Vikki Heywood: At a fundamental level, we are social and creative beings who need each other

The former Executive Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal Court Theatre turned author on how theatre and literature can help bridge the gap between intolerance and empathy.

If you create the space people will come. My dream has always been that every town and city in the UK should have its own theatre and library. Centres for performance and literature, but most of all spaces for storytelling.  

Storytelling goes right back to basics for all of us as humans. It is about being taken out of yourself, while, at the same time understanding yourself a bit more deeply through the life of someone else.

From the very youngest age, that process begins. You sit with a tiny baby, and you start telling a story. It’s instinctive. I saw this extraordinary study recently where they had electrodes on a baby’s head and on the mother’s head while she was reading Dear Zoo. You could see the brain activity begin to synchronise. The two brains were effectively working together.

You instinctively know that something like that is happening when you read to a child, but to see it mapped out was remarkable. It shows how deeply embedded storytelling is in us all; how it satisfies something very fundamental at a very early age.

There seem to be an infinite number of stories we can tell. That’s not changing, even in a high tech world. What may be changing is how those stories are shaped and how they reach people.

Alongside that, though, there is another side to human nature. If one instinct is empathy, the other is the need to ‘other’. To define ourselves by identifying who is not part of our group.

You see it throughout history, through religion, cultural behaviour, and social attitudes. We all seem to be programmed to find our tribe, group, a sense of belonging. And one of the easiest ways of defining that is by excluding others.

Social media is perfectly constructed to amplify that instinct. It allows people to manipulate how others feel and think. It creates spaces where you can very easily define yourself against someone else. 

Think about what Apple managed to do with its brand. It took something that is essentially a commodity and turned it into a marker of identity. It persuaded people that if you used their product, you were somehow more intelligent than the person next to you using something else. It’s a very simple example, but it shows how easily we can create difference. How easily we can other each other. And you can watch that logic flow through into all sorts of negative ways in which people behave towards each other.

There’s a growing caution, perhaps even a fear, around stepping outside what is perceived as ‘normal’.

I think, unfortunately, this has always been human nature. But I do feel that we are moving into a world where we have stepped backwards, to some extent, from celebrating difference. There’s a growing caution, perhaps even a fear, around stepping outside what is perceived as ‘normal’. 

That is why literature and performance are extraordinarily important. They create spaces where you can experience other lives, where you can understand what it feels like to be someone else. They can challenge that instinct to divide, or at least make it visible.

And that is why, if I had my way, if I was Prime Minister for a day, I would ordain that every town and city would have a theatre and every town and city would have access to library books. Because that process – whether you are alone with a book or sitting in an audience – is one of the most powerful ways we have of experiencing empathy.

At the same time, I think we are underusing the very tools we now have access to. During Covid, it felt for a moment as though we might find new ways of connecting. People were reaching out, building communities in unexpected ways, using technology to enhance our support for each other through connection.

A friend and I started working on an idea for a people's jury or citizens panel online. The idea was to bring together people from different backgrounds to debate shared issues. It could be something very large, like assisted dying, or something much smaller and local. But the aim was to create a space where people could listen to each other, properly listen – and empathise.

We got quite excited about it. It felt like a real opportunity – not just for public debate, but for educational situations. Children, in particular, don’t debate enough. Schools don’t connect with each other in ways they might. There’s a huge opportunity to bring young people together digitally from different places, different backgrounds, and allow them to understand each other’s lives, without leaving their schools.

But we couldn’t quite get it off the ground. Partly because of practical challenges – how do you make it safe, how do you scale it – but also because the conversation quickly turns to what might go wrong.

The moment you start to build something constructive the instinct is to ask how it could fail. How it could be abused. How it could be disrupted. Rather than asking what it might become, or what it might achieve.

And yet, my experience – whether in theatres, or through organisations like the Royal Society of Arts – is that most of the time, things go extremely well. People are courteous. They want to listen. They want to engage with each other’s points of view. They don’t arrive wanting to shout and leave. They arrive wanting to connect.

That’s why it feels frustrating that we are not using the internet more effectively for public good. There is so much potential there to bring people together meaningfully. And yet, it often becomes a space that reinforces division instead of unity.

Creative activity is an enormous leveller.

Covid revealed something. Under pressure, when we are forced into a shared experience, we rediscover our instinct to be creative. That gives me hope. It suggests that, at a fundamental level, we are social and creative beings who need each other. I’m also struck by how many people want to take part in collective creative activity from amateur theatre groups, to choirs and community projects.

Creative activity is an enormous leveller. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you are making something together, you connect in a different way. You might disagree on many things, but in that moment, you share something.

And there are wider benefits; people come together; they stay, talk, go for something to eat, and buy something locally. It supports the life of a place. It creates a sense of community. It has economic as well as social value.

That’s why it’s so concerning to see those spaces disappearing. There has been a significant reduction in cultural funding at a local level. And when those spaces go, something vital goes with them.

As an author, I wanted to explore that same idea of our shared collective experience through the experience of ageing. I chose to focus on two women of a certain age and to look honestly at what that means. Getting older is hard. It brings its own set of challenges. But it also brings humour, resilience and a determination to remain in control of your life.

I found myself thinking quite a lot about assisted dying as I was writing. About how someone might reach a point where they would prefer to choose their own ending, rather than follow a path that feels inevitable. We all have this idea, don’t we, of a perfect death, of a perfect ending. And for many people, that simply isn’t achievable.

I hope that younger readers might engage with that. There’s a gap between generations. When you’re young, it’s very difficult to imagine what it means to age. You see the person in front of you, not the life they’ve lived.

When I was a teenager, I used to visit an older woman who had no family nearby. We would go once a week after school. We’d talk, look at photographs, share stories. It was a simple thing, but I learned a great deal about what it means to grow older.

And now, as I approach that stage myself, I find myself thinking about it more. What it means to remain in control of your life. What it means to be seen. What it means to still feel part of the world.

Everything comes back to connection though storytelling. We have this extraordinary capacity to empathise. And at the same time, this equally strong instinct to other. The solution must be to keep choosing to connect.

This conversation took place in November 2025 and has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.

Vikki’s latest debut book, Miss Veal and Miss Ham, is available now.