Plays can be sparked off in many different ways. One of my plays (Darling Oscar) began with the idea of a young woman, living at home, who had caused devastating shame to her parents.

That’s probably because at the time I was a young woman who had left home a couple of years previously and although I hadn’t done anything too devastating, it had certainly been under “trying” circumstances. 

In this play, the ‘devastating shame’ was the daughter giving birth to a fish. This was based on something I had read in a newspaper article. Having made a link between the idea of the daughter giving birth to a fish and her parents subsequent shame, I also imagined the girl’s mother (the fish’s grandmother if you like) going ballistic with a Chux wipe and a bottle of Nifty because her daughter had trodden mud into the pristine carpet.

I could hear her voice, I could see her face, I could smell the Nifty. This became the opening scene of the play.

For me, the combination of magic ingredients were the sense of family embarrassment which felt like a truthful emotional base for me, plus the story element of the newspaper article, plus the image/character of a very angry woman scrubbing the carpet.