Acting and Directing

When you get involved in theatre from an early age, there's no being a writer: if you're doing plays, then you're an actor or you're crew.

The first play I acted in was in the infants school, playing the story-teller in the school nativity. Basically I dressed up in a long purple robe and spun around at the beginning of the story.

From there, I made my way into Hathi Productions, playing policemen, headmasters and racists in plays about Asian fathers wanting their sons to work in the Walkers Crisps factory or their daughters to have an arranged marriage. Sometimes, just the mix it up, they wanted both.

That led to being in Hathi's Christmas show, The Fire Dragon, which led to me giving up acting. Until I hit university, where the performance module insisted that I was in a play: Howard Brenton's Epsom Downs.

That was so much fun, I decided to try my hand at directing and put on a version of Romeo and Juliet in my final year, before directing my own play The Lunatic at Edinburgh the next year. On top of all of that, I started writing and performing in comedy sketch shows with friends I'd made at university. And just when I thought I'd escaped, they dragged me back in: yes, Small Pleasures features my return to the stage . . .