Guest Blog: Writer and Actor Jessica Regan on Starting Over, Rental Issues and Uncertainty in Her One-Woman Show 16 POSTCODES

16 Postcodes had a very long gestation period and a sudden sort of birth. I had been playing around with short form monologues, writing a few here and there but the concept really coalesced on the six mile walks I would take in Walthamstow looping around the River Lea during the pandemic when there was little else to do but think and walk.

Totting up all my addresses over the years and arriving at 16, I had a title and a format in a way. What if I did 16 monologues? In an hour?? FUN, RIGHT? I put my ideas to someone who knew what they were doing. The terrific actor/writer (and former flatmate, postcode #10) Milly Thomas gave me a single note: do not under any circumstances do all 16 monologues. The audience will count down, no matter how good a time they are having. Find a format that keeps them guessing and in the moment with you.

So often in my life in London, I have never known where I will move to next. What if I made uncertainty not a bug but a feature of the show? I enlisted trusted collaborators I had amassed over several jobs such as the extraordinary movement director Ira Mandela Siobhan (BFG, RSC; Arcadia, The Old Vic) and comedian Sean Burke who expanded my tool kit, provided inspiration and gave clear pragmatic feedback. There really is no such thing as a solo show, folks.

We trialled our concept in numerous works-in-progress. WIP audiences gleefully connected with bad landlords, relationship breakdowns, rodent infestations and last-minute reprieves. I had long wanted to explore straight-up storytelling in The Irish Tradition as well as stand-up comedy.

Having been lucky enough to do my fair share of classical theatre I was excited to break the fourth wall and address the audience directly for a change. Rehearsals with supportive friends in a variety of repurposed office spaces allowed me to weave these elements together and for the show to become its own entity but there was one glaring problem:  I didn’t have an ending.

I went away on a writing holiday of sorts to crack it in April 2024. On the third morning I woke to a text from my landlord of six years, my longest period of residency since moving to London in 2004. He was selling up and I and my fellow freelance flatmate who had become like family and weathered the pandemic with me, would have to move out. I got my ending alright, just not the one I wanted.

But these events imbued my play with more relevance and urgency. What I thought would be the staging of a series of anecdotes that I’d hoped would delight and amuse became a mission to chronicle Generation Rent through my lived experience. What does it mean to start over, over and over? What does that do your psyche? Is it freeing or infantilising, never putting down deep roots? And the question I had been afraid to look in the eye: can I really keep living here, like this?

18 months on from my show’s first full-length performances and I find I am still asking those questions. I’m not sure how much the Renters’ Rights bill would have protected me from the ending I didn’t ask for as if a landlord wants to sell that is of course their prerogative. I hope 16 Postcodes will engender more understanding of what tenants face in terms of uncertainty and precarity and what artists and freelancers experience in pursuit of their chosen profession.

I hope the show remains for all these issues highlighted, the passionate, committed declaration of love and fealty to a city that doesn’t always love me back but that I can’t quit. Yet, anyway.

16 Postcodes is at the King's Head Theatre from 25 February - 8 March