I Wrote a Play - And People Have Seen It
It’s a strange experience, reading essentially semi-autobiographical porn to a room full of friends. Cathartic. On Thursday 20 February 2025, that’s exactly what I did.
I’ve been writing for a long time. Obviously. You don’t make a whole online brand for yourself on the whim you might one day find the topic interesting. That said, I’ve never felt comfortable calling myself a ‘writer’. Everything I wrote always seemed to be on the wrong side of competent after reading it back, and my email inbox is a litany of rejections. But, I carried on. Okay, the hits knocked me down for months at a time, but putting fingers to keys or pen to paper has always been my north star. There’s no dark hole that writing can’t, and hasn’t, pulled me out of.
Being in the early days of my writing career, everything I write tends to have that characteristic hint of autobiography. Someone’s always gay. There’s always a Church angle, and good lord my characters were horny. But nothing ever truly read as real or authentic. In 2023, I decided to just get the whole thing out of my system. One play to flush the shame away in a flurry of beautiful fiction. The idea I created was… busy.
It was a one-person show, which seemed the right move for cost more than anything. It was about a late-20s gay man with commitment issues. He was also a prolific child therapist specialising in the rehabilitation of juvenile criminals. There was a Catholic funeral. There was a therapy sub-plot. And to top it off, there was a virgin ghost of the protagonist stalking him throughout.
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t bloody work. So, I shelved it. I carried on reading plays, watching National Theatre at Home, and knew I’d one day return to the project. Which I’ve now done.
Not to be ‘that’ dickhead, but visiting the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time genuinely changed my life. It also changed my writing. Watching one-person shows in rooms above restaurants, in small studios, and dedicated venues was mesmerizing. What was inspiring, though, was how thin everything was. Plays consisted, of course, of minimal or non-existent sets, but the story’s were just as thin. One strand, packed to the point of bursting with detail, physicality, and beauty. Nothing was off limits. One play consisted of the actor giving an audience member a small mirror to hold while he tried to shave his taint (miming, he was fully clothed).
Something clicked, and within three months, ‘I Have Sinned’ had been completely rebuilt from the ground up. Even now, four months since I finished my latest redraft, I don’t hate it. In fact, I think it’s rather good.
I’m also unable to take it any further on my own.
Enter Porter’s Theatre, the newest fringe venue in Cardiff. For some utterly bizarre reason, Dan Porter allowed me access to the venues studio space so I could put on a closed reading of the play for feedback. For someone that never felt comfortable calling myself a writer, that’s a huge confidence boost.
Suddenly, the play began occupying a thus far empty part of my brain. This is no longer a word document that lives and dies in my OneDrive. It’s a play. It needs to occupy space. The audience need some idea of tone and vibe before the play starts. The words need to be spoken, intentions need to be clear, and half the dialogue needs to be recorded before we even turn up. I’ve read enough books on writing and playmaking to know that it’s not enough to just be there, you have to stand out. So I made invites. I used the content of the play to inform not only how I’d invite people, but to create an entire ‘marketing’ persona for the play that I can use for the plays entire lifespan. Invites to the play were designed to resemble invites to a church wedding or funeral. Orders of service were created with sexually explicit songs in the place of hymns, and I made a graphic for the play which I’m probably prouder of than any written word in the play itself.
Of course, when the day came, the fear, anxiety, and imposter syndrome all reminded me of their existence. But I got through it. Not only did I get through it, but I also think it went rather well. As someone who has read the script a hundred times, there were issues I noticed that the audience didn’t, but equally they picked up on things I’d genuinely never considered. It’s a strange experience, writing something to illicit one emotion, but getting something completely different yet equally rewarding out of them.
Next steps are never something I’ve needed to consider. The next steps have exclusively involved me, a desk, a coffee, and a pair of headphones. But now… next steps are something new. Next steps are looking for an editor, scouting for a director, and doing something I’ve never done with a script before:
Putting it on its feet.
Thanks to the support of peers, friends, and of course Dan and the team at Porter’s, I’m finally able to accept that I am, in my heart and now in practice, a writer.
Also, potentially, an actor… but that’s a story for another day.
