Debut playwright Natasha Gordon revealed that her hit show Nine Night was the first thing she’d written since keeping a diary as a teenager.
Gordon, 42, who has been a working actress most of her life, wrote the play a year after joining a writing group.
She said: “Everyone thinks I’m lying but it’s the truth. I always kept a diary until I was about 19 but that was it.
“I even remember at drama school our amazing voice teacher gave us this project in the beginning of the third year where she would encourage us to write a monologue and I didn’t do it. I completely bottled it, I just went, I can’t do that.
“It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? I wish I’d started writing earlier, I really do.”
The play, which follows the Jamaican ritual of a nine-night wake for the dead, was a hit at the National Theatre before transferring to Trafalgar Studios, in the process making Gordon the first black British female playwright to pen a West End show.
She said she “couldn’t believe” it when she was told she was a pioneer, saying: “It’s an honour, but at the same time it’s tainted with a feeling of injustice.”
She said: “Somebody has to be the first, and we’ve done that now, and when we are really successful is when we are hailing and celebrating the fourth black British female playwright to transfer within a year and so on and we don’t even have to quantify it.”
Gordon is working on her second play but has put it aside to take on one of the parts in this show.
She said her acting experience had made it easier to write. She said: “As an actor I’m inside dialogue a lot so I know the importance of speech sounding like how people speak, and then it’s the challenge of writing something a bit more heightened so it’s theatrical.”
