Playwright whose career is heading for the bright lights

“I think what happened last year was that, in a weird way, I stopped trying to think about having a career,” she says.

“I started instead to think about trying to make the work I believe in happen, instead of sitting around waiting for it to happen. I started to think ‘you only live once so why not spend time writing and making the stuff you really believe in?”

It was a good starting point and the playwright, who has been working in and around Yorkshire for a number of years, suddenly began to experience a period of success. There was a piece of work commissioned as part of a celebration of Wordsworth, a piece called Northern Big Board, which involved participants jumping from a diving board at Shipley swimming baths and a piece of work that became, earlier this year, her most successful work to date. Freakoid was such a bit step up the career ladder for the writer for a number of reasons.

First, there is the work itself. Set in a future where people have sexual relationships with inanimate objects, Freakoid explores what it means to be “other”. Performed by the playwright herself, it tells the story of a woman called Emma – or 43004 – who discovers one of her forebears had a relationship with a hoover. “It’s about how we look at otherness. At the heart of every struggle for equality is someone deciding who is a person and who isn’t a person. The struggle for equality is to say I am a person, no matter whether I love this other person or – in my play – this ‘bot’,” says the writer, who is in a committed gay relationship.

In a time when every artist and organisation is fighting for its survival, attempting to make the case for its own existence and trying to be heard above the cacophony, Adams’ work stood out. Created here in Yorkshire, Freakoid was performed at a London theatre, the Ovalhouse and was nominated for an ‘Offie’, a theatre prize for work performed in London off the West End stage.

“I am ambitious for my work and it’s great to get it on in London, but for me there shouldn’t be anything unusual about that. We should be saying that work we make up here can absolutely go to London and deserves to be on those stages,” she says.

Adams was not due to perform in the piece, but the performers who were due to appear had to leave the project and she was forced to face her fears – and severe dyslexia – and learn her script and perform it.

Formerly a singer with a punk band, Adams discovered that holding an audience for a 20 minute set is different from an hour-long one-woman show. She has emerged as a stronger theatre performer and speaks with a new confidence about her latest project, a piece of work first seen last year called Enough.

For this latest piece she has worked with another theatre maker, Cathy Crabb, to make two stand-alone pieces that also sit together and which will be seen at Theatre in the Mill next month. “I think concentrating on making the work that’s important, about the things I really wanted to say, has been the key,” she says.

Enough is at Bradford Theatre in the Mill, June 13-15.