Crawling With ideas

Cockroach
Written By Sam Holcroft
Directed by Christopher Basile
Opens Tonight, Sept. 9, 8 PM
Monkey Wrench Theater
204 N Harbor Blvd
Fullerton

Between stints of counting cells and growing bacteria as an Edinburgh biology student, playwright Sam Holcroft managed to find time to write, perform and direct a glittering array of productions at the home of Edinburgh University Theatre Company, Bedlam Theatre. Taking some confident first steps out of the shadows of amateur theatre, Holcroft's most recent play, Cockroach (which opens tonight at the Monkey Wrench Theater in Fullerton), has just earned her a professional debut at Scotland’s new writing theatre, the Traverse.

During her third and fourth years as a student at Edinburgh, Holcroft attended the Traverse Young Writers group, headed first by Christopher Deans and then by Douglas Maxwell. As a result of her final piece, she was nominated by the Traverse for The 50, a collaboration between the Royal Court and the BBC writers’ room for new playwrights.

"The Traverse have been so unbelievably supportive of me," she says. "When they take a new writer on they really look after them." The Traverse writers’ program is open to all, which is unusual in comparison to other schemes and thus a fantastic opportunity for budding writers. At Edinburgh she was active at the Bedlam Theatre, which she thanks for giving her the chance to try out her earlier material: "I wrote parts and acted and directed them, and I realised very quickly that I was much better at the writing than the acting."

Holcroft's most emphatic advice to young writers is to "write as much as you can. You need to have a portfolio. Then send your work off, everywhere." The more work you send in, the more likely they are to remember you later on, she says. "Write every day: try to sit down, even just for an hour every day. There are schemes and competitions, enter them all." Subject-matter can also be crucial, according to Holcroft – a common problem is that "a lot of young writers write about writing," which has now become a virtually unstageable cliché.

Asked about the trials and tribulations of working on a piece of your own writing with a director, Holcroft agrees that she has been very lucky. Of her collaborator in Cockroach—Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland—she comments, "she is a very generous director." The relationship between a director and a living writer can sometimes be difficult, particularly when they live in different cities, and "you want to be part of the team, but writing is such an isolating thing." Sam Holcroft is currently working on a new play, and it will be interesting to see where she goes from here, and heartening to find that, for wannabe writers, there can be light at the end of the struggle.

By Lucy Jackson
Ms. Jackson writes for the Journal