Writing a play is a solitary experience, or at least it was for me. Long nights and sunken afternoons pass by with stilted and jarring thoughts, thankfully disrupted by shorter periods of clarity. Seeing a play rise up from the page and fleshed out in, well, flesh, is nothing less than the opposite of all this. It’s communal, fast-paced and characterised by the uncertainty of how it will all be received. I no longer have any idea whether I’ve written trash, a masterpiece or a trashy masterpiece. I only know I was proud of it at the time it was finished.

Many first-time writers, inspired by the opportunities of Cambridge’s excellent dramatic scene, will be writing with the real prospect of a complete production in mind. Because of this, most student writers, though not all, will try and maintain control of their creation as much as possible. Even though this is nothing blameworthy, I’ve chosen not to. My show, Killing Other People, is directed by someone else. A very gifted and thoughtful director I should add, but another person nonetheless.

Throughout the writing process I had sustained in my mind the exact way each line would push the drama and how each gesture would accompany every silence. It also seems that my director has done the same throughout the reading process. I found myself smiling when, after a first encounter with the script, he revealed his plans for a quasi-realist adventure through the play’s thematic backbone when I had seen a straightforward human drama. The set is so far removed from what I’d conceived that I fleetingly thought he’d read another play by mistake. Now that I see the work coming together along the lines of this vision, I couldn’t image it in any other way, as if that was the only viable option for any performance.

‘Who are you to write a play?’ your inner voice teases. It’s a good question. But having taken on so many creative suggestions, the unease ebbs away. If someone can legitimately see things in your creations that you’d never noticed, it’s either a sign that you don’t know what you’re doing, or you’ve made something interesting enough to be worth thinking about. As I sit back in the Corpus Playroom, seeing the action unfold, trying not to say too much and just watch what’s said and done, it’s as if I never wrote the thing at all. Not in a way that I wish to disown it, but instead as if it’s just as much the cast’s and the director’s as it is mine. For me, plays are the most intriguing of art forms, because they’re only complete for the minutes during which they have actors and an audience. Writing is just the end of the beginning. Giving it up is when it becomes interesting.

Killing Other People is next week’s late show at the Corpus Playrooms: Tue 22 – Sat 26 Jan, 9.30pm.