The Beginning

5th January 2016 

I’ve deemed this the year that things start. It’s not catchy but it’s accurate. I’m also hoping it will be some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the year that TwentySomething starts. Although we’ll probably always claim it started in 2015, when we’re writing our memoirs etc.

TwentySomething is made up of myself, Rebecca Sweeney, Rebecca Low and Claire McPhillimy (we thought about making her change her name so we could be the three Rebecca’s but that seemed a little ridiculous). We’re loosely based in Dundee – loosely because I don’t live there anymore and Claire is more ‘Dundee adjacent’ than actually in Dundee. As a company our aim is to make new theatre that makes people think. That might sound obvious but it seems like a pretty decent place to start. We want to make theatre that we want to watch, theatre that entertains and sparks debate, theatre that people can enjoy.

TwentySomething was born from a bottle of fairly nice red wine (probably a Tesco offer of the week) drank out of glasses that we liked because they wouldn’t have looked out of place in a scene with Mark Rylance in Wolf Hall, in the drafty living room of my flat in Dundee, on a weekday evening because we were students and didn’t have to be up early.

The three of us were about ten months through an MLitt in Theatre Studies at the University of Dundee – we graduated in November and drank more red wine to celebrate. We had played with the idea of starting a theatre company before; I write, Rebecca directs and Claire designs, it seemed we had everything we needed. Several times during early 2015 we thought about doing it, becoming a company and making theatre, but it wasn’t until that night in June that we sat down in my living room and made it official. By ‘official,’ I mean we wrote TwentySomething down in a notebook alongside a list of plays we wanted to put on.

I’m very lucky to get to work with people like Claire and Rebecca. We had opportunities to make small pieces of theatre throughout our time at university and I honestly couldn’t have enjoyed working with them more. Rebecca is an amazing director and I can only imagine how much better she’ll become with work that wasn’t scribbled out on the back of an essay plan by me. Likewise Claire has ideas about design that we could never fully bring to life with our non-existent budget, but she certainly made all the pieces look pretty damn amazing.

In the next few months we have a lot of work to do. We’re workshopping Hell Has No Fury, a one-woman piece I’ve written which tells the story of the Greek heroine/ villain Medea. We’ll also start work on For Our Tomorrow – a play about women living through the First World War. All this and more coming your way in 2016.

This is the year things start.

Sweeney.