The play that changed my life: ‘I was the badass queen in Titus Andronicus, we did it like A Nightmare on Elm Street’

Shakespeare’s bloody revenge-fest is full of horror and grotesquerie but the camaraderie of performing it with a youth theatre had an upbeat effect

T itus Andronicus has to be among William Shakespeare’s worst plays. In fact TS Eliot called it “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written”. Yet it holds a very special place in my heart. It’s a bloody revenge-fest in which each act of violence is more grotesque than the last. Titus Andronicus returns from war with “barbarous” Tamora, “Queen of the Goths”, as his prisoner. She stealthily proceeds to kill and destroy his family, and when he discovers this, he murders her sons and serves them up to her in a pie. The play ends with gudgeons of fake blood and a sea of carnage. In Shakespeare’s day it was a huge hit, a kind of slasher film of the 16th century.

Plays are very powerful things and I have spent my life watching them and writing them. Some have been revelatory but none has affected me like Titus Andronicus . It was the first play, outside of school, that I was ever in, so I suppose this is about the transformative power of youth theatre.

My family were going through some difficult years and I had been “asked to leave” my small-town Catholic school (it’s still hard to say I was expelled). I was feeling pretty low. When I got into the National Youth Theatre , it felt like someone had offered me a lifeline, away from the circumstances I was in. I got to escape from north Wales for a few weeks and I went to London for the first time.

I found myself in a diverse company of young people from all over the UK. We didn’t understand a word of Titus Andronicus. We could hardly say it aloud. But our director was adamant that we could do it, so we flung ourselves in. I discovered the level of collaboration that happens when you’re rehearsing a play. The camaraderie wasn’t like anything I had experienced before. It was exhilarating. Being thrown in at the deep end made me unafraid of Shakespeare. It made me instinctively appreciate the way his language worked. More importantly, I began to have faith in who I was.

I got cast as Queen Tamora. I learned her lines on the tube, saying them over and over. She was wronged, she was utterly ruthless and depraved. She was a mature woman, not a teenager like me, and she had badass lines. She was an absolutely transgressional woman. Being Tamora made me straighten my shoulders and stand strong.

We put on our production in a school gym. In the performances, we went for the grotesquerie, full-throttle. I remember the faces of my fellow cast members, playing the shock and horror of the play’s murders as if it was A Nightmare on Elm Street. I’ve got no idea what the experience was like for our audience but by the time the production was finished, something in me had shifted. I saw a new direction in life. I got my act together, applied to study drama and I moved down to London. A bit of barbarous Tamora had rubbed off on me.