You always need to be somewhat mindful of the space you're writing for.
But I feel like, actually, limitations and boundaries are brilliant.
They make things so much more creative.
I actually think it's quite good to have restrictions.
I think the most terrifying thing is to just start a play
where you could do anything! (LAUGHS)
So I actually find it really helpful to be like,
'OK, I can have five characters, I can have this, I can have that.'
And also, sometimes if you don't have much of a budget,
you're forced to be really imaginative.
What is really brilliant about the stage, about theatre, and what's different
from film or TV is the stage is a metaphorical space.
By which I mean, if you want to put an army on stage,
you can do it, and it doesn't mean you need an army.
I mean, you can use everything - that's the stage...
The craft of making a play
affords you, which is
the fact that one person can stand in for 25.
The fact that you can have costumes, sound, light, movement -
all of those things can create an army for you
without you having to literally costume 10,000 extras.
Which is what is exhilarating, I think, about the stage.
Things can have more than their literal reality. That's so exciting!
I do always have a sense of
the space that it's going into.
I think it really impacts on
the size of the play
and the intimacy of...
The quality of the dialogue -
whether you know that there's going to have to be
big, wide spaces between the characters,
because it's in the Olivier,
or whether you can really tighten down.
If you're writing in the round,
I think you'll write differently from if you're writing a sort of...
proscenium-arch-type theatre.
So definitely the space will affect the writing.
I don't really write with clear spaces in mind.
I just know what the location needs to do
and where it needs to be,
but not clear ideas of what it could be.
This is specifically because theatre is about collaboration.
The stage designer needs to come and bring fresh ideas
and feel like they're contributing to your work.
If you arrive there with everything kind of bolted down,
then there isn't room for play.
And that is really important to everyone working on the play.
Increasingly with my plays,
I'm excited by
texts for theatre as being provocations for other artists.
What I mean...
..is I like a play to inspire the imagination
of the actors and the directors and get them to work.
There's a lot of problems in my plays,
because there's no clue about how you're meant to do something. But I like that.
Because I like a rehearsal room where people are thinking.
So I tend to not prescribe physical activity.
I tend to leave space for physical activity
and allow the director, the movement director,
the actor, the performer, to find space for that.
I always just write something hoping that it's going to be a challenge
to the people that are going to make it.
That said, I do think it's worth thinking about
how the things that you've written
might be achievable in performance.
You probably won't be able to have a naturalistic rendition of every location
if you choose to move locations lots of times.
I also think that if you're writing a shorter play,
that sticking to one location can work really well,
because you retain intensity
by not moving around so much in space and time.
In film and television,
the edit is incredibly rapid.
And quite often people beginning to write for theatre
will try and write scenes which
have the same rapidity of edit as in a film or television drama.
I think just hold your nerve and stay in the space for a long time.
The advantage of theatre is you stay in the same room as these people
for ten, 15 minutes, 20 minutes at a time.
When I write a scene, stage directions really help me place it.
And actually, it helps me
emotionally place the characters as well.
You know, if someone can't answer but they just turn away,
that's really important for me
to write that and helps me write the scene.
I used to be an actress, and when I was an actress,
the first thing I'd do was cross out all the stage directions.
So I'll write a lot of stage directions in,
but I'm really happy for people to cross them out if they don't help.
If you have got a very strong idea, um...
..it's worth putting it in, because some directors just ignore stage directions.
But they'll have read it, so they'll then get a better picture
of what you did have in mind.
Not like endless long bits of stage directions,
but just if you absolutely know there's a long pause there.
Not if you're tempted to write it 25 times in your script,
but if it's just once and you know it's there, put it down.