It was her first job in the arts and Katie Redford was up front with the stars. Unfortunately, up front meant the driving seat of the car, ferrying actors and writers from their homes to the studio. Eager to learn, Redford spent the journeys firing out questions, listening to them talk about how they got to where they were. “Looking back, it was probably very annoying,” she laughs, “but every time I got to the studio, I didn’t want to get out of the car. I just wanted to do what they were doing.” Una Stubbs told her to quit the job and go chase her dreams.
Almost a decade on, the 34-year-old writer and actor is doing just that, with roles in The Archers and the TV sitcom Alma’s Not Normal, and her new play about to go on tour. But she hasn’t done it alone; the script has been shaped and influenced by months of observing workshops with teenagers across the country, listening to their hopes, fears and ambitions. “At first I didn’t know if I could write for young people,” Redford admits, having previously written works for the south London fringe space Theatre 503 and a radio play for Radio 4. “I was almost viewing them as a different species. But that went away about 10 minutes into the first workshop. I was in awe of how articulate they were.”
In early 2023, Redford, who hails from Stapleford near Nottingham, was invited to become a resident writer for Theatre Centre, a collaborative commissioning house bringing together new writers with the voices of young people. Through several months of workshops, she spoke to hundreds of teenagers and young adults in schools and youth theatres, between the ages of 12 and 22. The richness of those conversations formed a springboard for Wish You Weren’t Here, her story of a mum and daughter chasing nostalgia on a doomed seaside holiday.
Theatre Centre gives a platform to both parties: although this is not the first play Redford has written, it has provided the stepping stones of her first commission and first tour. For many of the students involved, Wish You Weren’t Here will be the first play they ever see. “It gives them the opportunity not only to see theatre,” Redford says, “but for them to be a part of it.” When the show tours schools and theatres this spring – in London, Sheffield, Newcastle upon Tyne, Guildford and Brighton – Theatre Centre will ensure that everyone who took part has a chance to see the show they helped create.
Redford had been about to go to drama school when she won the Norman Beaton fellowship for radio drama. She ditched drama school and moved to London for the six-month programme, during which she wrangled the part of a midwife on The Archers, before landing the role of aristocrat Lily Pargetter. As the daughter of Nigel, who infamously slipped, fatally, on a roof tile at new year, Redford was advised to “posh up” her accent for the part. Her seven years in the role makes her “a baby in the family” compared to some of the other The Archers actors; Alison Dowling, who plays her mum, has been on the show for 39 years, while Patricia Greene, her radio grandmother, is the longest-serving actor in a soap on any medium, at a record 66 years. “There is no ego in radio,” Redford says. “I always feel at home in it.”
Her experience in acting, both on TV and radio, has helped shape her work as she’s moved into writing. “When you read a script as an actor, you know if you’re into it within five pages,” she says. “That’s been really useful because it’s made me think about how to grab people when I write. For me, that’s usually with character. If you can make someone laugh with a character, you can let them do anything.” Brilliant characters to her are flawed ones who leap off the page, who “say things we don’t because we’re not brave enough”.
She unzips a folder packed with strips of paper from discussions and writing exercises, each one strewn with teenagers’ ragged handwriting. They are filled with emotion: open and hungry and mournful and sweet. The workshops, led by Theatre Centre’s artistic director Rob Watt, allowed the intensity of teen feelings and experiences to be taken seriously by adults. Scattered across the table, the personal and the global are mixed in together, the light and trivial woven with heavier themes. The students were asked open questions: what do you care about? What winds you up? Holidays up north came up a lot. Transgender rights. The Arctic Monkeys. The climate crisis. “It would always come back to personal stuff,” Redford says. “We’d be talking about the state of the world and what they want to do to help it, but then it would somehow become a conversation about them and their mums.”
The complexities of mother-daughter relationships is a theme that Redford previously explored in her first play Tapped, set within a self-help group. She also wrote about it in her debut radio drama, Yellow Lips, which centred on a mother with mental health challenges. Told from the perspective of a child, it was inspired by Redford’s own experiences. “My mum suffered with clinical anxiety and depression while I was growing up and it’s only in the last 10 years or so we’ve started talking about it,” she says, describing her mum as “one of the strongest, funniest people I know. She encouraged me to write about it so that it didn’t become this taboo subject, and radio felt like the perfect medium to tell such a personal story due to the intimacy of it.”
As the workshops continued, Redford found students opening up about their struggles and worries, and themes began to emerge. Body image and social media were talked about constantly. “One girl told me she hadn’t slept the night before because she’d had a bad day at school,” Redford remembers. “She had gone home in a bad mood and thought she’d quickly scroll on Instagram before bed, and next thing it’s three in the morning. She told me: ‘I went to bed feeling like I am not enough, and I woke up feeling the same.’” This idea of not being good enough made its way into the play, a kind of common enemy for the protagonists to grapple against.
Listening to young women talk about their bodies was striking for Redford, too, as she heard them repeat ways she and her friends had berated themselves years before. “It becomes this ingrained narrative, to the point where you don’t even notice it any more. That’s when it gets dangerous because it gets into your bones.” But over the course of the discussions she was able to see students’ confidence growing. “We did three days with Lewisham Youth Theatre and you’d notice people finding their voices over those days. That was beautiful to see.” Mila, the daughter in the play, is an accumulation of the girls Redford met through the workshops: smart and sharp, full of concerns about her own life and the wider world.
Redford’s own confidence began to grow, too. “The love of the creative process can get lost in the practical reality of trying to survive in this industry,” she says, “where you’re just trying to earn enough to keep doing it.” Her list of part-time jobs reads like a list of sitcom extras: a party princess, a nanny, a waitress, door-to-door sales. She had struggled when she had written her first draft, and remembers thinking “maybe it’s time to go back to party princessing”. But the Theatre Centre team encouraged her. “You quieten down that voice that says you can’t do it and listen to the one that says to keep going,” she says. “Then all of a sudden there’s a team. There’s venues. It’s really happening.”
Her name is on the front, but Redford wants all the students who took part to recognise how integral their conversations were to the story, their words mixing in with her own. “We really couldn’t have done this without them,” she says. “I hope they feel part of something, that they don’t feel they’re on their own.” Lots of the students were interested in going into the world of writing and acting, a desire she remembers keenly from her days quizzing writers and performers as she drove them to their sets. “I hope they pursue that,” she says of the students she met. “Keep being curious about the world. Know that their voices matter, that we’re listening.”
Wish You Weren’t Here is at Sheffield Theatres: Tanya Moiseiwitsch Playhouse, 24 January to 10 February; touring to 15 March, including Soho Theatre 19 Feb to 2 March.
