Early 2022, fresh off a fantastic pantomime-writing experience, it was time to write my first “proper” play. I had seen an open call for one of the Big National (England-based) Producing Theatres looking for scripts.

This was one of the Big Theatres that produce Massive Productions on their Huge Stage. Whatever I wrote, it was not going to be of the quality or scale to be produced by this theatre, but I wanted to write a play and knew I needed a deadline to make myself actually do it.

So, night before the deadline, I stayed up all night and just kind of stream-of-conscious hammered out a script and submitted it. The resulting script was a one-act play for one actor written in a Glasgow dialect. Which is to say, I wrote something completely unsuited for the theatre I was submitting it to. But I now had a first draft I could return to at a later date. It also, in all fairness, didn’t really have an ending. I just wrote until I didn’t want to write anymore and, when I didn’t know what I wanted to come next, I stopped typing and exported to pdf. But I had proved to myself that I was capable of writing a play. Or at least capable of writing 90% of a play.

I didn’t intend to write a “rape comedy” as such. Sexual violence was occupying a lot of my thoughts at the time (and continues to) and I wanted to write something that reflected how smaller things we excuse and accept as normal contribute to a culture where life-altering sexual violence and abuse is so common, and how this permissiveness insidiously pervades girls’ and women’s lives.

A rape occurs towards the end of the play, but there still had to be an hour or so of play happening before that. I wanted the characters to feel like real people and real people are funny and real situations are funny.

I decided to set it over the course of one day. My intention here was to create a microcosm. By jamming it all into a short time frame, I aimed to reflect the experience of compounding harms. That when one thing happens, it’s not just one thing. It’s another thing on top of a back catalogue of other incidents.

The one day was a wedding day. When I was fifteen, I had a job as a wedding photographer’s assistant and, every Saturday, I would go to a wedding with the photographer and get a good look into other people’s lives. (Writing this, I’m thinking wow, that sounds like a good job! I hated every second of it.) So my protagonist became a wedding photographer’s assistant. People are weird at weddings and they have the potential to do, like, anything, behaviour-wise. So it’s quite a fun setting for a play, lot’s of scope to write fun scenes, and has a natural end point where people will never see each other again.

I made the character a teenage girl. Partially because it’s just what I felt like in the moment. Partially because I had given her a teenager’s job. Mostly because it was important that it was possible for her to begin the play basically naive to everything, and to have the luxury of that naivety taken away from her by the end. It’s a fun fun comedy!

The result was essentially a coming of age story in which various threads of what we could consider the more benign elements of rape culture build to a horrible climax. Most of it is fun and lighthearted, and the end is…not that.

Fast forward some months, I got an email from the Big Theatre, saying thanks but no thanks (duh). But they did include this which I actually found very encouraging:

Some more weeks later, I got another email from the admin of the same company, saying the person who read my play for the open call is a producer and director and would like to get in touch if I would like to speak to him. Again, duh.

I got an email from this producer/director whom I shall call Mark. Mark said he loved my script and would love to develop it to production with me.

!!!!!!!!!!! v exciting

He was in the south of England and I was in Glasgow so we met via Zoom. He began the call by telling me how much he loved my script and then spent the rest of the call implying that he, in actual fact, kind of hated everything about it.

He didn’t like the Scottishness of it. This was not something I was willing to compromise on. I wrote characters who are meant to feel like real people who live in a place and therefore talk like real people who live in that place. If I limited myself to not-local-to-anywhere English, I would be restricting my vocabulary by about a third. Worse: I wouldn’t be funny. It’s not written in, like, impenetrable Scots language or anything. I also did include translations in brackets throughout. If everyone can watch and understand and enjoy Derry Girls (which I also do), then they can get onboard with some Scottish phrasing.

Mark rolled his eyes while laughing at the fact that it’s set at a wedding, saying every play is set at a wedding. But when I mentioned that I had had the same Saturday job as the character, suddenly he was absolutely fine/positive about the setting.

(This doesn’t make sense to me—audiences wouldn't have that information so I don’t know why it would change anything.)

I confessed that I didn’t so much write the ending as just end the writing and Mark suggested an ending. He suggested that, at the end of the play, we skip forward five years or so and the character has been massively changed by the experience; it has shaped her life in some significant way and she’s become, like, strong and powerful because of it, and has dedicated her adult life to ending sexual violence. But I thought that felt kind of trite, and also not real. I also had no intention of telling a neat, rounded recovery story, or an inspirational ‘See, everything always works out fine in the end👍’ story.

He invited me to come and see the show he had produced/directed at the Edinburgh Fringe. I said I would and we would speak again after. I ended the call feeling pleased that wheels seemed to be in motion, but uneasy about the fact that we seemed not to be exactly ~artistically aligned~. (I’m aware how wanky that sounds but I didn’t know how else to phrase it. Be assured I also hate it.)

I went to see his show at the Fringe. It was a one woman play about an incident of sexual violence. And the end jumped forward a few years to an uplifting ending where everything is fine and actually it’s good that it happened because of how much she grew as a person.

All things considered, I decided this collaboration didn’t feel right and unfortunately ended it before it began.

Some time later, I think the following summer, a new-writing London theatre announced that they were looking to meet writers so I submitted the same script to them. They ended up getting in touch saying I was one of the writers they wanted to meet.

Cue another Zoom call. A production was never on the table in this instance, they just wanted to meet and offer advice to the writers whose scripts they chose. The woman I spoke to really hammered in that I should be looking for a female director and ideally a female producer and ideally Scottish women. I took this advice and ended up getting in touch with an independent producer who is both Scottish and a woman.

We had actually known of each other for a couple of years by this point and kind of been in each other’s orbit but never actually had a conversation. (I actually think she assistant produced something unrelated I wrote in 2022/23 but we never crossed paths.) She seemed excited to work with me and basically said whatever project I wanted to do, and however I wanted to do it, she would make it happen. We had one great, lovely, hopeful, exciting call and then I hadn’t even had the chance to send her over the script before she started working for a theatre company and ghosted me. Yaldi.

That one was quite gutting, tbh, as I’d had visions of what could have been. But now it had been a couple of years since I actually wrote the script so I accepted that the stars were not aligned for this one and put it in a drawer permanently. (It has never been printed out, it’s a pdf on my laptop.)

I had so successfully put it in said drawer that I didn’t think about it again until I got an email from a woman called Emily who passed on some feedback on the script.

I do not know Emily. I had sent my play to no one except the two theatres. Emily did not tell me who she was or whose feedback she was quoting. This drove me to distraction for about four days trying to work out who/what/why/how and—long, frustrating story short—the mystery of the anonymous feedback never got solved.

This is what the mysterious feedbacker/feederback had to say, according to “Emily” at least (typing this has reactivated my curiosity lol whoooooo aaaaare yooooou????):

No higher compliment than being told your writing is understandable! 😍

I’m kidding, that was obviously nice to read. I received the mystery feedback the same morning that someone on instagram shared an open, free to enter, international playwriting prize that closed the same day. So I thought fuck it, might as well fire it in.

I went back to the script to give it a proper ending. I considered the feedback and suggestions from Mark and I did…absolutely not that. My ending is a bit more angry and despondent and realistic than it is inspirational.

The play now ends with the character imagining different endings than what “really” happened. And then we do have a time jump. She starts speaking directly to the audience about sexual violence in general and how fucked everything is. She tells us that, after the wedding, she retreated into herself and shrunk her life out of trauma and fear, but she is now braving the world again. And while she’s not doing perfectly, she’s doing well enough. I chose to end it this way again as a reflection of reality for so many. You really have no choice but to push back into the world that created the conditions that allowed something bad to happen to you. But that is not insurmountable. And most people don’t start national advocacy campaigns and go on The One Show or whatever.

I uploaded it to the competition knowing it wouldn't win. It was, you will recall, a one-act one-actor comedy about sexual violence written in local dialect, that has never had any development or dramaturgy, entered into an international playwriting award (the prize for which is £5000 and publication of the script) against people much more talented than I am, with plays with much more development than this script has had. Having read the title of this post, you will already know it did indeed not win. It did, however, make the longlist and then the shortlist. When I saw it had made the shortlist, I was a wee bit extremely chuffed.

When I saw I hadn’t won, I won’t lie, there was a definite undercurrent of disappointment. I had allowed myself to imagine the doors that might have opened up if I could call myself ‘an award winning playwright’, and £5000 would be a gamechanging amount of money for me right now. There was never any info on how or when decisions would be made or announced so, might as well admit all, I checked the Prize’s website every single morning for over a year. And every time, as the website loaded, I let myself think about what I would do with the prize money. I would have taken the play to the Edinburgh Fringe, using the money to pay venue fees and a director. I would have done a full month’s run and performed it myself in the venue I had decided on in my head. (For any Fringeheads out there, I was picturing the Anatomy Lecture Theatre at Summerhall.) Alas, it was not to be.

But, as I say, the disappointment was only an undercurrent. Partially because I never expected to win, but also largely because the shortlist was announced more than a year ago, and that is a long time to maintain a final ember of hope for a project that is quite close to your heart (it was my first real play after all).

I wrote it more than four years ago. I am fully ready to let it rot in my Documents folder. But, if you will forgive me bigging myself up for a moment, honestly, I still think it’s quite fun and funny and still feels relevant four years later so I am glad I didn’t shelve it after the first rejection in 2022.

RIP that play, I hereby banish you from my thoughts forever, and free myself from thinking about you ever again.

Unless…

Maybe one day…

LONG TIME NO SPEAK 2026 IS KICKING MY ARSE RELENTLESSLY THANKS FOR STAYING IN MY ABSENCE BYEEEE XXXXX

P.S. I started writing this when Substack had confetti…