Billy and Girl

Darkly comic and more than a little disturbing, Billy and Girl introduces a version of childhood trauma that is completely original and utterly unnerving. Abandoned years ago by their parents, Billy and Girl live alone somewhere in England. Girl looks for their mother by going door-to-door and addressing every woman who answers as "Mom," and Billy fantasizes about a future in which he will be famous - preferably in the United States - as a movie star, a psychiatrist, a doctor to blondes with breast enlargements, or the author of Billy England's Book of Pain. The siblings support and torture each other, forgetting what they need to forget, inventing worlds they hope will be better, but managing to prolong nightmares as they create alternate personalities in order to survive and conquer and punish.

Deborah Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, highly acclaimed for their "intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination", including Pax, Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Clam, Call Blue Jane, Shiny Nylon, Honey Babu Middle England, Pushing the Prince into Denmark, and Macbeth-False Memories, some of which are published in Levy: Plays 1.

Deborah wrote and published her first novel Beautiful Mutants, when she was 27 years old. The experience of not having to give her words to a director, actors and designer to interpret, was so exhilarating, she wrote a few more. These include Swallowing Geography, The Unloved, and Billy and Girl. She has always written across a number of art forms (see Bookworks and Collaborations with visual artists) and was Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989-1991.