Fort is set on a hillfort in Dorset – a place that seems to hold a lot of meaning for the characters. What’s special about this setting for you, and why did you choose it as the backdrop for the story?

I grew up in rural North Dorset, surrounded by hillforts – they were where we walked the dog, and played and messed about as kids. In Year 10, we did a whole project about them at school and I was interested in the layers of history in this landscape, ancient people surviving out on these hills. There’s also a magical or supernatural element associated with hillforts – the idea that many of these ancient sites are connected by ley lines, lines of energy. I guess I thought hillforts were everywhere – and was surprised when I moved away from home and realised not everyone knew what a hillfort was! When I started writing Fort, I started with an image of two teenagers out on a hill late at night, waiting for something – and I also liked the idea of this being their refuge, their special place, a bit like building a pillow fort as a kid. So it was always going to be a hillfort.

Viv and Daisy’s friendship is at the heart of the play. What do you think makes teenage friendships so compelling, and how did you want to capture that in the play?

I was interested in the intensity of teenage friendship, particularly for teenage girls, and allowing them to be messy and gross and weird (which I feel we don’t always get to see) as well as showing their deep care and devotion to each other – in a way, this is their love story. But it’s also a time when friendships can become fraught, emotions are running high, boundaries are starting to be pushed. Particularly in a small rural town, you’ve often been friends with the same people since you were 4 or 5 years old, everyone knows each other, and you really grow up together – which on one level is obviously lovely, but on another, I think there can come a time  in those teenage years when you realise what you want to do with your life is maybe actually different from what your friends want, and that can be difficult. Viv and Daisy are still kids, but they’re also starting to become aware of adult difficulties and complexities, and figuring out their place in the world. And it’s also quite a dramatic time, which seemed fertile ground for a play!

You’ve mentioned that growing up in Dorset helped shape your writing. How did your experiences of rural life influence the tone and themes of Fort?

Advice writers are often given is to ‘write what you know’, and I’d always thought that, for me, that would be really boring – I had a nice childhood in the countryside, where nothing much ever happened. It was only really through conversations with friends who had grown up in towns and cities that I started to realise there was so much to Dorset life which is really specific and intriguing, and also has some great comic potential – I grew up in a town with an annual cheese festival, for example, which I thought was totally normal, and then there’s the Dorset Knob Festival ( look it up!), being late for things because cows are crossing the road, having nowhere to hang out other than fields, and then such rich history, the folklore, the stories – the more I thought about it, the more I realised I actually did have a story there to explore.

The play touches on some heavy topics, like mental health and teenage pregnancy. How do you balance these with the more playful, supernatural elements of the story?

I think this comes back to the age of the characters, Viv and Daisy, and how they are handling things. They’re at this age where they sometimes want to be grown ups and they sometimes want to be little kids again, and I wanted to explore that in the play, and how they would deal with difficult, grown up situations: sometimes they want to run away from it, and the playfulness comes from an attempt at escapism, sometimes they can laugh it off, and a lot of it is about telling stories and how they can put what’s happening to them into a story – and they’re both interested in magic and the supernatural. And I also think that’s how life goes – something bad happens but you can’t think about it all the time, something else comes along and distracts you, or your friend does something silly to take your mind off it, and it’s all going on side by side, the heavy stuff and the silly stuff.

There’s a ghost in the story, but also a lot of real-life struggles. How did you mix the supernatural with the everyday to create something that feels both magical and grounded?

What I have tried to do is to show the story through Viv and Daisy’s understanding – so they both, in their way, believe in magic, they’re interested in folklore and the supernatural, and I think this all feels quite grounded to them, because it’s linked to Fort, as a historical, grounded but also potentially spiritual or haunted place. And being a teenager is this sort of in between stage, where things are changing and often feel outside your control and you’re not sure what’s normal – and you’re starting to realise that the grown ups around you perhaps aren’t totally in control of things either. So those real life challenges I think can feel somewhat supernatural at times, like there are forces around you working their magic which you can’t get a hold of, and I was interested in exploring this.

You’ve worked on this play through a lot of local workshops and performances in the South West. How has the feedback from those audiences shaped the final version of Fort that’s now heading to London?

It’s been incredibly helpful and I feel very lucky to have been so supported by South West venues, like Poole Lighthouse, Dorchester Arts and Taunton Brewhouse, to develop the play through R&Ds, workshops and rehearsed readings, even before we went on tour this November. I started writing the play on a Royal Court Introductory Group in 2019, so it’s been a long journey and the play has changed a lot through audience feedback and input – and it was particularly helpful, in school workshops, to young people of Viv and Daisy’s own age reading and reacting to the play, and what rang true for them. Rohan Gotobed, Fort’s director, has also been a great help in shaping the script over the past couple of years, as well as our incredible actors and whole creative team.  And of course, writing a play, I’m only ever writing a skeleton of the thing itself, which only starts to live and breathe up on stage in front of an audience, so seeing how audiences have responded each night on tour has been so interesting and useful. I’m very excited to see how a London audience reacts now!