Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.
'Posh' is not really political. I didn't want to aim a brickbat at the system. Or to bash Old Etonians. It was always the class and privilege aspect of that world that I was most drawn to. There is something endlessly fascinating about imagining something you could never be involved in.
Old Etonians are the most charming people in the world. It's not just the analytic ability and the great education; there is a really easy confidence to them that draws people to them and makes their passage though the world a little easier.
In my final year at Bristol University, I wrote a play called 'White Feathers.' It was produced in the studio theatre at the students' union in early 1999, when I was 21. It's 100 pages long: a very traditional play, with an interval, about deserters in the First World War.
I was the family alien. Both my parents are quite creative, but I was... appalling... always putting on little shows. I was rather a shy child, not a natural performer, but there was a performative edge to everything I did.
I think the interesting thing about the word 'posh' is that it is so relative; it's quite a provocative title because people have strong feelings about that word.
I am interested in the way advances in medicine and palliative care mean more people now have the opportunity to plan their own deaths, and also plan for those who are left behind. What does that do to the grieving process?
I'm not posh at all. I grew up in Sheffield but never managed to pick up the accent - which was careless because there'd be some cache now in being a northern playwright, but I missed out on that one.
Writing a tribe is fun. They have their own language, their own slang; they repeat it, and it becomes part of the texture of the play. For a writer, that's thrilling. That's when my pen flies.
It's very lucky to be able to do a job where I get to sit about writing plays all day and going to the theatre. The downside, I suppose, is that you put it out there, and people are invited to like it or loathe it.
I think a lot of playwrights have a script in their bottom drawer that hopefully no one will ever see about a bunch of young people sharing a flat and getting up to crazy stuff.
