Ahead of the world premiere of The Farmer's Wife at Theatre by the Lake, playwright Hannah Khalil talks to Andrew Palmer about writing three generations of Cumbrian farming women into being.

When Theatre by the Lake asked Hannah Khalil whether she might make a stage version of Helen Rebanks' The Farmer's Wife, her first instinct was to say no. Not because the book didn't move her – it clearly had – but because she wasn't sure the story was hers to tell. It took her husband, of all people, to talk her round. 'You come from farming on both sides,' he told her. Her mother's people and her father's, an Irish farm and a Palestinian one, are about as far apart as two farms can be and still share a name. Once she started thinking about the matriarchs in her own family and the women in Cumbria she'd go on to meet, the reluctance fell away. What replaced it was something closer to recognition.

That distinction matters more than it might first appear, because the play that has emerged – a world premiere opening at Theatre by the Lake this autumn, staged in the round with an all-female-led creative team and a cast of three actresses – is not, Khalil is at pains to clarify, an adaptation.

"It's a play that's inspired by her," she says of Helen Rebanks. "So, Helen isn't a character in the play." When the two women first met, they agreed on the shape of the thing together: Khalil would take the themes and the ideas of the memoir, but she would also go out and meet, as she puts it, "loads and loads and loads of other women in farming." - interviewing them, gathering their voices, building something plural rather than singular. Helen, she says, was enthusiastic about that from the start.

What follows, over the course of a conversation that is warm, unhurried and entirely without ego, is the portrait of a writer who treats collaboration as a genuine act of trust rather than a courtesy extended to a source. Helen has read every draft. She has given notes throughout. And her expertise – the granular, lived detail of a farming life that Khalil, for all her own familial ties to the land, doesn't claim to match – has shaped the play at every turn. "Her eye on that has been absolutely invaluable," Khalil says. "She's been a lovely person to collaborate with. She's great."

The women who inspired it

It was in the interviews, rather than the memoir alone, that Khalil found the note she wanted the whole play to strike. She talks about Helen's own bravery in writing her book – even the title, The Farmer's Wife, she points out, is a provocative one, given how widely women's work on a farm actually ranges. But what struck her hardest, talking to women across Cumbria, was not hardship. It was invention.

"A lot of the women I spoke to were really entrepreneurial and very adaptable and able to think about ways of making the farm work," she says. One family had started keeping goats, making their own cheese and milk. "I found that really inspiring. Often when you read the headlines about farming, it can feel a bit depressing – but I felt incredibly inspired by these women and their ability to be creative and forward-looking and adaptable."

Three women, one day

The finished play follows a grandmother, a mother and a daughter over a single day on a working Cumbrian farm – a structure Khalil arrived at early, and for reasons that are as much about engineering as theme. Three generations let her hold up the idea of legacy, so central to any conversation about farming, and examine what it looks like from each end of a life. But it's the compression into one day that gives the play its pulse.

"Having a day gives a sort of clock to the proceedings," she explains. "We're preparing through the day for an event that's happening later on – we don't know at the beginning what that event is, but we know it's important. Our characters keep getting interrupted in their task to prepare for it by farm life, by things that need to happen." It is, she says simply, "quite a good engine to drive the play along."

There's a lovely piece of alchemy buried in how the play begins. Reading Helen's memoir, one passage leapt off the page at her – a stream-of-consciousness list of all the jobs still waiting to be done. "I said to myself, I'm having that.' That's definitely got to live in the play." For a long time, she wasn't sure what form it should take – a song, a monologue, or something else entirely. It became a monologue and quickly turned into her anchor for the whole piece. The play now opens with it: the only words in The Farmer's Wife that are entirely Helen's own, before the audience is carried into the story Khalil imagined around her.

A decade on from A Shepherd's Life
Ten years ago, Theatre by the Lake premiered A Shepherd's Life, adapted from James Rebanks' bestselling memoir of Cumbrian hill farming. The Farmer's Wife, drawn from the memoir of his wife Helen, arrives as a kind of companion piece – though Khalil is emphatic it isn't a reply. Where James Rebanks' book made the case for a way of farming under threat, Helen's turns the lens onto the women who have long sustained that life from inside the farmhouse, largely uncredited. Two memoirs from the same kitchen table, a decade and one stage apart – and, in Khalil's telling, two stories that simply happen to sit side by side, each standing entirely Not a response, its own thing

Ten years ago, Theatre by the Lake staged A Shepherd's Life, adapted from the bestselling memoir by Helen's husband, James Rebanks. It would be easy – too easy, perhaps – to read The Farmer's Wife as a rebuttal, a decade-later correction delivered from inside the same household. Khalil is having none of it.

"Of course I know James's work," she says, "but it's really exciting to be celebrating the hidden female labour in farming, often hidden. It's absolutely not a response to A Shepherd's Life. It's its own thing that exists on its own terms, in the same way that Helen's book does as well."

Writing landscape without showing it

Theatre by the Lake sits with the fells filling every window, and Khalil talks about that setting less as a backdrop than as a collaborator. "When you walk out of the door of that theatre, there they are in all their majesty – you can't replicate that on stage. It sort of feels like where the theatre is does a bit of that work for us."

That's freed the play and its design to work symbolically rather than literally. Khalil describes it moving between straightforward, grounded conversation and what she calls "magical memory moments" – sequences out on the farm that are staged not as documentary but as metaphor. "If you want to watch a documentary about farming, you can see sheep being born and so on," she says.

"On stage, keeping that symbolic and employing the audience's imagination, inviting them into the theatrical game – that's what theatre does really well, in my opinion. I hope some of that excites an audience. But it's all grounded through really truthful family relationships, and concerns, and conversations, and arguments."

As for the all-female-led creative team behind that design – a point the production has rightly made something of – Khalil is careful and characteristically generous in how she frames it. "We do have a couple of chaps in the creative team. "But I think Liz [Stevenson, director] was conscious it would be nice to have a female-heavy creative team – it's not that common, actually. The truth is, we have the best people for the job. Our designer, Louie Whitemore, is astonishing, at the top of her game. Our movement director, Jess Williams, is just brilliant. It's exciting, and it's lovely that the majority of the team are women – but it's also because they're the best."

How she actually writes

Ask Khalil how a play gets built physically on the page, and she resists a tidy answer – "it depends on the play" – before offering one anyway. She tends to fix two points first: where it starts and where, crucially, it ends. "The most important thing is usually to have the ending, so I have a destination point." Everything else – earlier scenes, structure, order – stays negotiable and often gets cut or reshuffled long after that ending is locked in place.

New characters and their stories, meanwhile, arrive almost by instinct rather than plan. If someone she's interviewing mentions a concern or tells her a story that grabs her, she knows she wants it in. The work after that is compositional: whose story does it belong to, and how does it find its way into a scene dramatically? "I don't think about it in that way," she says, of the process itself. "That's sort of what happens."

(L-R) Christine Entwisle, Roberta Kerr, Eireann Devlin

The cast
Theatre by the Lake has announced a trio of actresses to play the play's three generations of farming women. Christine Entwisle, a West Cumbrian actress and writer with credits at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court, joins Roberta Kerr, familiar to millions from long-running roles in Coronation Street and Emmerdale, and Eireann Devlin, another Cumbrian native known for CBBC's The Dumping Ground, who was herself recognised by the Women's Prize for Playwriting last year for a script exploring rural life. The casting of Entwisle and Devlin in particular underlines the theatre's stated commitment to championing homegrown Cumbrian talent – actresses who, in Khalil's words about the women who inspired the play, may well recognise their own families in the script.
She's equally instinctive about form. Theatre is home — "that's where I started" — and radio sits almost as close to her heart, both fields she describes as generous and welcoming to her over the years. Something occasionally announces itself as televisual, but more often than not, her mind reaches first for the stage or the airwaves.

Looking back across a body of work that runs from Plan D to Scenes from 68 Years to Hakawatis and now this, she refuses the easy move of disowning her earlier plays. "There are some things I wrote that I look back on and think they're not as good as some of the others — but I wouldn't change any of them. They all represent me at different points in my life, my writing journey, and learning how to put things on stage. Even the ones I feel are less perfect than the others — I love them like my children."

The sign-off

It's when the conversation turns, briefly, to what she'd say to a young Irish Palestinian writer starting out now that Khalil says something worth sitting with. "Be brave," she says. "It's really, really scary to write about things that matter to you, but you have to do it. You have to be brave and know who you're writing for – are you writing for yourself or for an audience to help them understand something or to ask them a question you want them to chew over?"

She's speaking, she mentions, from a writers' retreat, in the company of her fellow Bristol Old Vic writers in residence. "I'm in awe of all of them," she says. "They're courageous. Writing is an incredibly courageous act, and I have great admiration for other writers." And then, the line that will stay with anyone who hears it: "Just be brave, and know that in that pen there is great power. Use it wisely."

It's a fitting note for a writer who spent a year listening to women whose labour rarely makes the headlines and who has spun that listening into a play that refuses to flatten them into either victims or saints – women who are, in her own account, entrepreneurial, adaptable, funny, and quietly extraordinary. Khalil didn't come to The Farmer's Wife as an outsider looking in. She came to it, in the end, as someone who recognised her own grandmothers in every farmhouse kitchen she sat in – and who has, with evident care, given them the stage.

The Farmer's Wife by Hannah Khalil, directed by Liz Stevenson, opens at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, on 18 September and runs until 10th October. For more information and tickets, click here.