A Very Difficult Person: You Can't See the Show When You're Inside It

What making my first solo theatre show taught me about writing, creative development, dramaturgy and the importance of an outside eye.

For most of my career, I’ve been the person standing slightly to the side of the stage. Since 2014, I’ve written, directed and produced work with and for other artists, helping to develop ideas, shape scripts and work out what a show is trying to be. I’ve always loved that part of the process. There is something fascinating about taking an idea that exists only in someone’s head and gradually turning it into something an audience can experience.

I’ve written and directed work for other people for years, but making my own solo theatre show was a different proposition. Suddenly I was the writer, director and performer. There was nobody else automatically occupying the space between me and the work. I had to find my own story, write it, perform it and then somehow work out whether any of it was actually working.

The result was A Very Difficult Person, a modern cautionary fairy tale about what happens when a roofer knocks on your door and turns a £1,400 quote into an £18,500 nightmare. Making it has taught me a lot about creative development, but perhaps the biggest lesson has been a simple one: when you are very close to a piece of work, you cannot always see it clearly.

Finding the story

I’d wanted to make my own show for years. I just didn’t have a story.

Then, in 2025, a roofer knocked on my door.

What followed was stressful, frightening and, eventually, slightly absurd. There was a point when I thought the dispute might end up in court, so I documented everything. I kept notes, recordings, photographs, messages and diaries because I thought I might need them as evidence.

Instead, I accidentally created an archive of my own life.

That archive became the starting point for A Very Difficult Person. The roofer became the Big Bad Wolf. The house became the setting for a modern cautionary fairy tale. What had happened to me became a way of exploring trust, shame, self-blame and the uncomfortable possibility that the person who looks like the villain is not always immediately recognisable as one.

But having a story is not the same thing as having a show. The interesting work was figuring out what to do with it.

Writing from the voice

My first draft did not really begin with me sitting down and writing a script. I talked.

I improvised the story aloud, recorded myself, transcribed the recordings and then started shaping those transcripts into a script. I’ve found this approach particularly useful when writing material that I know I’m eventually going to perform. Speaking gives you access to things that can disappear when you start worrying about whether something is good writing.

You hear the rhythm of the language. You notice the repetitions, the changes of direction and the phrases that you would actually use in conversation. You also discover things you didn't know were funny until you hear yourself saying them.

For me, there is something particularly useful about using oracy as part of the writing process. I am interested in writing that sounds like a person, rather than writing that simply looks good on the page. Starting with spoken material helped me find the voice of the show before I worried too much about polishing the script.

Some of that early material also made its way into performances at Story Slam in Bristol, which gave me an opportunity to test parts of the story in front of an audience. That was an important part of the creative development process. I wasn't waiting until I had a finished script to find out whether the material worked. I was allowing an audience to help me understand what was interesting, what was funny and what was probably only interesting to me.

Structure and the freedom to change the truth

Around this point, I took Elf Lyons' How to Make Your Dream Show workshop. I had already been working on the material, but the workshop gave me a different way of looking at it.

One of the ideas that stayed with me was the importance of not letting the truth get in the way of a good story. That might sound like an odd principle for autobiographical theatre, but I found it enormously freeing. Just because something really happened does not mean it has to happen on stage in exactly the same way.

Autobiographical theatre is not a court transcript. You can compress time, move events around, combine moments, change details and heighten things. What matters is whether the audience believes the emotional truth of the story.

The five-act structure we explored also gave me a useful framework for a one-hour show. Suddenly I wasn't looking at an enormous collection of memories, anecdotes and documents. I had somewhere to put them. I could start asking what the audience needed to know, when they needed to know it, where the story changed direction and what the piece was ultimately building towards.

I went away and wrote the second draft.

Then I did something that is easy to say and sometimes surprisingly difficult to do: I handed it to somebody else.

The value of a dramaturg

Mike Akers, a playwright and dramaturg, read the script and gave me feedback. This was particularly valuable because I already had years of experience working on other people's writing. When you're developing somebody else's work, you have a certain amount of distance. You can see the structure, the gaps and the things that aren't quite doing what the writer thinks they're doing.

When it's your own work, that distance disappears.

You know why the scene is there. You know what happened before it. You know what happened afterwards. You know what you meant by the line. You remember the real-life event that sits underneath the fictionalised version. All of that knowledge can become noise.

A dramaturg or outside eye can help cut through that noise. They don't necessarily have the answers, and they shouldn't be there simply to impose their own version of the show. Their value is often in asking the question you have stopped being able to ask yourself.

What is this scene doing? Why is it here? What does the audience understand at this point? Where does the energy change? What are we waiting for?

Those questions can be much more useful than somebody simply telling you whether they like the script.

Taking the work into the room

Before the first performance, I had two sessions with peers in the rehearsal room. The people I invited to give feedback were people I had met through clowning and writing workshops, rather than people I had brought in specifically as directors. I trusted their creative instincts, but they were far enough outside the project to be able to see things I couldn't.

This is one of the reasons I think workshops and creative development spaces are so valuable. They don't just give you somewhere to try out an idea. They give you opportunities to meet other artists, build creative relationships and find the people who might eventually become important collaborators.

Letting the audience change the work

The first performance at Camden People’s Theatre wasn't a final test. It was another stage of the writing process. It was particularly revealing because I had only previously performed the first thirty minutes of the show to an audience. I genuinely didn't know what the second half was going to feel like. I didn't know whether it was going to be scary, sad or funny.

When I reached the ending, I played it very RADA. It didn't work. What did work was the comedy. In fact, the whole show was much funnier than I'd realised.

That was a useful lesson in the limits of authorship. I had decided what I thought the ending should feel like. The room told me what the show actually was.

So I went back to the script.

I rewrote. I ran a couple more outside eye sessions in the lead up to performing the show again. Each time, the gap between what I thought I was making and what an audience was actually experiencing became smaller.

Following the second performance, the script felt essentially locked. There are always lines to change and things to fiddle with, but the fundamental writing was there. That was when I became interested in a different question: what can the theatre do that the story cannot do by itself?

Once the writing was secure, I could start thinking more seriously about theatricality. The visual world of the show, the performance language and the possibilities of bringing other creative collaborators into the process.

That feels like the next stage of the work, rather than something I needed to solve before I knew what the story actually was.

Solo doesn't mean alone

The strange thing about making a solo show is that the word "solo" can make the process sound much lonelier than it really is.

A Very Difficult Person may have one performer, but the work has been shaped by workshops, improvisation, audiences, dramaturgical feedback, outside eyes and conversations with other artists. The show exists because I wrote it, but it has been developed in dialogue with other people.

That has reinforced something I already believed from years of working with other artists: creative development is rarely about finding someone with all the answers. It is about creating the conditions in which the right questions can be asked.

The writer isn't always the best person to judge the writing. The director isn't always the best person to judge the staging. The performer isn't always the best person to understand what an audience is receiving. And the artist who has spent months inside a project is often the person least able to see it objectively.

That isn't a weakness. It's simply what happens when you care deeply about something.

The answer isn't to give up your creative voice. It's to build enough distance into the process that you can hear it properly.

For me, that means testing things early, talking ideas through, working with dramaturgs and outside eyes, and being prepared to discover that my first instinct was wrong.

Making A Very Difficult Person has also made me more interested in how I can apply that process to other artists. After years of writing, directing and developing work for other people, I now have the experience of having been on both sides of the outside eye: helping someone else find the show, and discovering how much I needed someone else to help me find mine.

That's the part of creative development I find most exciting.

Not telling an artist what their show should be, but helping them get close enough to their own work to discover what it wants to become.

If you're developing a new theatre project, whether you have a first idea, a rough script or a show that isn't quite working yet, I can help you interrogate the idea, develop the writing, find the structure and work out what the audience is actually seeing.