How the West Yorkshire Playhouse is giving a step up to new writers

Honestly, just one month closer to December and I’d be all over this story, decorating it to read like a Christmas miracle.

As it is, we’re not quite close enough just yet to start saying the C word, so I’ll just share the facts.

Christmas Eve, 2015, Charley Miles gets the phone call she’s been waiting a decade to receive. And given that she’s still only 25, that’s a not insignificant chunk of her life to have been waiting.

It was the call that told her she wasn’t crazy, that she might yet fulfil her dream of being an actual playwright.

“I was in a garden centre with my mum and little sister and I got the phone call saying ‘will you come to the theatre in January and can we pay you to write your play?’ I just burst into tears,” says Miles.

The playwright, and it might be taking its time to sink in for her, but that’s what she is now, will see her debut play, Blackthorn, on the stage at the West Yorkshire Playhouse next week.

Miles grew up in Kilburn, as she says: “The one with the white horse on this hillside? It’s near Thirsk, my village’s one claim to fame is that it’s home to Mousey Thompson.”

She looks baffled by my lack of recognition. “Mousey Thompson? The furniture maker? Well, growing up somewhere like that means that I wasn’t exactly part of the theatre world or connected to any of that kind of thing,” she says.

“I put plays on in the village hall when I was 15 with my big sister and her uni friends. We’d get all the old people in the village to come and charge them to watch these plays then give the money to charity.

“They were terrible, but the people in the village were so nice, probably because I was pretty much the only kid in the village.”

Miles’s story, although it appears to be one of a wunderkind achieving huge success early on in her life with a play being staged at the tender age of 25, is actually the same one that we’ve read many times before - it’s a story of rejection and persistence in the face of massive odds.

When she was putting on the ‘terrible’ plays as a 15 year old, Miles was also clearly focussed on the fact that all she wanted to do was be a playwright. She entered a playwrighting competition run by Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre, and won.

With a maturity that belies her age, she says: “There’s never been a point when I didn’t think I’d be a playwright. There have been points along the way when I didn’t think the world was going to let me be a playwright, but I’ve never wanted to do anything else.”

Miles puts the fact that she’s a middle child, with an older and younger sister, down to the fact that she always wanted to find her voice on the page.

The problem was then as it remained – how does someone from a little North Yorkshire village become a playwright?

“There was a real naivete about me when I left home for university. It was like bang, and you’re suddenly in the real world. I didn’t even know how to send emails properly. I had no idea how the theatre world worked. I’ve only really got to grips with it in the past year.”

Before the past 12 months though, there were many more of trying to crack the theatre world. After university Miles found herself an English graduate with no real idea about what to do with the rest of her life, all she really knew was that the itch to become a playwright hadn’t been scratched.

“The last thing I wanted to do was move back to Kilburn. I had zero job prospects, I didn’t want to just apply to a graduate scheme, couldn’t someone just put on a play I’d written and pay me for it? Turns out not,” says Miles.

“That took a few months 
to sink in. I moved to Edinburgh, where my partner was living and studying and I made lots of coffee and wrote lots. “I realised eventually that my work was actually getting worse because I was spending all my time making coffee to pay the rent. I didn’t have a community to share my work with, I was in a rut.”

That was when Miles made the decision to move back to Kilburn, bluntly, she admits, to save on rent and commit herself to writing.

It also unlocked something. While making in coffee in Edinburgh she had also been seeing plenty of theatre. The zeitgeist seemed to be for plays that were gritty and urban. Miles, and the sleepy town from which she hailed, was neither.

“I know nothing about writing work that’s gritty and urban. I was trying to write what theatres were producing and my work was clearly awful,” she says.

Once back in Yorkshire she contacted the West Yorkshire Playhouse and York Theatre Royal. She worked on a production at York, staged as part of the annual Takeover Festival, she began working as a reader of scripts for the Playhouse and she applied to a new writing scheme at the Leeds theatre. At the end of a scheme called Summer Sublets, when the Playhouse offers artists rehearsal space and support, she submitted a scene from a script. The Playhouse liked it and then the fateful Christmas Eve call came.

In January this year Miles sat in a rehearsal room and started writing the play that would become Blackthorn. In April this year there was another of Those Phone Calls. This one was to ask if she would like the Playhouse to stage her debut play in September. You can imagine the reaction.

“My mum went round the village telling everyone. Nigel in the pub heard the story several times.”

At West Yorkshire Playhouse September 13-17. Tickets 0113 2137700. www.wyp.org.uk