‘Blow Domestic Hearth! I would like to go on all over the kingdom …  acting everywhere.’ Charles Dickens, 1848

This was my dream, rather like Dickens said it. Other than a lifelong dream to read English Literature at Oxford, my other one was to become an actress. I wanted to travel to really exciting locations and experience the thrill of live audiences, but I had absolutely no idea how on earth I was going to do it. In the end, I used my Literature degree and learning to help me shape new ideas and let passion take flight.

I adored my time at Lincoln. It had been a dream of mine from a very early age to come here and the very first thing I did upon arrival, was to write a play.  I remember it now – taking snippets of dialogue from some of the ridiculous ‘over-heards’ by my-more-privileged-contemporaries swigging whisky at the Kings Arms and outrageous graffiti from the English Faculty toilets, I began scribbling in my arty notebook straight away. In fact, I scribbled away for much of the first week, alongside all the other exciting studying and partying that was a necessary part of fresher life in 2005.  I hope it still is.

The play was not that great in the end but the degree was better than anything I could have ever imagined. I had the privilege of being under the tutelage of the great Stephen Gill and the equally great Peter McCullough – two professors and humans who inspired me every single day and I worked tremendously hard for them. I had initially aspired to be an academic but instead I came ricocheting out into the real world and utterly clueless on how to get started.

If you’re an actress, you live largely in the imaginative world and I had no concept of how to live in the real one once I had left college. After some necessary travelling and living (climbing Meteora mountains, coastal moped rides with beautiful men and partying in the traditional feria of Andalucia), I returned to London and auditioned for a project that was initially going to be just a summer’s work but ended up spanning several. The role was Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby and was to be the start of a career that brought Literature to life in interesting ways – from immersive tea parties to warehouse projects, from pub theatre to outdoor ampthitheatre, via classrooms, authors’ homes and art galleries.

‘There was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget.’  F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925

I was able to play Daisy for three summers in a row, along with attending workshops, rehearsals, improvisations and plenty of training. It was such a creative and exciting time and I learnt a great deal about my craft, my peers and the industry at large, as well as being immersed with the funniest, most generous and brilliant groups of actors for the entire time.  I took some enormous risks, as you have to when starting out. I slept on sofas and shared a room for this portion of my life but I was able to do five staged readings including meeting soldiers returning from Iraq in preparation for an incredible play called The Lonely Soldier Monologues for The Arts and Brixton East Theatre spaces, three other fully-staged readings, four short films and a small role in a feature film.

‘I passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of Geneva and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts… [t]hese tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation.’  Mary Shelley, 1818

When you start out in acting, you will have to work for free or very little.  As my acting teacher wisely advised, ‘unless you’re a Redgrave or a Fox, you will find it necessary to make your own connections in this profession and rely heavily on creative collaboration with other artists.’  I remember vividly a school friend of mine telling me, after a wild night out in Hackney, that she wouldn’t do anything for free as a trained and educated professional. So she never did anything. The market is saturated with hungry young graduates from all disciplines and drama schools and from those already working in the industry. If you don’t take risks and aren’t prepared to do things for low or no pay at the very start of your career, you may not have one. So, yes – get yourself out there. Then again, you need to be grounded and have something that supports you.

So, my next pearl of wisdom is to ensure that your bread-and-butter job is something that you enjoy. I landed a dream job teaching Literature in my hometown of Stamford and suddenly re-immersed in an academic and creative environment. Prompted by discussion in an A-level classroom, I created Making Monsters, so I could take on the role of Mary Shelley. Having initially aspired to do a doctorate in Romantic Poetry, this was a dream fusion of my academic interests with my dramatic ones. Every bit of the process was wonderful – the research and development, the writing, the trying of speeches in my Stamford studio, the selecting of costume and then the casting, auditioning and rehearsal. For one exquisite summer, I took over a warehouse space on Brick Lane as I brought the play to life with three professionals, some wooden stage crates, a clothes rail and buckets of enthusiasm.

Like the corpse itself, I had stitched together a play that mattered to me. I had been careful to weave Romantic poetry into the fabric of the play and then brought it to life, first for The Stamford Georgian Festival and then in a cellar studio of a bar, before taking the plunge and heading to The Edinburgh Fringe. We selected the most gothic theatre imaginable as part of The Surgeons’ Hall – a fascinating place where you can see surgical equipment and apparatus stretching back to the 1700s, as well as all the usual eye-balls in glass jars and severed body parts.

Not everything went smoothly but you learn as you go. I ran out of money to pay the theatre and we had to hand out flyers for about five hours a day to bring audiences in. After a roasting from The Scotsman, we eventually received wonderful audience reviews and the offer to bring the show to The Old Red Lion. You will get bad reviews and days when you want to give up and go back home. But you can’t. You have to keep going.

I trained at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and did plenty of other work that enabled me to continue bringing Literature to life. Having enjoyed tutorials on Graham Greene with Stephen Gill during my time at Lincoln, I had always harboured a desire to adapt Brighton Rock for the stage. So, whilst working as Theatre Director-in-Residence at a London school, I did exactly that and greatly relished the process: writing an original script from the novel, taking charge of the casting, rehearsal and design, then working with fabulous young actors. I was paid to raid the National Theatre costume store, hunt for vintage pieces and then spend a calming Friday afternoon painting and covering our little wooden pier in seagulls and sand. Finally, I could dive into rehearsals to bring the text alive and work with the energy, talent and inspiration of the cast.

My biggest piece of advice for others would be to get cracking on your own work. When I did that, everything else I wanted to materialise – the bigger plays, the agent, the commercial work and being seen by more senior industry figures – materialised anyway. Next for me was being cast in The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing at St John’s College and Time/Shepherd/Cleomenes in The Winter’s Tale for Lincoln’s sister college, Downing. I had the summer of my life living in Robinson College and punting on the river again.

The tricky years of the pandemic meant that new directions had to be sought. Channelling Shakespeare’s players in the plague years, when actors were forced into the provinces, I created a troupe of all-female players and adapted Twelfth Night for a socially-distanced audience and then Macbeth for a brand-new venture – Thorington Theatre. Doing these plays definitely lit something inside me and helped me generate ideas for my next project – Unversed.

In May, I will perform my play at Shakespeare’s Birthplace in Stratford. If I could return and tell the teenage me - chain-smoking Marlborough Lights in Grove Quad over a copy of the Collected Works - that this is what I would be doing as I approach my forties, I think I would have beamed from ear to ear with joy. In fact, I do exactly that every single day now – beam from ear to ear with joy.

In one way or another, I have used my literature degree from Lincoln every single day of my adult life and can honestly say, in spite of some initial resistance, negativity and unhelpful advice from others, that I eventually found my very own way of using it to shape my career and I would not trade where I am now with anything or anyone. I get to be academic and artistic in my working life and enjoy it all so very much - I hope it never ends!

Upcoming production

Unversed… will be at Shakespeare’s Birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon on Saturday 17 May, and in various other venues around the UK. Find out more.