Perhaps fate led me inevitably to the theatre as a great love because my first kiss was in a scene study class when I was 14 years old. My scene partner and I were working on a sweet little scene that ended in a kiss; at least, that’s what the stage directions told us.

We were studying with the great Chicago acting teacher Joyce Piven. At the end of our performance for the class, the very sweet young man I was acting with planted one on me. I drew back in surprise, and Joyce said, in her unmistakable deep growl to the young actor, “Dear boy, you have to plan these things first!”

How do you adapt a book like The Waves? A terrifying idea, and one I could not get out of my brain, from the moment the director Jùlia Levai asked if I had ever considered doing it.

There are many things that drew me to re-imagining Noel Coward's The Rat Trap, an early play from the author of such enduring classics as Private Lives and Hay Fever.

It started with a Guardian long-read. I’m ashamed to admit it since so many shows could say the same, but that was the beginning.

I turn 36 this year, while living in London and rehearsing my new play The Fear of 13 at the Donmar Warehouse. The cast places a cake on my desk, covered in script pages and 10 pairs of handcuffs. I video the cake, the handcuffs, the singing actors – led by Adrien Brody – who have now broken into a sort of birthday rap. I text the video 5,500 miles to LA to my friend Nick Yarris, the man about whom I wrote the play, whom Adrien Brody is playing.

Forced Entertainment is a theatre company based in Sheffield, touring original performances around the world. The core group of 6 artists has been working together for 40 years, often inviting others to collaborate on particular projects. From the outset we wanted to make a different kind of theatre, incoporating influence from music, cinema, visual art, stand-up and performance art as well as from experimental theatre. The idea was to make theatre to speak about the times in which we were living, in a language born out of those times.

LIFT 2024 is nearly here. It’s a festival that will take you on deep and personal journeys. We’ve got shows that will catch your breath, spark your mind and rev up your imagination. There’s adrenaline too. It’s international theatre for your gut. 

In September 2022 I had an email from my American friend Richard Nelson: "Would you like me to write you a play?" Such an offer probably comes the way of very few actors and I was bowled over by it. My astonished and grateful response was tempered with a little uncertainty.

I first read Anne Gunter’s story about five years ago, when I was in my first year of university at Oxford, little knowing it would over time lead to our play Gunter [seen first in Edinburgh and transferring 3-25 April to the Royal Court].

I’m writing this in the lobby of the Menier Chocolate Factory a couple of hours before the first preview. I was last here in February for the start of rehearsals. In the time since, I’ve made a handful of, one hopes, helpful adjustments to the script. I’ll let audiences be the judge of that.