Playwright Dan Rebellato on Caryl Churchill, where he finds inspiration and his upcoming book with the National Theatre, Playwriting: A Backstage Guide.

Could you introduce yourself and the book?

I’ve been a playwright for stage and audio for about 30 years. I’ve written original plays, adaptations, plays for young people, puppet plays, I’ve written for devising companies, and made some experimental performance texts too. At the same time, I’ve been a lecturer in theatre at Royal Holloway, where I’ve taught playwriting for much of that time. This book distils a lot of what I’ve learned about playwriting and showing people how to write without telling them what to write.

Any top tips for those looking to get into playwriting?

The good news is – I think – that British theatre loves new plays. There are theatres devoted to it, festivals devoted to it, theatre companies devoted to it, publishers who publish little else – and there are actors, directors and designers who seem to find nothing more exciting than putting a new play on its feet, testing it, finding its shape, showing it to the world. So, you should write knowing that there are people out there waiting for a new play and a new writer. Seek out those theatres, those companies, those festivals. We are in the middle of the Vault Festival which is an accessible, vibrant showcase for new theatre work and every year discovers a handful of exciting new writers. Maybe start there?

Where do you draw inspiration from?

I used to answer this in a slightly mocking way by saying ‘only from two places: either in here (points to head) or out there (points out at the world) – and nowhere else’. More seriously, I do think an idea for a play can start anywhere at all: an image, a fragment of dialogue, an anecdote, a newspaper story, a character, a scene, a piece of music, something in the room. If you spend a bit of time thinking about anything, you can start to build stories around it. It’s the building of the story where the play happens. So, I’d say I start with anything I’m curious about.

What’s your favourite line from a play?

Oh, so many! From Caryl Churchill’s extraordinary Far Away, ‘Mallards are not a good water bird’; they’re describing a time of terrible war, in which the animals, even the elements, have taken sides in the struggle and they’re assessing the allegiances and rectitude of various creatures. This line is both deadly serious and completely absurd (the mixture of singular and plural nouns in the sentence somehow underlines this). Then my breath is always taken away by Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking speech where the incoherent fragments resolve themselves in here horrifying recollection of the murder of Duncan: ‘yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him’. I can’t think of a more nastily haunting line.

Which character do you wish you had written?

Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron from Jerusalem, Hedda Gabler, Marlene from Top Girls, Lady Macbeth – in fact, the brilliant Zinnie Harris has just written her version of Macbeth as Macbeth (an undoing) and it’s wonderful; she’s kept Lady Macbeth in the play, where Shakespeare sort of loses her. I’ve always wanted to find a way into Macbeth creatively, and she encourages me to screw my courage to the sticking place, as Lady M says.

Do you have any writing heroes?

So, I guess it won’t surprise you when I say Caryl Churchill. She’s been writing for over 60 years. She is always fresh. She never repeats herself. She always innovates. Her plays are taut, funny, complex, always surprising – and they always open new doors to new ways of writing plays.

What kind of work are you most interested in seeing on stage at the moment?

I’m always interested in the way the theatre is a machine for metaphor, to find ways of capturing, sometimes obliquely, what the world is like or what it feels like. I mentioned Far Away earlier. It was written and produced before 9/11 and the War on Terror but for me it captures better than anything else what it felt like to live through the 2000s. And then she wrote Escaped Alone a few years ago and once again, it felt like somehow she’s got under the skin of life in the last decade.

Is there anything else you’d like us to know about you or the book?

I want this book to be useful. I hope that writers at any stage will be able to dive into it to find, not cast iron rules about how plays must be written, but practical suggestions for how to get going, how to avoid trouble, how to fix problems, how to understand what you’re doing, how to make the play better, and most of all how to make the things you want to happen, happen. I hope this book will help more plays over the finish line. There’s nothing better than a new play.

Playwriting: A Backstage Guide (published by Methuen) is available to buy now from the National Theatre Bookshop along with Wigs, Hair and Makeup: A Backstage Guide.