experiment to direct my own writing for the first time. I think as a director that you need to be a very good reader -- of texts and actions and people. You need to be able to read between the lines. You also need to engage with the mechanics of each writer's style. I'm always concerned with how each writer's particular grammar and punctuation contains a world view. I enjoy uncovering that. I'm curious to know how the task of directing my own writing will reveal my play. Theatre-making is always a meeting -- of director and writer, of character and actor, of players and audience. It's messy, vulnerable, gut wrenching and sometimes glorious. I'm grateful for this opportunity to meet my own play in the Upstairs Theatre. What influences or inspires your writing and direction? I've spent the last 15 or so years directing plays by great writers -- Sarah Kane, Shakespeare, Marius von Mayenburg, Martin Crimp, Anton Chekhov, Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Tennessee Williams, Bernard-Marie Kolts, Samuel Beckett and Caryl Churchill, to name a few. These writers and their plays have been great teachers about art, life, and the craft of theatre-making... I have never directed the plays of Harold Pinter, but when I was a teenager his writing, along with Beckett's, showed me the possibilities of theatre. In both writers, I found a deep sense of place (at once concrete and metaphoric), and silence as an invisible substance -- the structuring principle which underpins all utterances...