Interview: Writer Alex Unwin talks about how political speechwriting compares with playwriting, how he turned a biography into a play, and the theatrical experience that sparked the idea.

Your background is writing speeches for political leaders; what sparked your interest in writing plays, and how does that style of writing compare?

Writing has always been a very big part of my life. My first entry into it was journalism when I was at university. I left university and went into government and speechwriting for various political leaders.

And I've really got the co-founder of Kick It Anywhere and the producer of Brixton Calling [John Dinneen] to thank for getting me into playwriting.

I loved the theatre; it was a big part of my life growing up. I used to come down from where I lived in the Midlands to London for matinees with my parents.

But it was only when I was living in Brixton during the lockdown with John, who is a writer himself, and he said: 'We've got to do something with all of this time that we've got, why don't we write a play together?

And we've been writing together for five or six years now.

It's very different [to speechwriting] in a lot of ways, but I do think there are some core similarities that have been very useful when applied to playwriting.

There's something about the fact that when you are writing for someone who is performing the words, whether it's a politician presenting to an audience or an actor who's in the theatre.

You can't avoid the scrutiny of listening to someone read words that you've written and really hearing every single word and the rhythm of the sentence, and things that work and things that don't work.

Doing that first in a political speech writing context has been very helpful, as I've started transferring it to theatre.

Your play Brixton Calling is inspired by Simon Parkes' memoir Live at the Brixton Academy. How did you come across the book, and decide to turn it into a play? 

In the same way that theatre was a big part of my life growing up, music was as well. My dad used to be an amateur DJ, so when we were crisscrossing the country, going to various sporting events or football matches, we'd always be listening to music.

He introduced me to The Clash and The Jam and that era of music.

Theatre director Scott Le Crass

Theatre director Scott Le Crass tells me about directing James McDermott’s play Jab a second time, whether comedy is harder than drama and what his dream play to direct would be.

Jab, which is set during the pandemic, originally opened at the Finborough Theatre last year, and now it's coming to the Park Theatre. What's it like directing it a second time, and are you making any changes?

Scott Le Crass: I really like to revisit plays that I've previously directed because having that time in between gives you a little bit of distance. I think that’s quite interesting because firstly, your life experiences sometimes shape how you work.

I'm different from the person I was a year ago in the way that I might see things.

And also, I think what's really interesting is there are lots of things online at the moment talking about it being five years since the pandemic, so there's an extra year distance that people have got.

The way I think we see it is slightly altered, so it's nice to be able to approach it again.

But not a lot has changed; there are a few sequences in terms of movement, but the text and the story are pretty much the same. Some of the design is different as well.

Jab is a dark, domestic comedy. Is it harder directing comedy than a straight drama?

I think comedy can span so many different things. Comedy is quite broad, and I think that as long as you're true with that, that’s something that will see you through in a really positive way.

Comedy is about truth, so in answer to that question, I think it can be harder because sometimes we feel like there's a tendency to lean into the laughs or play to the audience. And I think black comedy, in particular, is quite specific in its tone and its approach. So, I think it can be harder, yes.

Writer Laura Horton's (left) new play Lynn Faces is at the New Diorama Theatre

Laura Horton is a multi-award-winning writer and Plymouth Laureate of Words 2021-23, the first woman and playwright in the role. In 5 Questions With…, she talks about how her new play, Lynn Faces, was inspired by a collision of three different events, what it’s like performing for the first time and Edinburgh stress.

(Watch our conversation here.)

Lynn Faces sees a woman form a punk band after coming out of a toxic relationship. Where did the idea come from?

It's been years in the making. The seeds were planted over 10 years ago. I have a friend called Becky, and I pulled a face at her once, and she said, ‘Oh, that's a Lynn face [Lynn from Alan Patridge]’. So then we would greet each other with the gurn that Lynn does.

Then I came out of a very unpleasant relationship and got very drunk in the pub with my friends, and thought: I need to find some confidence, I want to be in a band.

I've always wanted to be a drummer, so I'm going to start this punk band inspired by Lynn from Alan Partridge. It was an idea that my friend Becky and I came up with.

I booked a gig in a basement bar in Plymouth, sobered up, and realised that absolutely none of us could play. I cancelled it. But I'm a writer, and it just stuck in my head.

Quite a few years ago, I met Viv Albertine from The Slits, and we were having a conversation, and I think she identified that I was in an abusive situation before I did.

And she said, ‘You should read my book’. [Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys]. It felt like the worlds of punk and Lynn were colliding.

Then I saw a wonderful play called Outlier, a beautiful play with music that Malaika Kegode wrote and performed in. And I just thought this [Lynn Faces] is a gig, albeit these people can't play their instruments, unlike Outlier, which is beautifully presented.

It was lots of components coming together.

Madelaine Moore is a freelance theatre director and artistic director of female-focused theatre company The Thelmas with Guleraana Mir. Here, she answers five questions about their new production, Santi & Naz at the Soho Theatre, gender equality in theatre, what she likes to watch and what making theatre is like behind the scenes.

Watch the full chat (11 mins) here.

Santi & Naz debuted at the Vault Festival in 2020; what initially drew you to the play?

It came out of a conversation [with Guleraana] around the time of the 70th anniversary of Partition.

There were a few Partition-set plays on at around that time. The stories were really focused on the trauma and awfulness, which, obviously, is the biggest part of it but was there space for another way of telling this story?

When you read the testimonies around Partition, a lot of women's voices just didn't get heard because, to be blunt, they didn't survive. It's really awful when you hear about what happened to women and girls during that period.

At the same time, I'd been thinking about really intense teenage friendships that girls tend to have, that burn really bright and then fizzle. So, we thought about combining those two ideas.

How do we tell this story that's about Partition but isn't really about Partition? It's about two young women experiencing a huge historical and political event in a tiny village right next to the border of the partition.

We brought in Afshan d’Souza-Lodhi, who co-wrote it with Guleraana, who brought another brilliant perspective that enriched the original story, the rough plot we'd come up with. They fleshed out these characters to make them feel relatable and fun.

Even though it's not a fun period of history, there's a lot of fun in the story. We don't want it to be a history lesson; that's not our job, but we want to ignite interest in the period through these two young girls.

The play's been touring the UK with a new cast and is set to open at the Soho Theatre on 21 January 2025. Is your approach to directing it any different this time around?

It's very different because, by the time the tour was booked, I wasn't available for the first two weeks of rehearsal, so we had to get in associate [director] Vikesh Godhwani, who was involved in the Vault version. I handed it over to him, which I've never done before, I'm a control freak, so that was quite scary for me.

We also didn't realise until quite late that the two actors who'd been in it in Edinburgh in 2023 were not available either. I got casting director Polly Jarrold involved. I came back from Edinburgh halfway through the festival to London, did a casting for it without Vikesh, and then handed it over to him via Zoom for two weeks while I was rehearsing something else. 

Actor & writer Lea des Garets

Léa des Garets is a queer award-winning actor, writer and theatre-maker from France. Through her company MQT Productions, Léa aims to give more visibility to hidden voices from the past and the present, focusing particularly on international voices, female-led narratives and the LGBTQIA+ community.

Here, she talks to me about George, her new play, which opens at the Omnibus Theatre later this month, playing a writer writing a play and LGBTQ+ representation in theatre. (Scroll to the end for the video)

George is inspired by the story of queer French author George Sand. How did you discover her, and what made you want to write the play?

So I am French, and George Sand is quite well known in France, but in a very limited way. Although she sold more books than Victor Hugo and Honoré Balzac in her time, she isn't nearly as well known as they are today.

At school, I had only studied two of her works, so I wasn't drawn to her literary works. But what I did know was that she dressed as a man, she used a male pen name and allegedly had many lovers.

I had this sense that she was a free woman or expressed her gender in whatever way she wanted, and she was still really, really successful in 19th-century France.

In 2019, I was really exploring my own queerness and craving for figures, not only to study but also to potentially embody as an actor, and I re-stumbled upon her.

In spite of all the press slandering, she still fought for equality and went against the norms, not only in what she represented but also in what she was saying. She really has something to say to our time, so I needed to write about her. And how amazing would it be to play her?

You play George and wrote the play, how does being the playwright inform your performance process, particularly as George in the play is a writer?

I had this image of three circles, there was my world, Léa the writer, and her world, George Sand the writer and the work that she is writing in George the play, which is her play Gabriel.

So much of the writing process of George is included in the play itself. There was a lot of bouncing off ideas with loved ones who are in the industry and who aren't, as well as brainstorming. There was some getting up in the middle of the night to write and also not commanding inspiration but having things come at you from the outside.

But then there is also the tunnel vision for something that you end up being so incredibly passionate about. I really found and experienced that, and I know what it feels like to hold on to what you believe in.

Camila França and Trine Garrett are co-artistic directors of the Foreign Affairs theatre company, which produces translated work sometimes in unusual spaces.

Ahead of their latest production, Black Swans at the Omnibus Theatre (23 April-11 May), I asked them about the new piece, how they choose what stories to tell and the unusual places they've staged theatre in the past.  

Black Swans also sees Camila and Trine returning to acting after a 5-year break, so I asked them what they are looking forward to about being back on stage and how they'll be feeling on opening night.

You can watch the full interview on my YouTube channel here.

Your theatre company, Foreign Affairs, shares stories from afar. What is the process for finding the plays you put on, and what are you looking for from a piece?

Trine: Our focus is working with theatre in translation. And the translators are our best friends, so plays get pitched to us. We also discover them through our theatre translator mentorship, which we run every other year.

And this play [Black Swans] was discovered during one of those.

What draws us to the plays that we stage is a lot about identity and belonging. We are both not from the UK; I'm from Denmark and Camila's from Brazil.

And then plays about women. I think that has been at the forefront for the last year with this one in particular [Black Swans], and prior to that, we did a rehearsed reading of a play about a female Danish scientist.

Black Swans is about caregiving for an elderly parent in a world of increasing technological influence. Tell us a bit about the play and what drew you to this particular story.

Camila: It's a story about women, and that immediately appealed. And then there's also a personal connection to the story, both on my side and Trine's, caring for elderly family, which is something we as a society tend not to talk a lot about.

The play is about two sisters who have to care for their elderly mother, who can no longer look after herself.

In that comes all the beauty and the bickering of their relationship and what happens when decisions have to be made.

How do they deal with it, and how does it affect their personal relationships, their own lives, and their relationship with their mother?

Sam McArdle had given up acting and started writing a play for 'something to do'. He ended up performing that play, The Manny, at the King's Head Theatre last year and a successful run in Dublin followed.

Ahead of The Manny's return to London at the Pleasance Theatre this week, I jumped on a video call to ask Sam about the play, the process of creating it, getting back into acting and what his ideal role would be.

You can watch the full interview here.

How did you decide what real parts of your experiences as a male nanny to include and what to leave out when you were writing The Manny?

Just the juiciest parts. I really wanted to keep in the bits about the child who is obsessed with World War II and then the bits about going to the school gates and seeing the other mannies literally trying to muscle in on your territory.

It's like a networking event. Picking up the mums at the school gate and working out, okay, I can get more shifts by working for them. I thought that was interesting and funny.

What parts did I want to leave out? The image of the male nanny is much more salacious than actually what the job entails.

So I left out a lot of the mundane day-to-day things of picking up the kids from school, cooking them dinner, making sure they do their homework. That would be a crap play.

Were you always writing The Manny for yourself to perform? And how did that inform the process?

No one else is going to play the Manny. No way.

To be honest, I just started writing it. I'd quit acting completely, and it was just something to do, and it's almost a form of therapy.

And then, after I got the bare bones of the script, I did a play reading during COVID, those ghastly Zoom play readings.

I thought, 'Oh, this feels really nice and good'. I felt like my old self was coming back.

And then I made a decision like the guy in The Bear, Richie, in the fourth episode, something in me just flicked, and I said, 'I've got to make a change and get back to London, put the show on, and I've got to see if I can still do it'.

So from there, after the first draught, it was something I wanted to do to express how I've been feeling the last couple of years.

Robert Softley Gale, artistic director of Birds of Paradise Theatre Company

Birds of Paradise, Scotland's pre-eminent disabled-led theatre company, is celebrating its 30th anniversary with a tour of its darkly comic play Don't Make Tea.

Before the company hits the road later this month I spoke to artistic director Robert Softley Gale about how he chooses what work to produce, disabled representation in the theatre (and yes Richard III at The Globe comes up) and his favourite type of theatre to watch.

Here are the highlights from that chat, scroll down to watch the video.

Tell us a bit about the work you do as artistic director of the Birds of Paradise (BOP) theatre company and how you decide what work to produce.

The company has been going for 31 years, and I’ve been artistic director since 2012. And I think the role is best explained as putting disabled stories onto the stage.

And that sounds very simplistic and ‘what's the big deal with that’? But if you look at our culture, there's a real lack of disabled stories.

I feel like BOP has a role to play in putting those stories on stage.

The first show I produced was a sex comedy called Wendy Hoose in 2014. It was a very standard two-actor comedy where they meet online, get together, and then he comes to her apartment and discovers that she's got no legs.

So, he’s immediately having to navigate how that works.

Taking stories that are quite familiar, like a sex comedy, and then putting disability into them is something I think is very interesting.

The stories we have to tell aren't radically different, but with a different perspective, they've got something different to say. 

Then there was Purposeless Movements, which was a physical theatre piece with four disabled guys telling you about their lives and explaining what masculinity meant to them as disabled men.

Then My Left/Right Foot, which is a musical co-produced with the National Theatre of Scotland.

That took the story of Christie Brown who wrote My Left Foot and asked the question: If an amateur theatre company tried to put this on stage, how wrong could they get it, how inappropriate could you be?

It's a very in-your-face musical. It was really well received as a big scale, quite shocking but also quite endearing musical about disability.

The key is that people came for a great night at the theatre; they didn't come to be told what it's like to be disabled because that's not very exciting.

So I guess I'm telling you about those productions to explain how I pick things. It's very much about what will attract audiences.

"If you come away from a piece of theatre having laughed very hard, having cried and thinking about something a different way, then its job done"

I hate theatre that's navel-gazing and 'what I want to say'. I mean, obviously, it's about what I want to say, but it's about what audiences want to hear, what they want to find out about.

It's about being aware of where the audience is, what they're interested in, what will entertain and surprise them and what will educate them. That's not a very popular word.

If you come away from a piece of theatre having laughed very hard, having cried and thinking about something a different way, then its job done.

What inspired theatre co-writers/directors Mark Down and Ben Keaton to create The Sex Lives of Puppets? I sat down with Mark and Ben ahead of the opening night at the Southwark Playhouse to find out more about Blind Summit's latest production and their theatre work.

Here's what they had to say (edited), and you can watch the full interview on YouTube by clicking here.

1. What inspired you to write The Sex Lives of Puppets? And why puppets?

Mark Down: We were messing around, and we loved them (the puppets) doing interview-style sort of backstage interviews, and they were very good when they talked about sex. 

Ben Keaton: You had a great title for a start.

Mark: I think it was a good title. And once we had it, it was sort of irresistible.

Ben: Mark brought me in, and I've said it many times, we just have to create a show around a great title. 

2. You are co-writers and co-directors. How does the collaboration work?

Mark: It's a f*cking nightmare.

Ben: I've made sure it's difficult. It's been my job to do this.

Mark: It came about because Ben auditioned, and he said, 'I know nothing about puppets'. And I was blown away by his voice.

I looked at who'd auditioned and said to my co-director, I want Ben, and if he really can't do puppets, I will do something else. And so that's how we got together, and then the arguments started.

Ben: Mark has an immense experience. He's incredibly passionate about what he does; he has a thing in his mind that he wants. And I come from a different world.

So the combination of our two skills come together in this, but not without bumping heads, that's for darn sure. What I love is we have one agenda, which is to make a great show, and everything clears its way for that.

L-R Sara Joyce with fellow Boy Parts creatives: Aimée Kelly (actor), Gill Greer (adaptation) and Eliza Clark (novel). Photo: Rebecca Need-Menear

Theatre director Sara Joyce's previous work includes Dust by Milly Thomas and Fringe First winning The Last Return. Here she talks about her new project, Boy Parts, what drew her to working in the theatre, her favourite theatre and how she'll be feeling on press night.

Boy Parts is described as a pitch-black psychological thriller adapted by Gillian Greer from Eliza Clark's novel and is at the Soho Theatre from 19 October. 

This is an edited version of the interview; scroll down to watch the full interview.

What made you want to work in theatre?

I wanted to work in something to do with entertainment or storytelling. I was acting, and I thought: well, I'm going to be an actor, and I don't think I saw anything outside of theatre as accessible.

Maybe it was just narrow-mindedness, or I didn't really think about it. And I think luckily so because I love it.

And then there's the question of why you keep working in theatre. I enjoy the event of it. I was thinking about it this week in rehearsal, and it feels a bit like you're planning a party that's going to be on every night.

There's something both vital and redundant about it at the same time.  

I love rehearsals. I love making things from scratch and figuring things out. And I love the shared experience with a team - people coming up with ideas you'd never think of.