Billie Piper Answers Her Need for Reinvention

“Some people didn’t even really say anything, they just wanted to be close to us — they wanted to somehow physically connect.”

I certainly had a hard time leaving the Young Vic the night I saw the play, my way blocked by women in tears. And if all this sounds melodramatic, it was echoed in the visceral language British critics used to discuss Piper’s performance: “shatteringly powerful,” “earth-quaking,” “heart-rending.”

It’s fair to say, then, that “Yerma” tapped into contemporary anxieties about the impossibility of having it all. “This is a conversation everybody seems to be having at the moment,” Piper, 35, said over coffee in East London, as she prepared to revive the role at the Park Avenue Armory this month, making her New York theater debut. “It feels very, very topical.”

Stone, the writer-director, brought the action bang up-to-date: Piper plays a successful, stylish, somewhat selfish journalist and lifestyle blogger who didn’t even want children until, one day, she did. And she’s used to getting what she wants: the dream career, the businessman husband, the house with the garden in the up-and-coming London suburb. When she fails to get pregnant, it spirals into an unhealthy obsession, propelled by biological compulsion, but also by a fierce refusal to accept this lack of control.

Speaking over the phone from his native Australia, Stone explained why he thought “Yerma” was ripe for updating. “I’ve had a relationship where we were struggling to get pregnant. I witnessed an incredibly confident, strong, brilliant woman feel crippled in a way that felt really deeply unfair,” he said. “This is the world that we’re living in. We need to talk about how we make it impossible for women to have it all.”

For some, a play with such themes could seem retrograde, unfeminist even. Piper says it “is enough to send anyone mad. The biological clock is a thing! To say that there aren’t periods in my life where I’m governed by my hormones would be a lie, and if that makes me ‘anti-feminist’ then I guess I am. Because that’s my experience of my body.”

For Piper, the play also resonates because it isn’t just about the particular hell of in vitro fertilization. “It’s also about a relationship burning out, the pressure of the modern world on a relationship,” she said. Piper is seeing Johnny Lloyd, the former frontman of Tribes. But when the show opened in 2016, she had just gotten divorced from actor Laurence Fox, the father of her sons, Winston, 9, and Eugene, 5. Was that something she was drawing on?

“There will be things that happen in your life that inform the decisions you make as an actor,” she said. “Something will connect. But once you put an audience in front of it, you hand it over.”

In Britain, however, Piper’s private life has often been the story. She grew up in Swindon, in the south of England, and moved to London when she was only 12, to go to stage school. By 15, she was a pop star, and in 1998 became the youngest artist ever to debut at No. 1 on the British charts, with the bratty single “Because We Want To.”

“I’m not a real musician,” she now concludes, frankly. “It’s a hard industry, and in the ‘90s, you worked inappropriate hours. I was so young, I just burnt out really quickly.”

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the #MeToo campaign has rung bells. “There were definitely areas I found challenging — nothing criminal, just an overall energy. We were winning awards for being sexy teenagers. I became quite cynical about it quite quickly.”

Her first marriage, at 18, to radio DJ Chris Evans, also made headlines, thanks to a 16-year age gap. But around the time of their separation in 2004, Piper’s career regenerated: She was cast as the companion Rose in the BBC’s rebooted “Doctor Who.”

“It came out of the blue, that opportunity, and it was an amazing one,” Piper said. It’s a role she’ll never quite shake. Today, she meets teenagers named after Rose, although unthinkingly adding a rose emoji to an Instagram post recently sent the internet into a tizzy, with fans predicting a “Doctor Who” comeback — a rumor she’s quick to scotch.

More recently, Piper has made a reputation for herself as one of Britain’s finest stage actors, in Lucy Prebble’s “The Effect,” and Richard Bean’s phone hacking scandal satire “Great Britain.”

“People look at someone who’s willing to be naked in their soul,” Stone said of watching her perform. “Yerma” is set in a glass box, which helps. “But I use glass walls a lot, and I’ve never had an actor that was so willing to go so warts and all — that’s her great beauty.”

Piper is also in David Hare’s crime thriller “Collateral,” now on Netflix. “That was a great female part, because she’s wild,” Piper said of her role as a spiky young mother with a drug habit. But she points out that, too often, film and TV roles for women are just boring.

This frustration led to Piper’s latest reinvention: as a writer. She’s written her own film, due to shoot this year, as well as having a TV series in the pipeline. Both are dark comedies, both about women in their 30s; both will star Piper.

The movie, “Rare Beasts,” is about “what it really feels like to be a modern woman moving through female emancipation, and how that affects our relationships with men,” she said. “What happens if this movement divides men and women?”

The TV series will center on a woman who has been hacked and has her private life exposed, but it also looks more broadly at the pressures of being a woman her age. Piper had noticed friends questioning their lives, asking “what have I not achieved and where’s my family and will I ever own a home and what’s my mental health like?”

It is written with Prebble, who became a close friend after they met working on the TV series “Secret Diary of a Call Girl” in 2007. “We’re like sisters,” Piper said, cracking her wide, irresistible smile.

Prebble was equally effusive. “I love her,” she said emphatically. “When my life fell apart a couple of years ago she took me into her home. In your 30s as a woman it feels like everything has to break or survive. And the people who are there, the people who show up, are the women.”

Their shared creative preoccupations — the fragility of relationships, the gap between men and women, the failure of life’s promises as we age — all chime with those Stone found within “Yerma.” And that may be another reason Piper is so keen to return to this exceptional role, readily admitting, “I’m still not over it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.