It is 11am on the morning after the Evening Standard Theatre Awards at The Old Vic and Billie Piper has a crushing hangover. The 34-year-old got a standing ovation when she won the Natasha Richardson Award for Best Actress for her career-making performance as Yerma, in a production at the Young Vic that reinvented Federico Garcia Lorca’s barren Spanish villager as a modern woman destroyed by her inability to have a child.

‘Oh crikey, thank you, I love this,’ Piper said from the stage. She told the play’s writer and director, Simon Stone: ‘You scared the s*** out of me and I thank you for it.’ To her mother, Mandy, her companion for the evening, she said simply: ‘I love you mum.’ After that, things got messy.

‘It was a great night, such fun, such an overwhelming experience,’ Piper croaks. ‘I just smoked an enormous amount of cigarettes and was shouting all night long. I got very, very drunk, but I didn’t realise I was drunk. I think I was pumped with adrenaline.’ During the star-studded ceremony, she sat at a relatively quiet table with the Young Vic boss, David Lan, and the polymathic director and producer Stephen ‘Billy Elliot’ Daldry — ‘people with the right level of commitment to the cause’ — and later found herself ‘at every given moment talking to someone deeply impressive. My mum kept her cool, even around Glenn Close, which was awesome’.

Read the full interview here