Playwright Amber Charlie Conroy spoke to David Hennessy about her play Clean Slate, one of the hits of last year’s Edinburgh, ahead of it coming to London.
Amber Charlie Conroy and Louisa Marshall’s five-star smash hit Edinburgh Fringe show Clean Slate comes to Pleasance London this month.
Clean Slate is described as a darkly funny, highly interactive solo show that makes you part of the problem.
A woman’s domestic life crumbles as she is pushed to the breaking point by her boyfriend’s relentless domestic incompetence… and you’ve been cast as the boyfriend. She navigates the full weight of cooking, cleaning, planning and hosting while questioning how much more she can take.
Amber Charlie Conroy, who has been featured in The Irish World for her previous work Gogo Boots Go, took time to tell us about Clean Slate.
Originally from Dun Laoghaire, Amber came to Bristol to study theatre and has recently moved to London.
How did Clean Slate come about?
“Within my degree my final performance project, you could do anything and it was the most freedom we’d been given on the course so myself and Louisa Marshall were like, ‘Let’s meet up’.
“We had to do it in May and we were like, ‘Let’s meet up in March and come up with an idea and commit to it and then we’ll just bash it out, we’ll write it, we’ll do it. It’ll be great’.
“So we basically did exactly that and then we came up with the first 20 minutes of what’s now Clean Slate.
“It was very different to anything I’d made before.
“It’s very interactive and it’s got an overt message to it.
“I was very excited because it felt like a whole new discovery of a way of working.
“Then Louisa went off to Japan and I stayed in Bristol and we FaceTimed for many, many months whilst we developed the show and applied for funding and got our fringe plan together.
“And then the rest is history.”
What was it about the subject matter? What made you want to tackle a domestic story like this?
“I think it honestly started with me and Louisa being like, ‘We want to make something that we love and that we’re proud of and that we would want to watch’.
“We wanted to do something that was intense and funny and packed a punch and so we just sat with a bottle of wine and started exchanging stories of what we thought was funny, what made us angry, all of these different things.
“And then it seemed like there was suddenly a through line and it was stories about living with male flatmates at university or the fact that someone didn’t know that you have to put a bin liner in the bin.
“Suddenly we kept being like, ‘Oh, and then this, and then this’.
“And then that felt like a really ripe foundation to make a show out of.
“I had read previously about weaponised incompetence as a phenomenon and I was really interested in that and I think with the Irish angle it’s interesting because there’s nothing about Clean Slate that is consciously inspired by Irishness but I do think it’s broadly rooted in conversations about domestic inequality and gendered labour and whatever else.
“Growing up in Ireland there are dynamics that are culturally familiar like the Irish mammy trope, the idea that women hold everything together silently and stoically and also our propensity as a nation to excuse really poor male behaviour.
“I think there was a lot that I found really interesting, theatrically exciting but also a lot that made me really angry and that was an exciting starting point.”
It’s kind of amazing that it is still a thing that strikes two young women of your generation. I mean it is 2026..
“Yeah, it’s wild.
“A lot of people have said to us, ‘God, I didn’t think your generation would be dealing with this’, or ‘I didn’t think you’d know about this in this day and age’.
“This is the thing.
“This is the point.
“The statistics are there.
“You can look at a multitude of different research papers or journals.
“There’s lots where the proof is in the pudding of what the difference is for women and men, in couples or not, in the domestic sphere and the hours of unpaid labour and the difference in effects to their personal, mental and professional wellbeings and it’s like we just accept it still.”
But are you finding people of all generations relating to it?
“Yeah, I think there’s a mix.
“I mean the reactions to the show are more than I ever could have dreamed of.
“It feels incredibly gratifying to get such a spectrum of reactions from people.
“People have come out in tears feeling very moved, very emotional.
“Other people are in fits of hysterics for the entire show and then other people are really furious and they come out and they want to talk to us straight away about this issue that’s still going on.
“That’s brilliant it’s created such a variety of reactions and also across the board, all genders and all ages people are really viscerally responding to it.
“Because Clean State is a performances research project it’s a fictional story and character that we’ve created all based on research and articles and scholarships that we’ve read and studied so the play is based in fact which means that people are really seeing their experience.”
Is it the case that the pile of dishes in the sink come to represent other things because it’s about more than the plates that need to be washed and more about they represent, isn’t it?
“It’s very darkly comedic and it’s intense and it’s funny, and it’s theatrical.
“It’s about a woman being pushed to the edge by an ever ending, growing pile of washing up.
“But, exactly as you said, that’s what it is on the surface but it’s really speaking about care and respect and love and your attitudes, your attitudes to sharing a space with someone, living with someone, being in a relationship with someone.
“It’s the expectations.
“The difference in expectations between men and women in terms of domestic work is really crazy and the reason it’s so crazy is because of what it conveys.
“I think care and respect are pretty big words.
“I would say that it feels like that’s what the subtext is.
“It’s like you value someone so little compared to yourself that you think it is their responsibility to do the washing and the cooking and the cleaning and the planning and those five things are half of what life is.
“It’s also interesting when these things are domestic, they’re considered unpaid work for women.
“When they’re professional, they’re considered high achieving jobs for men.
“Women are left to cook in the kitchen.
“The majority of chefs are male.
“It’s just the domestic sphere and the way in which women are still entrapped in it without any acknowledgement of the fact that domestic labour is labour, it is work.
“It felt so crazy how much that still is not acknowledged anywhere formally.”
And it is a different thing altogether when the man has a DIY job to do..
“Yeah, that’s a whole section of the show.
“You can’t just not make dinner but the bin shed gate, ‘Oh sure, it’s fine. I’ll do it later’.
“And that just goes on.
“So we actually have the audience say that line again and again and again throughout the play.
“They have to keep saying, ‘No, it’s fine. I’ll do it later’.”
Audience participation is part of the show in that way: The audience becomes the useless boyfriend..
“Basically by buying a ticket, by coming and taking your seat, you are agreeing to embody this character and because that’s the structure of the show, that makes it very original and exciting.
“It’s easy to say we’re making our audience complicit but that also can be very lazy how you actually do that.
“I think that is where you need to be imaginative to also make sure that your audiences feel safe and that they feel entertained so by positioning them as the boyfriend, it means the interaction is such an interesting thing because it’s terrifying but it’s also super fun and it means that you’re in on the joke but you’re also making the more serious point of the show with the performer.
“Creating that as the structure and that as the form is kind of the way in which we were like, ‘We’re going to make it very clear that this is all of our fault but we’re going to make it very fun for you to do that’.”
Did the idea of doing it that way come early in the process?
“I think Louisa and I spent just so much time in a room together bouncing what was largely many terrible ideas off each other and just brainstorming to try to find the penny drop of how we evoked the feeling that we were trying to get from the audience.
“I think it was honestly just that one day we were like, ‘What if we just made the audience do that bit?’
“And then as soon as we did that once, it was like domino effect.
“It’s addictive because you suddenly realise you can make your audience do anything.
“They don’t have to but you can ask them to do anything.”
Unlike Gogo Boots Go we won’t see you on stage this time as the show is performed by Louisa..
“I am very, very, very happy to be in the directing role and I do not belong on stage.
“I find it absolutely terrifying and I’m much happier being in the tech desk watching the show from afar.
“It was a rehearsal process like no other I’ve had because obviously when you’re doing a one on one show, it’s entirely different.
“My job is really playing the audience so it’s thinking about making sure that they’re entertained, making sure that they’re safe, trying to find things that are as inventive as possible and keeping it fresh and keeping it spontaneous but it’s also just me running around like a headless chicken for hours being all of the different boyfriends.”
It has recently been announced that you are the recipient of Summerhall residency for 2026, you must be delighted..
“Yeah, I’m so excited.
“It feels surreal and I’m just insanely grateful and I hope that they don’t suddenly realise that they’ve got the wrong person.
“I’m writing a new play for Summerhall in May which will be on at Fringe 2027.
“It’s still very, very early conceptual stages but it’s the first play that I’m going to be the sole author of.
“Everything that I’ve done I have co-written or co-created so that’s a pretty huge step which is absolutely terrifying but exciting.
“It’s called Baby Play.
“Baby Play follows a couple whose erotic life unravels when they try to conceive exploring how desire, power, biology and gender collide inside a relationship.
“Baby Play asks whether procreation can ever truly be equal when biology itself asserts a power dynamic which neither can escape.”
It sounds like it is another domestic story. Is it these kind of stories of differences between the genders that interest you?
“Gender, food and sex are the three things that seem to be the through lines in everything that I write and that I’m drawn to which is interesting.
“I would say all three of those things are endlessly fascinating.
“The gender and sex side of things, there’s different reasons for that.
“I think the food side, in terms of that being a device I come back to so much, is really interesting because I think a lot of Irish of Irish writers do.
“I was talking to Karis Kelly, who’s the writer of Consumed.
“Obviously Consumed really directly looks at these Irish characters’ relationship to food and generational trauma.
“I am definitely not writing about anything like that as directly but I do think it’s interesting that we both centre food so much.
“I’m not trying to interrogate the long standing effects of the famine but I do think it’s interesting how much food sits in our cultural psyche.
“When your national trauma is starvation, food isn’t neutral.
“It’s very weighted and I’m not consciously trying to unpick that or interrogate that but I do think it lingers.
“I use food a lot and I just think the fact that me and Karis were just talking about that was quite interesting from an Irish perspective.”
Of course you and Karis were both at the fringe last year, how was your experience of taking Clean Slate to last year’s Fringe?
“It was amazing.
“It was an experience.
“We were a tiny team and for most of fringe, it was just myself and Louisa.
“We don’t have stage managers and loads of producers and whatnot.
“I’ve been going to fringe and making work for years and Clean Slate was definitely the most successful run of a show I’ve had.
“For me to be able to have your work really acknowledged and validated properly for the first time was huge.
“And to win awards or to be shortlisted for things, to even sell out the run, all of that was just massive.
“It was that kind of moment of, ‘This is what I’ve been working so hard for for five years’.
“It felt like one of those moments of like, ‘F**k, we got something right’.
“And that felt really nice.
“I think also because me and Louisa believed in this play so much, and it’s risky, an entirely interactive show about an intense subject matter, we kind of said, ‘Let’s throw everything at the wall and leave it all sticking there and see how people respond’.
“And it worked so it was amazing, definitely overwhelming because there was a couple days where we got five stars from The Scotsman and then we got this award.”
Clean Slate has been described as having Sharon Horgan’s biting humour, was she an inspiration?
“Sharon Horgan I absolutely love.
“I think she is so brilliant and I would really like to have a career like her and write like she does.
“And I think Sharon Horgan particularly the line between light and dark and crying and laughing and so serious therefore so funny is the thing that Irish writers are brilliant at and is the thing that I always aspire to is constantly like, ‘How far can you go with treading that line between drama and comedy?”
Another name that came up in a review was Phoebe Waller- Bridge, another comparison I am sure you would be happy with..
“Again dream woman, dream person, dream career.
“Phoebe Waller- Bridge is like the messiah of fringe and comedy.
“People flog a dead horse when it comes to comparing one person shows and particularly one woman shows to Fleabag.
“That comparison, I think, is exhausting for a lot of people making solo work but it was a global phenomenon that show and that character and what she did and she invented the messy millennial woman trope.
“It just was the first time that a female character was so angry and so flawed and so overtly sexual and morally corrupt in the most brilliant way, was just there unapologetically.
“And I think Phoebe ran so that we could all walk and I am indebted to her as an artist.”
Clean Slate is at the Pleasance London 11- 14 March. For more information and to book, click here.
