Laura Wade wasn’t sure which would be more nerve-racking: being interviewed or having her picture taken. But the 28-year-old playwright will have to get used to both. She has just won the Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright, and earned an Olivier nomination for “Outstanding Achievement”. “I can’t get my head round it. I’m overwhelmed,” she admits.
“But it’s exciting. I get to go to parties and stare at famous people!” Wade has been recognised for two plays that opened in London last year — Colder Than Here at the Soho Theatre and Breathing Corpses at the Royal Court. For someone who had started writing full-time only a year before that, this was quite a coup. But Wade has already moved on. Her latest drama opens this month at the Soho Theatre.
In Other Hands, a thirtysomething couple — Hayley, an ambitious management consultant, and Steve, a computer engineer — find that their eight-year relationship has stalled. As they drift apart, Hayley gets to know a manager who is initially suspicious of her team’s interference, while Steve is drawn to one of his clients.
Inspiration came, says Wade, when she called an IT expert to fix her computer. “It struck me as a strange transaction,” she says. “Here I was allowing a stranger into my home and into my computer, something that had become a very personal thing because of all the work I had poured into it. It got me thinking about how we now relate to each other in a world surrounded by machines. When I was an office temp, I would be communicating on a daily basis with people via phone or e-mail and never meet them. I think we may be leading more isolated lives, creating different structures and ways of living for ourselves.”
Hayley and Steve gradually become afflicted by a paralysis in their hands akin to repetitive strain injury (RSI). For Wade, the RSI was a way of representing their inability to grasp their feelings. “A failing relationship can erode your confidence. I wanted to show how disabling that can be and ask: what do people do to help each other, who do you look to for help? All my plays deal with how individuals try to cope with whatever is thrown at them.”
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Colder Than Here was a mellow yet darkly humorous account of an emotionally repressed husband and his two daughters trying to sort out their lives while their terminally ill mother prepared her own funeral.
Breathing Corpses was angrier, offering snapshots of three couples, all at breaking point, who each discover a dead body. The title is from Sophocles: “When a man has lost all happiness, he is not alive. Call him a breathing corpse.”
That sounds bleak, but Wade’s plays offer hope. Her knack for dialogue and empathy with troubled characters has attracted both distinguished stage veterans (Michael Pennington and Margot Leicester, Colder than Here) and younger TV stars (Tamzin Outhwaite and James McAvoy, Breathing Corpses).
In Other Hands, Hayley and Steve are played by Anna Maxwell Martin and Richard Harrington. “Laura’s writing is very precise, but natural-sounding,” says Bijan Sheibani, the director of Other Hands. “She can create a lot of depth with minimal language.”
Born in Bedford, the daughter of a project manager for an IT company, Wade was raised in Sheffield until the family moved to the Peak District when she was 15. Her first play, Limbo, was staged at the Sheffield Crucible two years later. “I took the ‘write what you know’ adage a bit too seriously. It was about a 17-year-old girl who wasn’t comfortable in her own skin. As friends and family filed in, I suddenly realised they were seeing something that might be a bit too close to the bone.”
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Wade studied drama at Bristol for six years and wrote for the university drama society. The Bristol Old Vic then staged 16 Winters, which explores the exile of Shakespeare’s Hermione and Paulina from The Winter’s Tale. “I look back on those early plays and think that I wasn’t quite in control,” Wade admits. “Then I came to London for the Royal Court Young Writers Programme and was encouraged to develop my own voice.”
This summer Wade embarks on a new play for Hampstead Theatre, with a “ sprawling narrative and a bigger cast”. And once Other Hands has opened, she is returning to work on an adaptation of Jane Austen’s The Watsons. “It’s a wonderfully mad project,” Wade says. “Austen never finished the book so I’m imagining how the characters react after being abandoned by her, and they behave pretty badly. The Austen Society probably won’t be pleased. I’m half-expecting to be garrotted by women in Empire-line dresses!” Not before the Olivier Awards party, we hope.