Conversations, dispatches and ideas from the Bush Theatre.
Dream List: What plays should we (the users of bushgreen – ie emerging and professional Playwrights/Practitioners) be reading, putting on and going to see?
Anything by Dennis Kelly should be read/seen/worshipped. Same probably goes for Martin McDonagh.
What are your career highlights so far?
A twenty minute reading of the first half of my first play, it was on the set of Jerusalem so was already surreal but it was the first time I’d ever watched my own stuff with an audience, when people started laughing I thought I was going to have a heart attack.
Who is the greatest influence on your career?
Leo Butler the tutor on the Young Writers Programme and a brilliant writer in his own right too
What’s the best thing you’ve ever seen at the theatre?
Maybe that Hamlet or Richard II with Kevin Spacey at the Old Vic (same experience of just ‘getting it’) or the Norman Conquests at the Old Vic because it was just a flawless production and it’s a very funny very clever script.
Also Posh by Laura Wade blew me away when it was on at Royal Court and DC Moore’s Honest was the first kind of off West End monologue I’d ever seen and I’d always been a bit high and mighty over all that kind of stuff, but after I saw that I had to eat my words and my hat and humble pie.
Anya Reiss wrote her first play when she was 14 and then became a member of the Royal Court Theatre’s Young Writers’ Programme. She was invited to take part in the Royal Court’s Supergroup of young writers. Her play, THE ACID TEST, opened at the Royal Court in May 2011 and received rave reviews. Her debut play, SPUR OF THE MOMENT (written when she was 17) opened at the Royal Court Theatre in July 2010. Since then Anya has won the Most Promising Playwright Award at the 2010 Evening Standard Awards, Best New Play at the 2010 TMA Awards and Most Promising Playwright at the 2010 Critics’ Circle Awards.
