Playwright Nathan Queeley-Dennis: "I don't think I could have carried on much longer - then my life changed"

The Bruntwood Prize winner on writing for stage and TV plus a pros and cons list of he new Macbeth at the Lyric, Son of a Bitch, Offies news and more!

Hello friends!

Hope all is hunky-dory with you. Isn’t it nice to have some sun, finally? I took my laptop out for a walk and sat on a Roman tumulus to do some work this week. It felt good to work outside for the first time this year and feel the grass under my feet. This is a very theatre-oriented Working Differently. Hope you enjoy!

This week I went to the glorious Chloé Nelkin Consulting 15 years celebration party, where Chloé announced CNC will be opening a new publishing arm, CNC Books, for play texts. When lots of play publishers are taking on less work, or disappearing altogether (the erosion of theatre infrastructure is an inadvertent theme this week, sadly) it’s something to celebrate. Chloé said, “We work with so many artists who struggle to get their incredible world published and this initiative will lend support to them and allow their work to shine on the page as well as the stage.”Huzzah!

I also saw Son of A Bitch at Southwark Playhouse – a one-woman show about a mother who calls her son a c*nt and the video of it goes viral thoughts in Any Other Business at the end of this post.

Son of a Bitch: nice pink jumpsuit though. Anna Morris stars as Marnie in Sn of a Bitch at Southwark Playhouse - Borough, unil 15 March / Pic: Steve Gregson

Also, Victoria Yeates, my lovely friend and actor has made it to the finals of the Offies for her performance in Wormholes! The ceremony is in a couple of weeks, so I have all fingers crossed obviously, but I’m also attending as press so will try to mask my extreme bias for that category.

I also caught Macbeth at the Lyic Hammersmith. I reckon all the school kids that are going to shipped in to see it for their GCSEs will enjoy it, bu it was a bit of a dog’s dinner in terms of the themes they chose to highlight. Here’s a pros and cons list, as the show had a lot of things going for it too.

Macbeth

What’s good about it:

• The passages that had long faded from my memory about Scotland’s war against Norwegian forces were given fresh life and were very present. There was a real sense of a battling underdog in the Scottish forces who were also themselves divided. It had evocations of the Ukrainian conflict.

• Lots of nice acting. Lady Macbeth! Lois Chimimba does that rare thing of making Shakespeare both easy to understand and emotionally evocative.

• The ‘great equivocator’ speech - actually funny for once, thanks to Sophie Leigh Stone, who finds a lot of depth the fused character of Ross/ the porter, who suffers with PTSD.

• Filming stuff: This has become a bit old hat with all sorts of shows filming the action (Arg, Bluets! WHY?) but it worked here because it showed the ghosts that the Macbeths see but no-one else does. Cool.

• Set by Designer Basia Binkowska is curvy mansion, with 70s wood panelling turret housing aan aluminium-panelled kitchen for the mandatory hand-washing. Excellent use of mirrors so we get framed cameos of the more private moments between the Macbeths.

• The fourth-wall-breaking banquet where audience members participate - this will liven up all the school trips.

What’s not good about it:

• The final fight scene. Why oh why would you make a mockery of the final fight. They played it like a jokey scrum in the park after school rather than the ultimate fight to the death. Killed the tension, ruined everything.

• The second act was full of the nervous directorial twitch of: I’m not sure of my own vision so I’ll just throw a load of glittery props around and see what sticks. Director Richard Twyman usually knows what he’s doing so this unhinged approach was weird.

• Alex Austin’s Macbeth is a happy chappy Essex lad, which is initially likeable but his character seems at odds with any real sense of stakes or tension in this fight for his own survival. He commits to the character playfully well – so it may be the direction that’s asked him to be so trivialising of his own fate.

Until 29 March, Lyric Hammersmith

This week’s Working Differently interview is with actor / playwright / screenwriter Nathan Queeley-Dennis. He won the UK's biggest playwriting prize, the Bruntwood 2022 with his debut play Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz. The play is about a young Black Brummie man who is eternally optimistic about finding love and was snapped by production company Kudos to transform it into a TV show. He’s now a judge for a cruiseliner to find a new play to be performed at sea, with a £6000 reward and a free cruise for two. Get writing everyone!

Nathan Queeley-Dennis; Brummie theatremaker / Pic: Ellamae Cieslik

As you’ll see from the chat, Nathan’s pathway into being Bruntwood winner doesn’t exist any more – because the venues and initiatives that supported his development along the way are kaput. If you want to test your early writing work out in similar ways, and head on a similar trajectory, I can recommend Theatre503’s Rapid Write Response nights, Omnibus Theatre’s Engine Room, Papatango and Royal Court Writer’s Membership which are all there to help grow new writing and writers. These are all London-based because that’s where I am… do please comment below with any great schemes you know about near you.

Emily: You're now on the judging panel for the Ambassador Peel Playwriting Challenge 2025?

Nathan: Yeah. It's really exciting to be able to go through all these new plays, and it's going to be performed on a ship. It's a different set of parameters, so it is really a writing challenge in that regard. The opportunity to read new plays and hear new voices that you maybe haven't heard before is probably the most exciting thing.

Emily: You're seeing something quite in a raw stage, I guess. And it's just the words.

Nathan: Yeah, exactly. You get the most purest... It's just the writer's voice. Ultimately, without those words, there's nothing. And the words can take you to that transformative place. It's the same with reading anything, really, in that regard. But I'm really looking forward to getting lost in the worlds that different writers have created for this challenge.

Emily: So let's go back in time. So you won the Bruntwood?

Nathan: Yes, I did.

Emily: That's like a catapult to everyone suddenly being very interested in you.

Nathan: Yes, it was.

Emily: When did you start playwriting? And were you a playwright before the Bruntwood?

Nathan: So I've predominantly been an actor before writing. So I've worked in... I've worked for the National Theatre, I've worked in the West End, I've worked at the Kiln Theatre, Royal Court, Birmingham Rep, I've done UK tour, I've worked in Europe. So I mainly worked as an actor.

As an actor, I just always enjoyed creating. So I can't ever really pinpoint the moment where I could say now I'm a writer butit makes sense that I was writing. And I just wrote just for the sense of control and ownership over my own creativity, which I think is one of the most beautiful things about being a writer. It's like you get to choose the stories that you tell and you get full ownership over how they're portrayed and the way and the manner they're told.

Emily: And Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz started out as a 10-minute monologue. Give me a sense of time. What year was this?

Nathan: I did a short monologue competition around April, May, 2018. I went to the national final at the end of 2018. Then throughout 2019, I finished writing it. Then I had this 10-page script, and I sent it off for this thing called Pint Size Plays, which is like you have a 10-minute extract performed at the Bunker Theatre [RIP]. I ended up being one of the five scripts selected for that. Then I was like, Okay, this actually has legs,. Then my acting stuff picked up a more. I started doing a couple more jobs, so I didn't have much time. But then I was getting ready to do a sharing of it with a Wildcard theatre [also RIP] at the Vault Festival [A big month-long festival of new writing in the Waterloo Vaults – also RIP] in early 2020.

Emily: I loved Vault

Nathan: Yeah, exactly. Unfortunately, it's not with us anymore. Even more unfortunately, it never got to happen at all because of COVID. The week we were meant to open, everything was getting shut down, so it never ended up happening.

Emily: Pesky COVID.

Nathan: Then coming into 2021, I was working with Paine's Plough doing their roundabout tour as an actor. On that tour, it was a load of new writing. There was May Queen by Frankie Meredith, there was Hungry by Chris Bush, Really Big and Really Loud by Phoebie Eclair Powell and then Black Love by Chinonyerem Odimba. I think it was the first time in my career working with really great new writing.

Nathan: It really lit the fire in my belly, seeing new work and new plays. It's so much fun. I remember speaking to Phoebe Eclair-Powell [who won the Bruntwood back in 2019] and saying ‘I’ve actually written something, it’s only ten pages’. Then I was like, You know what? I should finish it. Otherwise, I'll be looking back in a few years time, being like, What could have been? I then took it into my own hands and just between the end of 2021 into 2022, just committed to actually completing the writing of the play. Then I had all these lists of different playwriting prizes that I was ready to submit for. I missed every single deadline, basically. It's so embarrassing as well. I had a proper spreadsheet. I was so planned and organised for it, but I still missed every deadline. I think part was just being afraid.

Nathan: But the last one that was open at that time was the Bruntwood Prize, and I didn't really expect much from it because of the previous players I've won. I felt like the play wasn't necessarily... It didn't sit in that pantheon or anything. But you could get feedback.

Emily: Yeah, worth it for the feedback.

Nathan: Yeah. Exactly. I was like, If I can get to the feedback phase, that'll be really good because then I can actually have conversations with people in buildings. And yeah. I just ended up winning.

Emily: What did that feel like?

Nathan: Honestly, it was just one of the best moments of my life, honestly. I don't think I've ever... I've won the egg and spoon race at school and stuff. But Something like that, something of that magnitude. It was such a... I can't think of the word, but it was so reassuring. It was a real confirmation of, Yeah, you've been sitting on something that people actually do want to hear and read. I’d just been doing it my own time, not really telling anybody about it... I didn't really suffer from any form of imposter syndrome or anything like that. I was just like, Okay, this is something I should be doing. This is the right thing to be doing right now. And I just wanted to carry on. It was really life-affirming in that regard. It helped catapult me towards the career and the work that I'm doing now, which is great.

Emily: Did it open a lot of doors? Did you get lots of other offers?

Nathan: Yeah, opened a lot of doors. I immediately started having conversations with different theatres, different TV and film production companies. I'm signed with my literary agent, and it's just been 100. That was all in the... At the same I was also doing a play. I was still acting. I was doing a play at the Soho Place in London, the newest theatre. I was doing As You Like It, directed by Josie Rourke. I was performing in that at the same time. It was just all happening at once. It was unbelievable. Amazing.

Emily: What else are you working on at the moment then?