Guest Blog: 'How Do You Accept What You Have Done?': Writer Katherine Moar on Truth and Fiction in Her New Play RAGDOLL

My play Ragdoll takes place across two timelines. In 1978, a young American heiress is put on trial for her role in an armed bank robbery that has captivated the nation. In 2017, a disgraced celebrity lawyer calls upon a former client to help him redeem his reputation. The former really happened. The latter did not.

As the old adage goes, truth is stranger than fiction. I have consistently found this to be true. My first play Farm Hall was based on the recorded conversations of a group of German nuclear scientists held in a stately home in Cambridgeshire by the British Secret Service near the end of the Second World War. The Secret Service only retained the transcripts of those exchanges that they thought were important at the time – those in which the scientists discussed the Nazi project to build an atomic bomb, for example – and so I freely imagined some of the inner conversations the scientists might have had. Still, the central premise of Farm Hall, the main events, and the characters themselves were all true.

With Ragdoll, however, I wanted to both have my cake and eat it too. I originally anticipated that Ragdoll would be a pretty straightforward history play about the American defense attorney F. Lee Bailey. I drafted a couple of scenes depicting Bailey and some of his most infamous clients including Albert De Salvo (the Boston Strangler) and OJ Simpson, but nothing about these scenes seemed particularly exciting to me. It was only when I wrote what would become the very first scene of the play – an imagined reunion between Bailey and another former client Patty Hearst – that I thought I might be onto something.

The scion of an iconic, wealthy family, at nineteen Hearst was kidnapped out of her apartment by a left-wing terrorist group called the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was locked in a closet for several weeks and raped. When eventually given the choice to leave or remain with her captors, Hearst chose to stay. She was later captured on CCTV robbing the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco alongside the other members of the SLA.

After almost two years on the run, Hearst was finally apprehended by the FBI and put on trial for her role in the bank robbery. Bailey’s defense of Patty Hearst was a famous catastrophe. Despite the kidnapping, despite her imprisonment and rape, the jury remained unconvinced that she had not been a willing participant in the crime. She was convicted.

The facts of the Patty Hearst case are remarkable. I certainly hope that the audience comes away with an appreciation for this shocking and bizarre episode in history. Yet, Ragdoll is not history. I borrow liberally from Hearst and Bailey’s biography and the play is populated with references to the real-life personalities who circled this story: John Wayne, Charles Manson, and Bill Clinton (to name a few).

At its heart, however, Ragdoll is about two characters – not Patty and Francis Lee, but Holly and Robert. It is about their relationship with each other and, ultimately, their relationship with themselves. It asks: How do you accept what you have done? And what you might become.

Read our review of Ragdoll here.

Ragdoll runs at Jermyn Street Theatre until 15 November.