Hello?
Hello? was my first play, and my most successful.
It
won the IRDP's Woolwich Young Playwright of the Year Competition in
1994, and the stage version was premiered at the Cambridge Theatre in the
West End in April 1994. After that, the radio version was broadcast on LBC,
and finally the stage version was performed at the Old Red Lion in
Islington between 30 August and Saturday 10 September 1994.
When I was younger, I used to work as a youth leader at Soar Valley College, which meant that I attended training on some pretty weird things for a 15 year old boy to attend. One of those was a training event on child abuse.
Knowing that I wanted to write something for the IRDP competition, I started doing some research. I found a picture of a young girl with a black eye and a cut lip, and I knew I was going to write about her.
The fact that the competition was for a radio play, and I spent most of my youth messing about with my dad's old CB radios, pretty much meant that I had the whole story there and then.