A Night on the Tiles

A Night on the Tiles was my second award winning play - winning the Manchester Student Playwriting Competition in 1998. It was performed at C Venues between 5 and 31 August 1998 as part of the Edinburgh Festival.

It was a heavily rewritten version of a play I wrote straight after Hello?, and was inspired by the Tori Amos song Me and A Gun, which she wrote about her rape at the hands of a fan.

For some reason, I seemed to have it in my head that plays must be written about "issues": after the reception that The Kissing Game got, you'd think that I would have run a mile from writing about traumas I only know about through research. But it was a competition, and the subject matter got me noticed. Who knows.

The play was produced by K486, and performed at C Venues (who were then based at Over Seas House on Princess Street). It was the first of my plays where I started to develop my own style. It involved short scenes and rapid cutting, and the use of captions on TV screens (although this feature was the first to go when it was performed).

Basically, I've been very bored sitting through two hour plays that take thirty minutes to work their way through a scene. I wanted to write theatre for the TV generation - for people who could make rapid connections and take character from snippets.

Unfortunately, my ideas seem to go against every theatre in the country's: every rejection letter I got for plays written in this style kept saying "Why not try writing for TV?"