The Play That Changed My Life: "I Was the Wicked Queen in Titus Andronicus - We Did It Like A Nightmare on Elm Street"

Shakespeare's Feast of Bloody Revenge is full of horror, but the camaraderie of performing it with a youth theater had the pleasant effect that Titus Andronicus must rank among William Shakespeare's worst plays. In fact TS Eliot called it "one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written". However, it has a very special place in my heart. It is a celebration of bloody revenge in which every act is more violent than

Titus Andronicus has to be one of William Shakespeare's worst plays. In fact TS Eliot called it "one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written". However, it has a very special place in my heart. It is a feast of bloody revenge where each act is more violent than the last. Titus Andronicus returns from war as a prisoner with Tamora "the Savage", "Queen of the Goths". He sneakily proceeds to kill and destroy her family, and when she finds out, she murders her sons and serves them in a cake. The play ends with fake blood and a sea of ​​carnage. In Shakespeare's day, it was a blockbuster, a sort of 16th-century slasher film.

Plays are very powerful things and I have spent my life watching them and writing them. Some have been revelatory, but none have had the same impact on me as Titus Andronicus. It was the first play I was in outside of school – so I think it's about the transformative power of youth theatre.

My family was going through some tough years and I was asked to leave my small town Catholic school (it's still hard to say I got kicked out). I felt very weak when I entered the National Youth Theater, I felt that someone had given me a way out, away from the situation I was in. I had to escape North Wales for a few weeks and went to London for the first time.

I found myself in a diverse company of young people from all over the UK. We did not understand a word from Titus, Andronicus, we could hardly say it out loud. But our director was adamant that we could do it, so we threw ourselves in. The camaraderie was like nothing I had ever experienced before. It was exhilarating to be thrown in the deep end, it made me not afraid of Shakespeare. This made me instinctively appreciate the way his language worked. More importantly, I was beginning to believe in who I was.

I was chosen for the role of Queen Tamura. I learned his lines on the tube and said them over and over. He was wronged, he was completely cruel and corrupt. She was a grown woman, not a teenager like me, and she had bad lines. She was a total delinquent woman. Being Tamura made me straighten my shoulders and stand firm.

We did our productions in the school gym. In the performances, we went full throttle towards Grotesque. I remember the faces of my fellow actors playing the shock and horror of the play's murders as if it were A Nightmare on Elm Street. I don't know what the experience was like for our audience, but by the time the production was over, something had changed in me. I saw a new path in life. I packed up, applied to study drama and moved to London. A bit of wild tamura had rubbed off on me.