What inspired you to write Peter Grimes?

I visited these little villages by the Suffolk sea-side called Southwold and Walberswick for years since I was tiny, and my family feels very tied to there. I spent a lot of time walking around the harbour daydreaming, because there’s not a lot to do apart from sitting by the seaside and daydreaming. That’s where it began, the Christmas vacation before last, when I was wandering around Walberswick and came across a handmade printing of the George Crabbe poem, Peter Grimes. It was a beautiful edition, so I poured over it. I read the poem over and loved the illustrations; I already knew the Britten opera and the poem revealed to me how incredibly different the two were. It was fascinating that this story I thought I knew has a completely different version that predates it. And then I did a bit more research and found out it was actually a Suffolk local myth. I started to think about the character a lot, and from that I decided to have a go at doing it myself.

Why did you decide to re-write Peter Grimes as a play?

It’s a very dramatic story. I don’t have the skills to write an opera, and I don’t think you need another opera of Peter Grimes, but I thought it lent itself very well to a play because of its interrogation of character. He’s a very conflicted man, which lends itself to close and careful dramatic interrogation. Crabbe’s poem, being eighteenth-century, doesn’t do that and nor does Britten’s opera.

Was the writing process easier or more difficult than you thought it would be?

I have previously written an Oscar Wilde play for Cam FM, which I found really easy, but this was a very different experience because I had no intentions of it ever being staged. I found it a very pleasurable thing to do character sketches - I have a notebook to draw them in. I didn’t find it difficult to try to build a big play, because I wasn’t trying to. Then, however, I got to produce the Footlights Tour Show, Love Handles, and everyone involved went off for a week to write the show. As one of the tour managers I got to pick where we’d go, and so I sneakily picked Walberswick so that while everyone slept through the morning I would get up at 5 or 6 am and wander around the town, have some ideas, and then come back and type them up. Then, flash forward to the summer vacation, when I was at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where you have to take a week out or you’ll run out of money, so I spent that week locked away in a little bedroom writing a proper draft. Then I got back to Cambridge and showed it to a couple of my friends, who were really nice and didn’t say it was terrible, and said I should pursue it. And so I had a little group reading where I got friends to read it out loud, and it went really well. And so I applied for the show.

And now you’re in the process of seeing Peter Grimes come alive: has the play changed since bringing it to stage?

Yeah, hugely. There’s a scene in which someone drowns a cat and, when I wrote that, I showed it to someone who said it was ludicrous and I’d never be able to stage it at the ADC, and I said: “yeah, but I won’t be directing it so I don’t care…” Now I look at the script and think: “who wrote this? It’s impossible to stage!” Two people drown on stage, a cat gets drowned, there’s a massive fight, there’s a bar brawl - it’s nightmarish. But the play itself has changed hugely because I’ve had to really interrogate it with all the fine detail that a director would. If you’re just writing it, thinking that someone else will stage it, you get very imprecise, so directing is a process of clarification. You have to scale things down, or because of casting you have to change a character. We had a read-through last night and realised that we are very much at the beginning of this process. To me it had felt like that was the end, because I’d finally given in a written draft, but there is so much work to do. It’s terrifying as a writer, but also incredibly exciting, that the actors who come on board are also going to change what the play is. You have to be the person at the centre: everyone’s being creative around you, but you have to be the emitter, drawing in everyone’s ideas and then funnelling them through you. That is, at least, what I’m hoping to do.

At what stage of the process did you decide to direct the show as well?

About a week after I got the show. I floated the idea of co-directing with a couple of friends and they all said that since I have such a clear idea of what I want, I should do it myself. That was a really nice thing for them to do, because it sort of gave me permission. I haven’t directed an ADC main show before, and thought I just wasn’t qualified. But I have ideas for lighting and set design, so we’ll see how it goes.

Has this process made you want to do this in the future?

I’m very conscious of not wanting to sound like a parody of a Cambridge English student, but yes. One of the things that was brilliant about doing the Footlights show last year was that in Edinburgh we had a party with generations of people who have done the Footlights tour show, and you stand in a room, as in the 2015 tour, but there’s the 2014 tour, and the 2013 tour, the 2012 tour, and by the time you get to the 2011 tour, they’ve got jobs. You got to see that it was possible to go from the ADC to working in Radio 4 or beyond. I would absolutely love to pursue it as a career, and one of the nice things about Cambridge theatre is that it makes it feel possible.