How To Make a Mess: A Totally Unauthorised Love Letter to Nigella Lawson is a chamber musical written and composed by Emily Rose Simons. It follows a young woman who, after the death of her estranged mother, inherits Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat, a cookbook that becomes the starting point for an unexpected emotional and imagined journey. Nigella herself appears as a kind of guiding presence, part fantasy, part cultural memory, helping the protagonist navigate grief, desire, and self-reconnection.
First developed through workshops and staged readings, including Oxford Playhouse and The Other Palace Studio, the piece blends humour, music, and magical realism. Cooking becomes a language, a way of processing loss, identity, and pleasure.
At its centre is a fascination with Nigella Lawson not simply as a chef, but as a cultural figure who reframed pleasure as something unashamedly accessible.
For Emily Rose Simons, the idea began with something small, and unexpectedly persistent.
Many years ago, she was working at the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead alongside writer and performer Tanya Truman, who would regularly do impressions of Nigella Lawson as if she were part of their everyday world behind the counter.
“One day she turned to me and said, ‘You should write a musical about Nigella Lawson, and I could play Nigella Lawson.’ I laughed it off… but years later, during the pandemic, I noticed how close my parasocial relationships with TV and YouTube cooks were becoming, and that moment came back,” she said.
What resurfaced was a question about intimacy, comfort, and how deeply we can connect to mediated figures through food and ritual.
Framed as a “love letter” to Nigella Lawson, the show is less about celebrity and more about philosophy, particularly her approach to pleasure and imperfection. Framed as a “love letter” to Nigella Lawson, the show is less about celebrity and more about philosophy, particularly her approach to pleasure and imperfection.
“Nigella leans into enjoyment with a good smattering of silliness, and away from perfection. She is not exacting, and I hugely appreciate that. Perfection is a ridiculous aim in life.”
That rejection of perfection becomes the emotional backbone of the work, where “making a mess” is not failure, but a necessary release.
“Letting go of control in order to bring joy and love into one’s life, and joy usually comes out of the messier moments.”
Beneath the playfulness, the show is also shaped by grief. Cooking becomes a language for memory, particularly in relation to those who are no longer present.
“Food and cooking allows us to feel connected to the people we miss whilst helping us keep going.”
On stage, this emotional world is translated into something physical and immediate. Cooking is performed live, becoming both action and metaphor.
Emily Rose describes a creative process in which music and storytelling are inseparable, developing side by side rather than in sequence.
“They evolve together most of the time. Songs lead the emotional journey and the script balances that with the practicalities of plot… which then uncovers more of the emotional journey in the music.”
That structure allows the show to move fluidly between intimacy and theatricality, often using the sensory world of cooking to hold emotional tension.
“Cooking is emotional, creative, and naturally theatrical. There are stakes, success, failure, and burning a compote so badly you ruin an engagement present. There is literal cooking on stage.”
While the premise is playful, the themes reach into deeper questions about care, identity, and autonomy, especially for women navigating expectations around domesticity and selfhood.
For Emily, self-nourishment sits at the centre of that conversation.
“It’s trusting that, deep down, we can know what we need and want.”
And although the musical is not explicitly political, it inevitably engages with cultural ideas around labour, desire, and permission.
“Strength is not about denying your desires. Having wants and needs doesn’t make you weak.”
As the piece has developed through spaces including Oxford Playhouse and London stages, audience response has played a quiet but important role in its evolution.
“Mostly cheering us on. It’s wonderful knowing how excited and moved audiences have been; it has kept us going when the future was unknown.”
Off stage, Emily’s relationship to care is quieter, embedded in everyday rhythms rather than performance.
When asked what “nourishing yourself” looks like right now, she said: “Listening to my audiobook and crocheting a baby blanket I hope to finish before my child’s potentially imminent arrival.”
And when asked if she lives by a guiding idea, she closes simply:
“Just keep going.”
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