Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In August 2013, producer Francesca Moody found herself in a dank cellar at the Edinburgh Fringe for the first night of a one-woman show by an unknown writer. They’d had a three-hour technical rehearsal in the middle of the night, the actress was still learning the script on the journey up — despite having written it — and proceeded to forget a whole chunk mid-performance. Which might not have mattered, except that Moody had invited the national press.“We were all young and we didn’t know,” she says now, grinning. “You only get better by making mistakes.”That show was Fleabag. It would go on to travel the world, win multiple awards, become a TV hit and make a star of actress and writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge. It would also confirm for Moody exactly what she wanted to do with her life. We’re sitting in the office of Francesca Moody Productions — a buzzy, brightly coloured space in the heart of the West End. She’s now one of the theatre industry’s most dynamic young producers, with a string of successful, slightly off-the-wall shows to her name — Baby Reindeer, An Oak Tree and Kathy and Stella Solve a Murder! among them — along with co-producing bigger hits such as Rebecca Frecknall’s A Streetcar Named Desire and the New York staging of A Doll’s House starring Jessica Chastain.To anyone outside the business, producing looks like a nerve-racking profession: finding projects, funding them, getting them on to the stage. Moody says you have to trust your gut. “You have to really love what you’re working on,” she says. “I’m always looking for things that are from an original point of view. And it has to be funny. I can’t imagine producing plays that don’t have a comic edge to them: I think comedy invites an audience in.”The latest of her maverick finds certainly tests that hypothesis. Weather Girl, about to play London’s Soho Theatre, is a darkly comic monologue in which Stacey, a Californian weather presenter, struggles to keep a lid on her rising panic about the state of the climate. As wildfires scythe through California, her sunny disposition goes into meltdown. A tough subject, yet it won widespread praise at its Edinburgh Fringe debut last year. “Forecasting the apocalypse has never been this entertaining,” wrote one critic.“I would say Weather Girl is Don’t Look Up [Adam McKay’s 2021 satirical film about impending doom] but for the stage,” says Moody. Given the recent wildfires in Los Angeles, the show has only gained in grim topicality. And its arrival in London means that both Soho Theatre and Soho Place Theatre — five minutes’ walk apart — will be showing innovative drama about climate change (Kyoto is playing Soho Place). For Moody, that feels significant.“This is the most important play we will produce for a while,” she says. “It’s really about now and it feels more relevant now because of everything that happened this year. But it’s also very funny and there is hope in it. Brian [Watkins], who wrote it, and Julia [McDermott], who performs it, are from LA. So it’s very much a love letter to their home.”Moody is a vivid, sparky presence, with her lime-green blouse and trainers, and around us there is a hum of activity. This is a building packed with theatre producers: Eleanor Lloyd Productions and Jamie Wilson next door, Wessex Grove and Playful Productions on the floors below. Between them they’ve shepherded many West End hits into place. Does that foster any competition? Any eavesdropping in the lift?Moody gives a huge laugh. “Our office used to be on the first floor and the walls were paper thin,” she says. “There were no secrets . . . But we’re all very distinct from one another. I don’t feel any rivalry. Especially from the women. It has been a boys’ club for a long time, with the exception of people like Sonia [Friedman], Nica [Burns] and Caro [Newling]. I think we all feel quite passionate about holding each other up, to be honest.”Moody herself trained to be an actor and fell into producing almost by accident, when a friend asked her to work with him on a project at the Edinburgh Fringe. She realised that her priorities had shifted when she began to resent auditions for taking up producing time. And the Edinburgh Fringe is, in a sense, her alma mater — it’s where she learnt the nitty-gritty of making theatre.“There’s something about producing in Edinburgh that allows you to get your hands dirty and do all the things. I’ve stage-managed shows, I’ve painted sets, I’ve built things, I’ve driven vans, I’ve flyered . . . You make loads of mistakes when you’re starting out and that’s good. People shouldn’t be afraid of making mistakes. You’ve got to be strong and wrong to work out how to be right.”Indeed, she’s such a passionate champion of the Fringe, that in August 2020, when the pandemic halted live performance, she teamed up with Scottish writer Gary McNair to produce the Shedinburgh Fringe Festival: a packed programme of acts live-streamed from performers’ garden sheds. This highly eccentric project arose from a throwaway remark made by McNair, but at its core was a firm belief in creating a showcase for emerging artists.There are high hopes for a Shedinburgh return. But what of the Fringe itself? Can it still perform that critical function when accommodation prices alone can be crippling?“It is eye-watering,” agrees Moody. “I think it’s incumbent on producers like FMP, who have had some success at the Fringe, to work out how we can create pathways for people — whether that’s about creating schemes for more emerging talent or investing in earlier career artists.”Access and affordability are rumbling concerns for UK theatre. Another growing issue is the rise in prices, particularly in the West End, with some top price tickets hitting hundreds of pounds. Moody suggests that theatre producers have a responsibility to “bake in” schemes for accessible prices across the board. “The challenge is whether we can make sure that the accessible prices are available to people who actually need that price point.”Weather Girl will run a weekly lottery and release £25 standing tickets daily from March 3. And Moody adds that the health of the theatre industry, its ability to experiment and find new audiences, has a much wider impact. She has just announced a first-look deal with Well Streets Films (Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s production company), opening a possible pathway for shows to progress from stage to screen — as Fleabag did. But the key to the success of a show like that, she says, is its origin in theatre.“The best way to tell a story first is through theatre. There are fewer voices, there’s less noise, the writer really is king or queen. Fleabag and Baby Reindeer — those shows would not have been commissioned as TV shows if they hadn’t been theatre shows first. The ideas are too strange, wacky, out there.“People say we want the next Fleabag or Baby Reindeer — the truth is, you don’t want those things, you want the thing that we don’t know exists yet. And the theatre is where that comes from.”‘Weather Girl’, Soho Theatre, London, Mar 5-Apr 5, sohotheatre.com; ‘An Oak Tree’, Young Vic, London, May 6-17, youngvic.org
