If you’re interested, this post is all about the ideas and concept behind my play Boy-friend (which you can read here).

It couldn’t have ended up more different from the original idea, to be honest.  My friend, and co-worker at the time Becca (yes, I named Becky for her) told me this story…

She had this friend, who was gay.  They’d gone on holiday together to Spain.  Near the end of their holiday, out of the blue, he asks her to sleep with him.  Why?  Because he wanted to check he was really gay.

Becca didn’t, but the story was funny, and I thought it’d make a good comedy.  I started writing it, but for some reason, I couldn’t make it funny.  I wrote and wrote but nothing even close to a joke ended up on the paper.  In the end, I just decided to write what I evidently wanted to, and it just came out a whole lot darker.  Sometime when you write, it’s effortless.  It just feels like you’re remembering a story, and all you have to do is write it.  For the first three quarters of this script, it was like that for me.  Then the easiness stopped, and I was stuck for a good few months.

Until I saw this:

I’m not a massive fan of Skins (well, series one and two were brill anyway), but it was on the TV, muted, while I was writing one night.  When I started writing again the next day, this image was stuck in my head.  I still have no idea what happens in the actual episode, but I shamelessly took that image and used it.  That’s how the final scenes came to be.

I’m not sure I’ve explained the ideas behind Boy-friend very well.  I think I just wanted to write a play about unrequited-love-gone-horribly-wrong, which it really is.  And for a dark story, there are some funny bits too.  Most of Becky’s dream sequences made me laugh when I thought of them!