She’s 71, her daughter is 40 — they’re both staging no-holds-barred shows

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Babs and Laura Horton have a similar sense of humour. So much so that they both included “golden showers” in the shows they have taken to the Edinburgh Fringe this year — only realising after an editor looked over Laura’s script and told her he’d already had to look the phrase up while reading her mother’s. If you don’t understand what it means, I won’t be explaining it in the pages of The Times.
This is Laura’s second play at the festival, but Babs is a newcomer. “My friends say, ‘I can’t believe you’re 71 and you’re taking a play to Edinburgh,’” she tells me when I meet them both in central London. “I’m in student accommodation. It’s going to be hilarious.” Laura, 40, is staying with a friend in Leith.
Babs wrote her play, In the Lady Garden, during lockdown — it’s a one-woman show in which her 69-year-old character, Alice, reflects on the sexism she has experienced over the years. It is not directly based on her own life but Babs has a lot to say about the restrictions of her 1950s upbringing. “Being a girl was really, really underwhelming … I went to a convent school that was like, ‘You will marry Mr Right and buy sheets and towels for your parents.’ The women in my family didn’t have an opportunity to do anything.”
She had been set on storytelling from a young age, growing up in northwest London with her father, who worked in the Vauxhall factory, and her mother, who was a waitress. “I wrote all the way through primary school. I loved the library. We didn’t have many books at home but my dad bought a set of encyclopaedias, which is a very working-class thing to do. He spent a whole month’s wages on it so that we’d have an extra education.”
But she was put off writing for years after experiencing classism at the London private school she won a scholarship to, where her English teacher was far from encouraging. “And then I thought, ‘I’ve got to turn this around somehow.’ So as I got older, I started to write short stories.” Working around her day job in children’s mental health services, she had her first novel — the thriller A Jarful of Angels, set in a Welsh village — published by Simon & Schuster when she was 49. She has since published three more.
Her daughter Laura also had her confidence knocked at school. “I was told I was too average to be a writer by my careers adviser,” she says. “I always felt the world wasn’t really made for introverts so I should get in my box.” She looks at Babs: “I think that’s why it was so great when you got published when I was 18 because it gave me an impetus — this is the road I could go down. But it took me a lot longer.”
Laura worked in theatre PR and began writing plays in her early thirties, winning a Fringe First award in 2022 for Breathless, which was based on her hoarding behaviour and transferred to Soho Theatre in London. This year she’s staging Lynn Faces, a piece of gig theatre about recovering from a controlling relationship — something she has experience of. It’s a dark comedy combining masks depicting Alan Partridge’s assistant Lynn Benfield and an all-female band trying (and failing) to play punk music inspired by the Slits’ Viv Albertine.
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Laura met Albertine at a talk in London and credits her with helping her to come to terms with the nature of her previous relationship. “I got chatting to her after [the talk] and I don’t think I realised the extent of the abuse I’d been through — I didn’t quite realise how bad it was,” Laura says. “She did [understand], based on a few things we discussed. And she said, ‘I think you should read my book. I think it will help you.’ It was the one about her breaking up with her husband, who was very controlling. I loved it and we kept in touch.”
In the wake of Baby Reindeer and Fleabag, it can seem as if sharing your trauma has become a prerequisite for Fringe success. Is there a pressure to share intensely personal experiences in your work? “100 per cent,” Laura says. “I guess it’s just interrogating why you’re doing it and how you’re doing it.” In terms of her own show, she says, “I do not think people understand coercive control. I think there are phrases that are bandied about, like narcissism and gaslighting, that are very real, but I don’t think people actually understand what that looks like. So I’m hoping that we can demystify as well as provide a show that’s silly. It’s very daft. But that’s deliberate — I want it to be funny.”
“It’s very rude and very funny,” Babs agrees. The pair are clearly close, living within 30 minutes of each other in Plymouth and working on a play together about Tredegar in south Wales, where Babs was born. “We’ll hang out lots,” Babs says about the Fringe. “We’re definitely going to flyer for each other,” Laura adds. “What’s that thing we have on the back?” Babs asks, pointing to the promo material for their shows. “A QR code,” Laura tells her with a loving laugh.
Do they ever get competitive? “Never,” Laura insists. And since they’ve both written comedies — who is funnier? “You’re definitely funnier,” Laura says to Babs. “Only because I’m older,” Babs replies. “I’ve got to that cheeky stage now where you don’t give a monkey’s. All the years you worry about, ‘Am I too big, am I this, who’s looking at me?’ When you eventually just throw it off, it’s bloody wonderful.”
This mentality has inspired In the Lady Garden, which is directed and performed by two women who are also over 60: Deborah Edgington and Julia Faulkner. “There’s a cloak of invisibility thrown around you when you become menopausal, so when you go to the bar nobody really serves you,” Babs says. “And I just think: stuff it. I don’t care if I’m fat any more, I don’t care what my eyebrows look like. This is a time in my life when I’m going to say what I would really like to say without being rude or horribly stupid.” As well as golden showers, the script also features the “c word”, Babs highlights.
There’s a determinedly modern element too: Alice finds herself in a jail cell after getting involved in a social media scandal. While this is yet to happen to Babs, she has been trolled on Twitter after wading in on political subjects, from Brexit to Angela Rayner. Laura has called her, worried about the hate. “But,” Babs says, “I’m too old and ugly to give a monkey’s.”
Before Edinburgh, In the Lady Garden had a run at Theatre Royal Plymouth, where it sold out. Babs wants to encourage other women her age to give it a go too. “When you say, ‘It’s never too late’ as a cliché, I see it as a call to action. Just do it. Don’t sit there and go, ‘I’m going to do it.’ If you just take ten minutes a day or 20 minutes a day, just write. Just go.”In the Lady Garden is at Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker 1), pleasance.co.uk; Lynn Faces is at Summerhall, festival24.summerhall.co.uk. Both to August 26.