There is something extraordinary about writers in conversation. Ideas, routines, advice, community, vulnerability, bravery, vision… everything is on offer with no holds barred. Inspired by the conversations we have been lucky enough to facilitate and witness, we have created our Writers on Writers series to share the wisdom, camaraderie and heroism of Bruntwood Prize-winning playwrights to aid you on your own heroic journey. We hope they will inspire you to have more conversations with your peers, and focus your aim towards our submissions deadline on Monday 9th January 2025.
In this edition of Writers on Writers we bring together Martha Loader and Ben Musgrave. Martha and Ben first met when Martha started her MA Degree in Scriptwriting at the University of East Anglia, where she was taught by Ben. We wanted to bring these two writers together to reflect on the generational community of artists supporting, learning and rallying together in the new writing ecology.
Ben won the inaugural Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting in 2005 with his play Pretend You Have Big Buildings, which was produced at the Royal Exchange Theatre as part of Manchester International Festival 2007; he was commissioned by the National Theatre, has written for Film and Radio, and teaches on the MA and Undergraduate scriptwriting modules at the University of East Anglia. Martha won a Judge’s Award at the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting 2022 with her play Bindweed, which premiered to critical acclaim in 2024 in a tour produced by Mercury Theatre, New Wolsey Theatre and HighTide, in association with Royal Exchange Theatre; she is an associate artist of the New Wolsey Theatre (supported by the Peggy Ramsay Foundation and Film4), and is currently working on commissions from Menagerie Theatre Company, and the Almeida Theatre as part of the ‘Genesis New Playwrights, Big Plays Programme’.
Martha: So, shall we start at the beginning? Was Pretend You Have Big Buildings your first play?
Ben: That’s probably the story I would tell. It felt like a debut play in that it was the first play I’d written not necessarily knowing what I was doing – but with all the time I needed to think about it – and being in a place where I had what I needed to write a play that I would be proud of, I suppose. I wrote it on an MA programme that I did at Goldsmiths in 2004, so I had the luxury of a year to build up to writing it – but in the end, I just had a deadline. I was writing something completely different about hunting for dinosaur fossils in Patagonia that meant absolutely nothing to me, and I just had a week to write something. I discarded this weird, painting-by-numbers play, and I just started again: I knew there was something about moving between worlds, and something about Romford, that I needed to write about. I just started writing this thing.
Martha: Was that quite a gut reaction? That this other play wasn’t in any way interesting to you?
Ben: It didn’t have a charge for me. Nothing was singing, it was just kind of theoretically theatrical or joyful or something… but I didn’t get it. I couldn’t get my head or my heart into it, whereas I could with this play that I suddenly started writing at the last minute. It just felt easy to write for the first time in my life – and the last time in my life! I’d found a play that I could just get into and that was starting to speak to me about ideas that meant something to me.
Martha: And you wrote it in a week?!
Ben: Well, I just sort of say that – everybody says that, don’t they? No, I didn’t really write it in a week. I didn’t have long to go, and I knew I just had to commit to it and make it happen. And it happened very suddenly.
Martha: And did you have any expectations of it when you entered it into the Bruntwood Prize? Did you think, “this is a great play, this is going to do really well”, or were you like, “here’s a deadline, I’m going to go for it”?
Ben: That’s an interesting question, and one that I’d like to ask you about as well – I didn’t have expectations of it, but it contained some delight for me. I remember I was working at the Birmingham Rep, and I was on a National Express coach to London, and I was reading it just before sending it off and thinking “there’s some life in this.” I didn’t have any expectations, but it just seemed alive, that’s all. How about you? Tell us about how Bindweed came into existence and what your thoughts were about it before submitting. How did it end up being sent off to the Bruntwood Prize?
Martha: I wrote Bindweed as part of the Mercury Theatre playwrighting course, run by Kenny Emson. He’s been a part of a lot of people’s stories, I think! And he’s been on the Bruntwood Prize shortlist. I pitched a couple of ideas to him: I don’t know how I’d come across perpetrator groups – I don’t know where the idea came from – but I pitched that and something else, and he was like “this is more interesting, this is your play.” So I wrote the first draft in a week. I was working as a producer for a festival which had just finished a week before the deadline – I’d asked Kenny if I could just give a really good outline, and he said no.
Ben: Oh.
Martha: He said, “when I was at the Royal Court we had to write something in a week, so bloody write it in a week!” I’m really grateful to him that he said that, because it meant that I wrote my first draft really quickly. There were about twenty-thousand characters – it was all over the place! I whittled a lot of it down and reshaped it for the second draft, and it was my second draft that I handed into the Bruntwood Prize.
Ben: I’m sort of slightly impressed by Kenny about this. In my instinct generally, when someone says, “I don’t know what to do, I can’t do this, I’ve only got a week” I try to lower the anxiety levels and take the pressure off – but it sounds like just putting a gun to your head really helped there!
Martha: Yes. I think that’s what I personally need. It might have sent some people over the edge, so maybe that’s not a hard and fast rule. But I do think there’s something about the panic of it, and we’ve spoken a lot about this in the past: about feeling like a deadline is actually a really important thing to have in the diary. I think that’s why these sorts of prizes are very useful because if you don’t have a deadline in any other sense there is something that you can work towards. I never used to finish anything until I understood that deadlines could be your friend in that sense.
Ben: So how did you develop Bindweed to a point where you felt it was ready to send out?
Martha: Is it ever ready? That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it! I think, very honestly, the deadline coincided with my second draft deadline for the Mercury, so I think the day I submitted it to the Mercury is the day I submitted it to the Bruntwood Prize as well. I don’t think much thought went into it, in that sense, because I’d entered a lot of playwriting competitions in the past. You know, you sort of get used to a nice rejection email to a competition you’d forgotten that you’d entered nine months before. That was my pattern until then. So I had very, very few expectations about this – it wasn’t until Suz rang me in October to say that I was on the shortlist that I knew anything about it. I think I’d forgotten my pseudonym as well, so I’d not even looked at the longlist…! Terrible!
Ben: And so you wrote Bindweed in a week – as did I… Did you regard it as your first play, in the way that I do with Pretend You Have Big Buildings, or is it slightly different?
Martha: I think it’s probably important for me to say no, because I think it took nearly ten years of experimenting and trying to work out how I like to write and what I like to write about. I was writing micro-commissions for Ipswich Museum and a project in Stowmarket with young people. If something came my way, I would write something for it! I was learning on the job. Bindweed was one of the first things I wrote where there was probably no real reason to write it. I’d had a couple of experiences leading up to that point where I just wanted to write something – but this was probably one of the first where I had the opportunity to write anything. I think that can feel a bit scary at first because commissions are quite helpful from that point of view, aren’t they?
Ben: I think it’s really important to hear the story you’ve just told about Bindweed; there’s a tendency to imagine that a playwriting prize plucks you out of nowhere, and all of a sudden projects you into the stars. I feel like I was quite experienced when I won the Bruntwood Prize: I’d done quite a lot of work experience at new writing companies and things like that.
Martha: But you hadn’t written much, you were working more dramaturgically? You were sort of on the other side.
Ben: Well that’s a grand way of putting it! I was making tea, and I did some archive work at Paines Plough, and I was a script reader for various places (which was an amazing beginning for me) but I hadn’t written that much. I feel like there is a real apprenticeship that you get from having a play on in a low stakes way – you’re learning to work with people, you’re learning to work with actors, you’re learning how a play does or doesn’t work onstage – so that by the time production does come along, you’re ready to realise it. You’re ready to write your next plays as well, I think. The play that follows (the Bruntwood Prize, or the competition-winning prize – the play that ‘plucks’ you) is the one that seems to send you into a new place in the theatre writing ecology. It’s often really hard to move onto the next play.
Martha: What happened to you after you’d won? Did you think, “this legitimises me as a playwright”? What were your next steps?
Ben: Yeah, I mean, winning seemed like an endorsement of a series of career choices that I’d made. When I was working at the Birmingham Rep, I was having a wonderful time working with other writers, but I didn’t write a word in the year that I was there; I was desperate to keep writing and I just wasn’t able to – I was drained somehow. And so I made the decision before winning the Bruntwood Prize to leave that job and commit to writing full time, come what may. Winning the prize was very literally a validation of the choice that I’d made to do that, so that felt very good! The difficulty was that I didn’t really have a ‘next project’. Perhaps because I hadn’t completely done the apprenticeship that others had; I hadn’t spent a long time getting plays on at the Etcetera Theatre or the White Bear, those real training grounds for being a writer. I was quite lost and stuck. I was commissioned by the National Theatre Studio, and I was a bit lost and thought “oh I’m going to write a play for the Olivier, it’s going to have 27 characters and be set on three continents and make full use of the revolve!” I just didn’t know what to do next. But I found I really enjoyed doing other people’s projects: I did quite a lot of plays that were responding to new developments in science, or something like that. It meant that I was able to make work and get work on that didn’t necessarily feel like my next play, but things that were really teaching me how to write.
Martha: Do you think that was you cleverly working out how to avoid that kind of second album syndrome?
Ben: I think I was desperate to write a second album. Trying to get to a point where I could write that play was not always a happy thing; it took a bit of time for me. It was important for me to establish creative health and stability until such a point as I did write that second play.
Martha: You were building up your craft by working professionally, but perhaps in a way that you weren’t expecting – what do you think the hinge point was, when you suddenly thought “actually this is my second album time”?
Ben: It’s difficult to know, but I think I got to a point where I stopped writing plays for other people, in a sense. I started writing plays that I felt had a deep charge for me. I began to learn how to write a ‘possible play’, because my plays had tended to be enormous, unmanageable things that I couldn’t quite get a hold of. I’d begun to make work that I knew could go on, that I had a clear sense of, where I could find some simplicity in the structure so I could realise the play. Also, the thing with me is that I can take seven or eight drafts! I just can’t see what it is for ages and ages and ages, and it gets better and better and better with each draft (hopefully!) – but it takes a long time for me to go “ah, this is what this is, this is beginning to have a charge for me.”
Martha: So are you a splurger? Do you write the vomit draft and then whittle? Is that how it works, do you think?
Ben: I often don’t use a synopsis initially, and I just splurge around and work instinctively – that means having an enormous mess for years and years and years, because I can’t completely see the structure, I can’t completely see the story. I can sort of trust myself that there’s something in it for me somewhere, if only I can weed out what’s not important and find a way for what is important to grow and sing within the draft, that eventually I’m going to get there. But it’s a marathon, quite a lot of the time.
Martha: You kind of write your way out of trouble?
Ben: Well, I write my way out of trouble and into trouble again! How about you, how have you felt after winning at the Bruntwood Prize?
Martha: I think similarly I had to remind myself that I had written plays before, and that this wasn’t the first one; that I could write another one as well. I think that was something to get over a little bit. I mean I wasn’t in the country when it happened – I’d run away to the other side of the world – and I’m kind of glad in some ways, because I think it helped to not feel the pressure of it in the moment. It was nice to have another six months away, and to come back at the time that I’d always said I would come back. I was starting to work on the next stages of Bindweed while I was still in New Zealand, but I knew that once I came back I’d have to be professional again and take it a bit more seriously. It was quite nice to delay that start of it, because it was a slightly scary prospect to go into writing more full-time than I’d ever done before! I think it’s been an interesting time since coming back and working on the production. Again, I think it’s legitimised my decisions to be more of a writer than I perhaps was before, and I think that was what I needed. It’s partly why I wanted to do an MA: I felt like I could carry on writing small-scale things that were absolutely fine but wouldn’t reach past a first or second draft – that would go on and be fine, but perhaps never propel me into the next stage. And that’s what I think winning an award at the Bruntwood Prize did for me: it helped me write to a higher standard. Hopefully that’s what I’m going to carry on doing!
Ben: Well I think I know that that is what you have carried on doing…! I happen to know that you are writing a play – well, more than one new play – following your enormous success with Bindweed. Do you want to talk about how you start, how you approach writing a play?
Martha: Yeah, it’s a very good question. I think I’m the opposite to you, actually: it takes me a long time to write a first draft. So by the time I’ve got to a first draft it’s possibly nearer to other people’s later drafts, because I’ve spent a long time doing a lot of research. I’m not very good at sticking to a plan, but I’ll spend a lot of time working out what the structure is before I start writing because I hate editing so much. If I feel like I’ve got a good enough first draft then I can sort of whittle it down, but the idea of ripping something up and starting again, or having to completely overhaul something because the structure is wrong, fills me with so much dread that I think I have to get to that point before I start.
Ben: How do you get to that point? What do you do to have the confidence and understand the structure of the play before you begin writing?
Martha: Lots of tea-drinking and pacing the house…and going for walks. I find it quite stressful. I think it’s quite a stressful time building up to the writing of something. I don’t know if you feel this, but every time you write the new play, that’s the hardest play you’ve ever written in your life. No other play felt like this, and you think, “I can’t do this, why do I put myself through this?” Then you come out the other side and think “oh yeah, that was great, that was a lovely experience!”
Ben: What does ‘coming out the other side’ mean? Is it the moment when you start writing scenes and dialogue starts to come, or is it only when you’ve polished something off that you can relax?
Martha: I don’t know, can you ever relax with something like that? I feel a lot better once I’ve got a draft. If I’ve got words on a page, I know that this thing exists as an entity, but then redrafting is really hard. You go into rehearsals and you’re redrafting; you’re working with actors, and they’re asking you difficult questions. I think maybe you can’t really relax until the whole process is over. That’s not to say it’s not enjoyable throughout in different ways, but I think it’s hard: it’s a constant picking yourself up to take a deep breath and do the next stage. Do you think you can ever really relax in a process?
Ben: No! There are times when I feel more vulnerable, when things feel very volatile, and there are times when I feel quite happy; there are weeks when I feel quite stable in the writing – not full of doubt, not full of fear about what it is – when I’m in a routine and in a zone, and I’m just about on top of things there. I tend to remain uncertain and worried about a play right into production; I feel very connected to the plays by that point. I find myself in a bizzare tunnel vision in the first performance, and that tunnel vision doesn’t really go even after the performance of that play.
Martha: Had you always wanted to be a writer? Was this always the plan, and that’s why you put these steps in place, or did you see yourself more in a dramaturgical role?
Ben: When I did my undergraduate degree I was really into acting and also writing short stories. Chris Hannan, an amazing Scottish playwright, inducted me. When you’re in an environment where you’re doing creative writing more generally, there’s often an extraordinary, seductive moment of identification with being a playwright. And that’s where acting and writing came together – I definitely felt like I was specialising in playwriting. I did my MA at Goldsmiths, which also had a nice option of dramaturgy: it was developing both dramaturgs and writers for performance. It had a wonderful performance department where you could work with MA performance students, so by the time I got there I always knew that part of me wanted to work with writers, as well as being a writer. How about you?
Martha: I did English Lit and American Studies at the University of Manchester – I did a ‘proper degree’, as my parents would say. It was great fun. I’d always loved acting and wanted to be an actor but I got rejected from drama schools, so I moved away to Melbourne. I showed a play around when I was there which was basically me ripping off Lungs by Duncan Macmillan – because I think that’s what I’ve basically spent my career doing! I showed it around in Melbourne thinking, “well, no one knows me, so it’s fine – and if it’s particularly crap then it doesn’t really matter and won’t follow me home.” So my first ever play went on in Melbourne when I was back in the UK – I never saw it.
Ben: Wow!
Martha: It was a good vehicle for me to be an actor for a while… And then I realised that it was easier to fit being a writer around other work, to work part time in a steady day job, and then have a wild end of the week where I tried to write things.
Ben: What was it like to have a play on without seeing it?
Martha: It was bizzare! It was quite a small theatre, and I’d been working with them in an unpaid capacity as an actor: a group of us would go weekly and perform script-in-hand new writing after a bunch of writers brought in a scene they were working on. We’d stand it up and read it out, and then we’d talk about it together. It was a lovely model which I’ve always been quite desperate to bring back home. So I knew the company more as a writer than an actor, then they just asked to put the play on once I’d gone. I read some reviews, which were… fine..! They were a solid fine, I think! For a mad first play, I thought that was as good as it was going to get.
Ben: One of the things that I’ve really appreciated over the past few years is that the two of us have had a good chat about the state of the new writing world, and sort of gossiped a little bit about developments and things like that! What do you feel about the state of new writing?
Martha: I mean, it’s pretty bleak in many ways, but I think it’s been really heartening to see how everyone is rallying together. I think there is a lot of very good intention in terms of how to support this industry that we are famous for across the world. It feels important that that is recognised: that it’s something that we’re very good at, as a nation. I think if we can ride this next wave, then we can keep the great playwriting culture that we have in this country. That’s what you’ve always said to me: that we have always come out the other end of it – hopefully that’s where we’re heading still. I’ve benefitted hugely from schemes and theatres that invest in you personally as an artist – it can be very hard if you feel like you’re on the outside of that investment. It’s very difficult to make meaningful connections with people and get paid work if it’s not directly supported by a theatre or a company investing in you as a playwright. I’m very lucky to have a few people who are backing my career right now, and I think it helps with feeling that you’re not on your own with it. Peer support is also very important – as well as that top-down support. How do you feel now that you’re also helping shape the next generation of writers as a lecturer at the University of East Anglia? Do you have any feelings when you’re seeing people go out into the world, and how they’re going to find it as well – as well as you personally?
Ben: It’s been very interesting to see how the new writing industry and how the structures that support new writing have been shifting – perhaps weakening, perhaps disappearing – in the last few years. We’re clearly in a difficult position, and we’re clearly in a dip and a lull. I do think, in the long view, that there’s always been contractions and expansions. In the last 20 years we’ve seen the top of a wave, and perhaps things have changed. I think things will bounce back, and new impetuses and new energies will be found, because I don’t really feel there’s a diminishing in appetite for the experience of being in a room with a load of other people, watching something unfold in time and space together. I think there’s a temptation for people new to this industry and to the world of theatre new writing, to think there are magical bullets – bullet trains, in fact – that are going to zip you to the top, and from that point you will have a career that will never stop. To me the thing that I’m most interested in communicating with my students is thinking about how we can give ourselves, as writers, power to make things happen for ourselves. I’m going to use the word ‘agitate’, but I don’t mean that in an aggressive or pushy way – but how can we make things happen ourselves? Thinking about the ways we can build our own relationships and partnerships, how we can raise our own money and funding – how we, as writers, can bring theatre partners and artists together. Although that will only be one part of the jigsaw, it’s an important thing for writers to have in their minds at the moment: the power and agency we have to make things happen.
Conversation transcribed by Clodagh Chapman.
Edited for publication by Rosie Thackeray.