‘I paid people for pints and chips’: Georgina Duncan on the award-winning play she tapped on her phone | platform

IIt took Georgina Duncan a few seconds to realize that Indu Rubassingham, when announcing the winner of the Women’s Prize for Playwriting last week, was talking about her play Sapling. “The first sentence I heard her say, I said, ‘This could be any of the plays,'” the 30-year-old recalls of that moment. “And then I said, ‘Holy shit! This is the craziest thing that has ever happened to me.’

The news has not yet been fully digested, but anyone who has read Sapling will not be surprised by Duncan’s victory. Set in Belfast in the 1990s, the play follows 16-year-old Gerry, whose older brother Connor was murdered 10 years ago by another child. “Someone described it as being about the scar tissue behind grief, which I thought was very pithy,” Duncan says. The play was born out of her fear of loss: “Grief is something we all experience in our lives. And it scares me.”

Duncan admits she didn’t know much about the Troubles before she started writing Sapling, but she was determined to get the play “right”, so she gave prison tours in Belfast, riding in the back of a black cab with a driver called Cedric to absorb the city’s history and geography, while also meeting with actors from Northern Ireland to talk about her ideas. “I paid them for a pint and a bowl of chips.”

Her dedication has paid off: Sapling meticulously paints a detailed portrait of a scarred society. Even just on the page, there’s a verve in her words, and she writes the kind of characters actors long to play. This makes sense because Duncan is also a trained actor. She graduated from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in 2018 and co-starred in The Mousetrap, Agatha Christie’s West End staple and the world’s longest-running play. She says her time spent performing brings out every piece of her writing: “When I write, I speak my play out loud like a mad man. And because I’ve said words in front of a live audience, I know what that sounds like.”

It became clear that storytelling ran in Duncan’s veins. She speaks fondly of her childhood in Lancashire, where she would dance around her living room to Riverdance or watch Kate Bush videos on repeat. “Her music videos are theatrical,” she says. “I was watching them on loop.” Although her mother and father had no artistic background, they encouraged her to follow her dreams. “I had working-class parents who were not of that world at all. We were very skinny, but they did everything they could to help me.”

Applying to drama school became Duncan’s obsession as a teenager. “I was totally wearing blinkers,” she says. Writing came later, in the years after she graduated, when she stopped acting for a while. “I remember calling my mom and saying, ‘I think I want to write.’ And she said, ‘Okay, just do it.

Duncan joined the Writers’ Lab at the Soho Theatre, where Sapling’s originals were formed. “I wrote most of the play on my phone while I was commuting,” she says. “I stayed on the tubes longer than I should have because I got into a flow state.” In the years that followed, she wrote another play (“Still in the Drawer”) and a one-woman show called “Aspo Pozo”, about a social worker in Wigan. She performed it in London last year: “People seemed very moved.”

However, it took Duncan a long time to feel successful. Sapling was “shopped”, where several versions of the script were entered for various prizes. “I’ve come close a few times,” she says. “It was almost like a man. The industry is very difficult for people starting out, especially for people emerging without context or anyone in the industry to open doors for them.”

That’s why Duncan believes awards like the Women’s Prize – founded by producer and writer Ellie Keel, along with Katie Posner and Charlotte Bennett of the Pines Plough tour company – are so important. “The awards are one of the few things we have that kind of levels the playing field,” Duncan says. Keel, frustrated by the lack of plays produced by women on national stages, introduced an award to female playwrights in 2019. This is certainly necessary: ​​in its fifty-year history, a woman has won the Olivier Award for Best New Play only seven times.

For Duncan, this feels like the start of something. With a £20,000 award to support her, she hopes she can make time to “really understand how she writes”. “It’s the greatest gift. This award has completely changed my life.” Now, for the first time, Duncan feels confident enough to call herself a playwright. “I feel like I’ve been given legitimacy,” she says.