I really don't know where my interest in death comes from. Maybe I've just got a twisted imagination. The truth is, I haven't had a hugely eventful life - maybe I'm compensating in my creative life. Or maybe I'm just a bit sick.
'Posh' is not really political. I didn't want to aim a brickbat at the system. Or to bash Old Etonians. It was always the class and privilege aspect of that world that I was most drawn to. There is something endlessly fascinating about imagining something you could never be involved in.
I was the family alien. Both my parents are quite creative, but I was... appalling... always putting on little shows. I was rather a shy child, not a natural performer, but there was a performative edge to everything I did.
And I admit it: there's a rather dirty thrill when 700 people laugh at a joke you've written.
I'm not posh at all. I grew up in Sheffield but never managed to pick up the accent - which was careless because there'd be some cache now in being a northern playwright, but I missed out on that one.
In my final year at Bristol University, I wrote a play called 'White Feathers.' It was produced in the studio theatre at the students' union in early 1999, when I was 21. It's 100 pages long: a very traditional play, with an interval, about deserters in the First World War.
Maybe if I'd had more direct contact with death, I wouldn't find it so fascinating and I wouldn't write about it so much.
I think it's disingenuous to believe that being born into a privileged world means you feel like you are having an easy time.
Your plays are always personal. You can't help seeing yourself in the serial killer you've just written. But they get less specifically personal.
Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.
It's not a meritocracy until everyone starts with the same opportunities, is it?
I think theatre at its best looks into the dark corners; clearly, my dark corners are full of doom.
Writing a tribe is fun. They have their own language, their own slang; they repeat it, and it becomes part of the texture of the play. For a writer, that's thrilling. That's when my pen flies.
I'm always drawn to writing things that feel like uncharted territory.
I am interested in the way advances in medicine and palliative care mean more people now have the opportunity to plan their own deaths, and also plan for those who are left behind. What does that do to the grieving process?
It's an odd mix, the life of a playwright.
A fascinating breed, Old Etonians. Impeccable in their social skills and very portable - you can put them anywhere, and they are absolutely charming.
Apparently the show happens even if I'm not there. Who knew?
I don't like writing with real people in mind.
I think a lot of playwrights have a script in their bottom drawer that hopefully no one will ever see about a bunch of young people sharing a flat and getting up to crazy stuff.
