Let’s talk about your move into screen because you were already a very established and very successful playwright in the mid-2010s when you decided well maybe you had it sounds like you had uh that idea in your mind from way back when but you began to really make tangible inroads into writing for television.

I was going to ask a question which now is a bit redundant because I was curious about the name of your theatre company which is Real TV. 

Were you always interested in the blurred boundaries between theatre and screen or are you always quite clear in your mind about what is theatre and what is television for example? 

I'm definitely clear in my mind about what is theatre and what is television. I think they are very different mediums and have very different tones and forms. But for theatre particularly, because I created so much work for young people and some of this work, would tour into tiny little regional schools in little classrooms on a hot, sweaty, Thursday afternoon or a huge gymnasium. and the poor actors would have to overcome all of those constraints to keep a young audience captivated.

Looking back, it was such good training ground for writing compelling, fast moving, riveting stories. You couldn't drop the ball, the actors couldn't drop the ball, the script couldn't drop the ball.

I guess one of the strategies I used was applying familiar genres to theatre. It fascinates me that that we are so obsessed with crime narratives in on our televisions, and yet we're not so much in theatre. 

I have all sorts of theories about why we're obsessed with crime. But I was really interested in finding out whether crime worked in a theatrical context. A number of my plays explored that idea. 

Yeah. I've read that you were interested in using genre as a way to explore those more political ideas we talked about before? To make the medicine go down or make it more palatable? 

Absolutely. You know, I had always seen ourselves as political theatre makers, but we thought that we were pretty cool and exciting as well. When people hear political theatre, they often doze off, and we wanted to make it as exciting and compelling and edge of the seat as we could.

The dark room was a play that we produced downstairs at Belvoir and in the tiny little theatre and we wanted it to be a thrilling and terrifying experience. It's a ghost crime story. It's set in a hotel room but in three different temporalities. 

It felt for the tiny audience very immersive, we used all the stage tricks that we could to make it really propulsive. 

Right. And I guess the thing about genre, is audiences have expectations about certain tropes, so you can use that to subvert those tropes sometimes. 

Absolutely. And I think it just brings in younger audiences as well and there's an argument that theatre is a dying medium. I'm not sure if that's true, in fact, I don't think that's true, but I certainly want to see a diverse age group in my audience, and that was part of the strategy.