I was a middle-class kid growing up in a very working-class city, Newcastle. It was a great place for theatre, with the Playhouse and Live theatre. The RSC visited every year and I have a distinct memory of Kenneth Branagh in Henry V, seeing rain on stage and properly drinking the theatre Kool-Aid. But if the RSC productions I saw were a scented candle, Rod Wooden’s play Your Home in the West was semtex.
I saw it at Live theatre in the early 1990s. I was very aware of the social and political tensions of that era. My parents – both very leftwing – had taken me on marches as a kid to support the miners. The north-east still suffered greatly from the loss of the coalmines and of shipbuilding. I knew a lot of people whose lives were directly affected.
It was the time of the Meadow Well riots, an explosion of anger. It felt like people weren’t going to put up with things any more and you weren’t quite sure where it would end. I thought: this is how revolutions start. Your Home in the West embodies that. The play is an act of anger.
It’s about a working-class family in the West End of Newcastle. It’s funny talking about the West End because that is where you aspire to have your play if you’re a London playwright. But in Newcastle it’s the toughest, most deprived part of the city. This family are locked into a horrible cycle of repeating the same mistakes, trapped in poverty, crime, unhappiness and bad relationships. Then into their life walks the teacher of the young son, wanting to understand why he is so unhappy and help them make things better. She is met with a wall of anger, particularly from the father, Mickey, who says: “Your kind can’t possibly understand.”
Although I grew up in the north-east, I was born elsewhere and didn’t have a geordie accent. And I did feel a sense of otherness. So there was part of me that identified with the anger of the working-class characters in the story, and part of me that identified with the teacher, sort of trapped as a kind of voyeur.
It spoke powerfully to the difficult relationship with class that we have in this country. The problems in the UK are still very much to do with a class war, and there is a fundamental inequality in society that, until it’s addressed, will always be a source of massive problems and discontent.
I’d never seen anger expressed like this on stage, never seen reality expressed like it. Now, as a playwright myself, I feel determined to achieve the same. I don’t want to watch something that feels like “a play”, with clever dialogue constructed by an author. I don’t want to see the presence of the author. I want to feel as if I’m watching real people.
It’s something I strive for, a sort of naturalism, but slightly disconcerting, kind of unusual, with an off-kilter eloquence. Wooden’s play felt to me like something that needed to be said. And I think it’s even truer now, decades later.
My character Ben in 2:22: A Ghost Story embodies that anger, a kind of fury at the gentrifying couple who are the main characters of the play. Those characters owe a debt to Rod Wooden. I was inspired when I saw Your Home in the West. I felt: “God! This is how to do it!”
• As told to Lindesay Irvine
• Uncanny returns to BBC Two and iPlayer from Friday 31 January. The live show will tour from autumn
