It Wasn't Like That at Lion & Unicorn Theatre

Written & Produced by: Katherine Tempany

Performed by: Zandalee Clarke

She has told this story for fifteen years. Tonight, she is not sure she believes herself.

It Wasn’t Like That is a razor-sharp, darkly funny one-woman play about sex, power, memory, and how some stories change in the telling.

Fifteen years after leaving a London marketing office, Alex sits at a cafe table and addresses the audience as if they are an old colleague who was there when it happened. Using the surviving text messages as evidence, defence and confession, she revisits her relationship with Julian: older, married, the CEO, and the kind of man who should never have made a twenty-year-old junior employee feel quite so chosen.

What follows is a forensic journey through work drinks, hotel rooms, blurred boundaries and the dangerous intimacy of being seen by someone with far more power than you.

Alex is determined to prove it was mutual. Consensual. Complicated. Fine. But as she replays the same facts out loud, certainty begins to fracture.

Funny, intimate and quietly devastating, It Wasn’t Like That asks where desire ends, power begins, and what it costs to finally see yourself from the outside.