She's on the Sutherland line, heading into the CBD ahead of the opening of her latest play, A Fool in Love, at Sydney Theatre Company.The play is an adaptation of the 17th-century farce La dama boba by Spanish playwright Lope de Vega.
" wrote infinitely less, his output was much more conservative and he was formally much thinner. De Vega is funnier. I mean, Twelfth Night can be quite funny but, as someone who has seen 19 different productions, I promise you, you'll get more laughs out of him." In her early 20s, Badham studied creative arts at the University of Wollongong, which she describes as a "DIY 90s arts school experience".
She also debuted shows in New York, becoming the first Australian playwright selected for New York's Summer Play Festival. TheAmid her early success in the UK, Badham was encouraged by one of the major producing theatres in London to apply for a program with the Australia Council , but she was knocked back.
"I get treated like a waitress who's wandered into the wrong room at an arts event because of the way that I talk and my general manner. I don't fit their expectation of what a working artist , let alone a playwright who does adaptations of 17th-century farces." Then an unexpected lifeline came in the form of an offer to write for Guardian Australia, after an editor saw her appear on stage in a satirical panel show called Cherchez La Femme — a parody of ABC's Q+A, hosted by an all-female panel of comedians. "I just wasn't connecting with any of the work I was doing and I saw it as a bit of an opportunity to sort of do something else for a while," she says.
"I was taking myself very seriously and the world very seriously. I wrote plays about terrorism and rape as a war crime in the former Yugoslavia and the collapse of the Soviet Union. That kind of stuff." When Badham wrote her pick-up-artist rom-com Banging Denmark for STC, she was ready to reclaim her inner theatre kid."It was an important play for me to write to deal with all the horrendous trolling that I'd been subjected to from when I started writing the Guardian column — getting up in the morning and having a bunch of internet randos telling me I was too ugly to rape," she says.