, you know, he's my dad. My mum and my dad, I really I find them very annoying. I spend all my therapy talking about like how they ruined my life, but ultimately their opinion matters to me quite a lot. And then my dad came to see me in a bunch of shows and just said nothing and was like, Yep. And then um, because he was like, I think you should be a singer songwriter. And then um then I remember first I wrote the music for a show that he liked, and then he said, That was really good. And I was like, Oh my dad. And then like a few years later, I was in a I was acting in a show and he said, I'm proud of you. And I was like, Oh my god, dad. Again, chills. Yeah, he's not an I'm proud of he's very loving, but it's not an I'm proud of you household.

It's more like, Why have you done that, you moron? Um, yeah, to break through the humor of like constantly sarcastically negging each other and like and and they've been really um I think my dad they loved Oklahoma because my dad's also like quite a big country music fan, and like the pedal steel guitar and the bluegrass sound of it, they were really and Oklahoma's like one of my dad's childhood musicals, so that was really joyful. That was the first time I was like, Dad, I'm playing Laurie in Oklahoma, and he was like, Yes, I know what that is, and I approve. I've I have heard of said musical and I approve dads, they're such a complicated thing.

[45:05] Anoushka Lucas: Have you thought about you speak do I have four languages? Well, three at this point because it's hard to keep Russian up if you're not using it. First of all, two part question. One is what made you want to become fluent in all of those languages, especially Russian. And then the question that I originally wanted to ask was do you ever think about doing bilingual work or work in any of these other languages? And I just think it'd be really fun to um I was in a production of Henry the Fifth uh two years ago, where the director, which is obviously about England invading France, and the I was playing Catherine of France, and the director decided to translate all of the text of the French court into French and he hired French speakers as all the French characters and I got to stand on stage at the Donmar warehouse which is like a lovely prestigious theatre in the centre of London opposite Kit Harrington and speak in French on stage and it was so my mum was so happy but also you know there's research that people have different personalities in different languages and for example if you set um like an ethical dilemma to people in different languages they respond differently because they reason differently in different languages and it was so freeing to be French on stage and to access that part of because that's normally really I speak French at home and I speak French with my school friends but it's not like in my day-to-day life um and I've written a couple songs in French but it doesn't flow as naturally as the English and then I really love myself in Italian like as an act of self-care sometimes I speak Italian because I think I'm much better in Italian than I am in English or French.

[46:51] Anoushka Lucas: You guys should have interviewed me in Italian. I'm so much fun and I'm really like see you yeah I'd love to work in Italian but I'm quite nervous about it because it's a bit rusty and then my Russian is my Russian's sort of long gone. And I studied it because I was just like a huge geek. I was really I can't overstate I loved school I was good at languages and literature and humanities and terrible at maths and science. And I went to a French school in London, and there was an option of taking two extra languages. So I did Italian and Spanish. So in by when I was 17, I was basically fluent in English, French, and Italian and uh Spanish. And I thought arrogantly again, I was like, Well, I should try something else, I'll try Russian.

But also, the true story is that I had an amazing English teacher called Madame Compagnon who gave me a short story called The Lady with the Little Lapdog by Chekhov. And I read it when I was 16, and I thought it was the best piece of fiction I had ever read in my entire life. And I was like, if this is what people are writing in Russian, I want to read Russian. And that's why I did Russian. And then it turns out it's really hard.

[48:11] Anoushka Lucas: Right. As is Chekhov in general. I'm I'm I'm just sitting here thinking of a 16-year-old who's reading Chekhov and going, This is the best piece of literature I have ever read. Yeah, I was weird because I was like sat around thinking I was Buffy, reading Chekhov. I like didn't know in English, we had this expression, I didn't know my ass from my elbow, like when you don't know anything. And I just was like, I love books, I love school, I'm never gonna do anything else except which I think is also like circling back to the intentionality. I was a pretty like I was a weird passive young person, basically. I was like, you know, take me.

[48:49] Anoushka Lucas: You say passive, but you were so willing to embrace so many things. Oh, I like this, let me learn this language, I like that. Let me write this song. I like that, let me go out for this audition. I mean, it's good. I was very um my dad went to art school in the 70s, and then they were both musicians, and my parents also this is very funny, but like my parents are quite bad with money, and we were definitely living beyond our means the whole time. And it was pretty tight and quite hairy a lot of the time. And my dad really instilled in us. He was like, doesn't really matter. Just make sure you're having a good time.

[49:27] Anoushka Lucas: I love your dad. Yeah, I love my dad. I mean, I really got older, and I was like, Oh, I wish he taught me how to like save money or make money. But he did teach us how to like um he was like, if you if something feels good and you like it, do that. And then if something else feels good and you like it, do that. And you don't need to know where you're going, and it doesn't need to be with an aim of making money, and like it just like if which is sort of goes back to what I was saying about relationships, which is like the only thing I think I have always been intentional about is being in spaces that I like, and I was always like, oh, I'm having so much fun with this person. If they're like, do you want to come and do a a workshop from Monday to Friday? What I hear is, do you want to spend five days of next week in a room with me? And I'm like, yeah, that sounds fun.

[50:18] Anoushka Lucas: That's that's it. I'm gonna interview you now in in Italian. He's gonna try with his Google Translate. Really ready, go on. Yep, and I I gotta do the the hand because that's what they do in it. Uh everybody talking about this, yeah. Uh qua il tuo reperto con io fallimento.

[50:35] Alan Seales: What is my relationship with failure?

[50:38] Anoushka Lucas: Oh, well done, both of you. Fantastic.

[50:41] Anoushka Lucas: Fantastico, italiano adesso.

[50:45] Alan Seales: Fantastic.

[50:49] Anoushka Lucas: Uh what uh well, I failed at my the only thing I ever meant to do, which was get a record deal and be a pop star. Like that was true.

[50:58] Alan Seales: You just changed your mind.

[51:00] Anoushka Lucas: Well, yeah, but I do think there was like a I it took me a while to change my mind because that was the only plan. And uh that was really confronting. And when I realized that it wasn't gonna work, I was heartbroken, like probably more heartbroken than when I've broken up with people I was deeply in love with, or you know, the grief of people passing equal to that was being like, I'm not going to be Carol King. It's not going to happen. This plan has failed.

[51:29] Anoushka Lucas: So yeah, but so that's been quite useful though, because uh like life has been so great with the failure of that plan. So I'm like, well, that's fine. It doesn't really matter.

[51:39] Anoushka Lucas: Uh how am I with failure in general? I mean, honestly, if I'm really honest, like not very good. I am a classic, like straight A student, baby Oxford graduate who's like, I must be the best, and find failure very confronting and difficult. Largely don't accept it. I normally like I'm also a Capricorn, so I will like keep going way beyond like people will be like, you should give up on this. And I'll be like, I think it's just like no, whether it's like whether it's a a professional endeavor or a personal endeavor, I'll really like slog a horse. What's the expression?

[52:14] Anoushka Lucas: Like flog a dead horse and be like, this could still be a success. And often it can. Like I'm like, you guys aren't sticking this out long enough. It took seven years, but it worked.

[52:23] Alan Seales: Well, that's a that's a lot of people of how people succeed is that they just don't stop. Like when everybody else is ready to give up, you just keep going.

[52:31] Anoushka Lucas: I think um I read this extraordinary interview a few years ago between Kay Tempest and Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. I've got it like pinned on a board at home, which Phoebe Waller-Bridge was like, Well, what do you think is the difference between a writer and someone who thinks they can be a writer? And Kay Tempest said something like, I'm paraphrasing badly, and you know, presumably maybe they would have updated their viewpoint in the last seven years. But at that point, they said, you know, lots of people could write a book, and lots of people have stories inside of them that they should tell. Um, as far as I can tell, the difference between a writer and someone who thinks they could be a writer is that they'll sit down and start writing, and at a certain point, it will become really apparent to all of those people that what they're writing is shit, and it's really shit, and they hate themselves and they can't do the thing that they wanted to do.

[53:18] Anoushka Lucas: And they're like, Oh my god, I had this amazing idea, and now I've ruined it with my own shit brain and my own shit hands and this shit laptop. And she was like, and then 90% of people will quit. And writers, inexplicably, will keep writing even when it's shit and finish it, and that is what makes a writer.

[53:37] Anoushka Lucas: It's like, and I was like, Yeah, that's it, you just keep going when it's shit. Like it's not like a big secret, but it's also, you know, full circle back to intentionality. It's also like it's like it's a privilege as well to be like, you know, I know people who are not professionally creative, who are some of the most talented people I know who couldn't make a living from it, whether they're writers or actors or musicians, who at a certain point, you know, as you grow up, they were like, Well, I'm broke and I'm miserable, and I want to go on holiday, and I want to have a child, and I want to like buy a house and I want to pay for a wedding, and so they found something else to make money from, and you're like, So it's not always like just keep going and it'll be fine. Like, like but it it is also true that.

[54:32] Alan Seales: All right, one more quick break. Hang on a second. All right. Here's the rest of the episode.

[54:38] Anoushka Lucas: I remember this is the last thing I'll say. I had a music manager when I was 24, and she said this thing to me that like always stuck in my brain where she was like, just keep going, Anoushka, because it's basically the secret to the creative success is perseverance. And I was like, Yeah, I know everyone says you should keep going. She's like, no, no, no. It's like maths. And she's like, because the longer you go, two things will become true. The longer you go, the more other people will drop out, and the better you will become at what you are doing. So eventually you'll be in competition with fewer people, and you will be really good at what you're doing. I like that. Yeah, it's really good. And it's proven to be true, you know. So that's cool. That's very cool. That's very cool.

[55:21] Heather Vickery: Okay. So there are um three questions that on my solo podcast I ask to wrap up every episode. The first one, just very simply, is what motivates you.

[55:31] Anoushka Lucas: Um honestly I'm gonna say joy. Like, I find creative processes, processes deeply intellectually, they're like the only thing that are simultaneously intellectually and emotionally satisfying. And to be with a group of people trying to work out how to make something good or something beautiful or something meaningful is very joyful, and it's a source of huge joy and meaning for me. And I think I'm mostly motivated by like having a good time at work.

[56:04] Heather Vickery: I mean, if you're having a good time, it's not work.

[56:06] Anoushka Lucas: Yeah, for that. I'm here for joy. I'm really I'm really motivated by joy. What's the next question?

[56:14] Heather Vickery: The next question is what advice would you give to your younger self and younger people listening now starting out down a similar path?

[56:20] Anoushka Lucas: A bunch of things. Number one, if you are really at the beginning of making art your life in any form, find a side hustle that pays you well and leaves you enough energy to do the thing you want to do. And do not put all of the financial pressure of your life on the art that you were trying to make. Because a lot of the people I know who had to potentially recalibrate what they were doing as they got older refused to fund themselves properly through other avenues. So if you need to be a nanny or a tutor or a waitress or a dog walker, or I'm listing all the jobs I've had, or a shopkeeper or a barmaid, or like whatever it is, find the thing that means that you don't need to get that job to pay your rent because then you also will end the audition with a better energy than if you'd need the job to pay your rent.

[57:16] Heather Vickery: Absolutely.

[57:17] Anoushka Lucas: Number two would be um look for the people. Look for the people that you resonate with and that you like, that you admire their work, or that you have the same sense of humor, or you like their music, or you love their plays, and you know, if they are Lynn Manuel Miranda, you probably cannot become friends with them. But if they are like some random person, make friends with them. Or if they're just someone who's 10 years ahead of you and you really like their work, go and see every single thing that they make and in and ingest all of it. And like I really believe that theatre and music and film are all about relationships. So find the people that you want to make art with or copy. It's a compliment, right?

Like, yeah, I mean, don't steal it word for word. Plagiarism bad. I think the best, all my favorite cultural experiences, and the ones that the best compliment that anyone ever gave me after my show that I had on last year was, oh, your show made me want to go home and write. And I was like, that is amazing. Because my favorite gigs and my favorite plays and my favorite films. I've like sat there and felt this buzz where I'm like, I want to go and make something, and this has made me want to make something, and that's like the best thing a piece of art can do.

[58:38] Heather Vickery: Alright, final question now. This is the hardest one. If you could only see one show for the rest of your life, but you can see it as many times as you want. What would you see?

[58:45] Anoushka Lucas: A musical. Anything show. That's why this is the hardest one. Oh wow, what a great question. Would I be seeing the same production every time?

[58:56] Heather Vickery: Yep, the exact same show.

[58:57] Anoushka Lucas: You're stuck on a desert island with strangely a solar-powered plug and a DVD player and a TV. I don't know if I can answer that question. I'm just thinking of how hellish it would be to have to watch the same thing over and over again when basically the main thing that stimulates me is variety.

[59:26] Anoushka Lucas: Like the the movie version or a recording of like an original the original movie version. If I'm really honest, I think it would actually be a Shakespeare or an Arthur Miller. Because they're so there's so there's so much to discover in them over and over again, and their depth is I'm having so much fun rehearsing the crucible, and it's so well written. It's like all the information is in the script, but there's always new information. And also it's so joyful when you're like, Oh, I've I've got this part now, and some amazing people have done this part before, but this part can be done in nine million ways, and I don't feel like constrained. I currently have like a huge crush on Arthur Miller, which is something I'm working through in my own private time.

[1:00:17] Anoushka Lucas: Yeah, and I'd like to have a really serious conversation with my girlfriend about it and be like, I have like really fixated on Arthur Miller as like a hot guy because he's so ethical and also like politically, he's so good at writing in a way that is like dramaturgically phenomenal whilst also being politically progressive, and he writes great women and he had those glasses, and he went out with Marilyn, and I was like, I just feel like if I met him, I would have probably had a showmance with him. So it reminds me of the scene from Love Actually, where Emma Thompson talks about her relationship with Joni Mitchell, yes, thank you. I was like, all of a sudden, I am having a similar relationship with Arthur Miller, and that's been the backdrop to this whole conversation. I'm gonna bring up and just think about him and be like, I wonder what Arthur Miller would have for dinner.

[1:01:10] Heather Vickery: Well, speaking of dinner, and you probably want to go off and have yours and have you know your intimate evening with Arthur Miller? Thanks. This has been really, really great. Can you tell folks how they can discover you, follow along on your journey?

[1:01:25] Anoushka Lucas: If they're nearby, come see the crucible. Like, like yeah. How can we be up to date? Well, my name is Anoushka Lucas, and I have Instagram and I'm Anoushka Lucas Music. Um, and that's the only one I have because I'm a very addictive person and that takes enough time. And I also have a website which is Anoushkalucas.com, but I am responsible for updating that. And I only do it when my mother texts me to remind me that I haven't updated it. So Instagram is better. And I'm in the Crucible at a theater called The Crucible in Sheffield. Uh and we open on the second of March. Well maybe well, press night is the 7th of March. And you.me is on everywhere on the internet forever on the 21st of February. It is really, really good.

[1:02:12] Heather Vickery: Well, thank you.

[1:02:13] Anoushka Lucas: Thank you. Thank you so much. This has been a pleasure to talk to you and to and to discover your secret love affair with Arthur Miller.

[1:02:21] Heather Vickery: Thanks. It was a weird note to end on, but I stand by it.

[1:02:23] Anoushka Lucas: It was pretty great.

[1:02:25] Heather Vickery: It was pretty great.

[1:02:26] Anoushka Lucas: Have a lovely afternoon, guys.

[1:02:31] Alan Seales: I love her. She's very cool. I want to find our a local queer bar and just talk to her about whatever for Arthur Miller. She's a de I can feel, she's a very deep thinker, deep feeler. Um, keep all of those dirty dad thoughts to yourself. It's inappropriate.

[1:02:46] Heather Vickery: I was not thinking anything.

[1:02:48] Alan Seales: You're the dirty one.

[1:02:49] Heather Vickery: You were the dirty one.

[1:02:50] Alan Seales: Y'all know that, right? You listen enough that you know he was.

[1:02:54] Heather Vickery: Anyway, um, I just think it's really cool. I love, I love she's gotta be a manifesting generator. I didn't want to ask her about human design, but all of the different interests and things and exploring and trying and saying yes, and I appreciate uh her perspective on everything. I don't feel old until I talk to people who aren't old. And she is she thinks she thinks she's old, but she's No, she's not.

[1:03:20] Alan Seales: She's not.

[1:03:21] Heather Vickery: Um, and I I really, really love that um, you know, she comes from this this generation uh of people who talk about their feelings and who want to express themselves fully in, you know, she was like, I didn't have a boyfriend and I'm a girlfriend. I just, you know, it just like I didn't have a partner, right? It it is what it is. And I I love that along with accompanying with, and all joking aside, coming from a different culture, uh, we we are isolated a lot in who we talk about on the podcast here because it's mostly Americans and their their background, their history in the American creative environment. And that's different in other countries. It has to be.

[1:04:00] Alan Seales: Absolutely different.

[1:04:02] Heather Vickery: I I don't know. I think like I said, I want to sit and have a nice long conversation because it's so fascinating to when she said it several times to grow up as a middle class brown girl, but with that deep, deep arts background, that deep arts appreciation, which I don't know is standard across the board for middle class people in general anywhere, because there's not so much access if you don't have parents who are interested in it. You don't know about it. You don't learn about it unless you have a teacher or a mentor or somebody who introduces you to the work. So, you know, it's cool. Uh she's got such a a good perspective. She did such a lovely rendition of Shut the Fuck Up Alan. It was a little short. I think you cut her off. I wish we could have gone a little longer.

[1:04:47] Alan Seales: Listen, um, it she she was going with her gut, you know. It just she got straight to the point. I can appreciate that.

[1:04:53] Heather Vickery: She did. She did. It was very good. Very good.

[1:04:57] Alan Seales: Um, hey folks. We maybe Alan can maybe make this sound better when he edits it. The whole thing. No, we really are super glad that you are listening to the podcast. We work really hard. We're really proud of it. And if you liked it, and we hope that you did, we want you to tell your friends about it, share it, go to your favorite podcast listening app and follow, subscribe, whatever that button's called for you, and write us a review. We really love to see those reviews. They make us feel really proud of all the work we're putting into it. And Alan, will you tell folks how they can reach out to us and follow us and if they want to connect?

[1:05:35] Alan Seales: I can't wait. I will do that right now. Yes, reach out in your favorite mail browser. Was it chance at gmail? No, it's the podcast. Was it chance podcast? Reach out using your favorite email browser, was it chance podcast at gmail.com on your favorite social media called Instagram at Wasitchance. On your other favorite social media called Threads, also at Was It Chance. And on YouTube, find us on YouTube. We wanna get that custom domain. We need more subscribers. Hey, thanks for being here. You have been listening to Was It Chance. I'm Heather Vickery.

[1:06:13] Alan Seales: And I'm Alan Seales.

[1:06:14] Heather Vickery: You have to say the podcast about embracing opportunity.

[1:06:19] Alan Seales: Oh, it doesn't matter.

[1:06:23] Heather Vickery: Taking it embracing opportunity and taking intentional risk for your creative life.

[1:06:30] Alan Seales: I need to go back to that.

[1:06:31] Heather Vickery: I'm Heather Vickery.

[1:06:33] Alan Seales: And I'm Alan Seales.

[1:06:16] Heather Vickery: Bye.