I can trace back when I fell in love with theatre, I think, to a seat in the dark at the Crucible Theatre in 1982. I don’t remember looking forward to it or having an idea what was about to happen.

I was six, probably with little idea of what theatre was then. But I remember being awestruck by Bonnie Langford, this beautiful pint-sized ball of energy. She was Peter Pan, all jolly and rogueish and fearless movement, leaping across the stage with bright, mischievous certainty. Langford had already been performing professionally since childhood and had the kind of stage confidence that feels almost electric. Even then she carried something unmistakable: a sense that performing was not simply pretending, it was a full-body act of storytelling. I didn’t know the language for that yet. I only knew I was completely captivated.

Peter Pan is one of those clever stories that primes children and adults in slightly different ways. As a child you see the pirates, the flying, the magic and the adventure. As an adult you realise the story is also about time, loss and of growing up. But that night I six and it was magical. I was watching someone stand on a stage and become the story. And from that moment that was what I wanted to do more than anything in the world. It’s still my first love.

After that, theatre became a sort of gravitational pull in my life. School plays, I was happily chosen for every single lead role for years because I would work at it, learn the lines, be reliable, embody the role to the best of my ability. Joseph, Elizabeth I, The Pied Piper Of Hamelin.  Amateur dramatics then at my local library/performance space where we concocted a show about Sheffield during the war named Elsie, Spam and The Doodlebug. I had multiple roles but my favourite was the glamour of Veronica Lake, a famous wartime actress with spectacular blonde hair. She cut it short to inspire women in the war effort to cut their hair for safety in the munitions factories.  
The there were dance shows, I took ballet, tap, jazz and acrobatics, took exams and performed in shows and craved the main roles. I joined bigger am dram groups and began performing in a wider variety of shows. I did comedy, Coarse Acting, operetta, classics. Any excuse to be near a stage or on one. The constant of rehearsals, the glee backstage before the curtain goes up.

Later I managed to get into The Crucible myself via the youth theatre; The Dreams Of Anne Frank. I loved it. I was enthralled by the process, the workshopping, the research and development and I delighted in my role as Mrs Van Daan, the slightly vain, haughty and disagreeable resident of the secret annexe which hid Anne Frank and her family. Thus began a love for playing the bad guy – gal in this instance. Bad guys are so much fun.
I got my first review, one which named me specifically, by the theatre reviewer for the city newspaper, John Highfield. I was ecstatic.
I even managed to persuade John to let me work as a theatre reviewer for the Sheffield Star so I could begin to develop an education for myself about theatre without it coming with the standard price tags. John was an understanding voice of experience and did much to support me.

Then I had a new plan, I spoke to the then director at the Crucible at the time, I wanted to know where she recruited from so I could go to one of those drama schools, to choose well. Deborah Paige kindly met with me, complete with a cast on her leg from some adventures of her own and she gave me a list of her top ten drama schools, I diligently applied to them all.
That September I ended up at Bretton Hall, delighted beyond all belief. Bretton Hall then, was one of the most prestigious drama schools historically linked to theatre and performance training. It was in Deborah’s top three in fact, for producing great actors and where she would often find the actors she chose. Which put it in my top three aspirationally.
Things took off after that, I managed to get professional touring work after the first year and the hallowed Equity Card was mine at twenty. I felt like I’d won the prize. I continued from there, later setting up my own touring theatre company and beginning in TV and film.

Looking back now it makes perfect sense. My life has been a long orbit around storytelling. Sometimes through theatre, sometimes through writing, sometimes through the craft of shaping ideas into words. It’s the desire to take a feeling, a moment, a fragment of imagination and give it form so that someone else can experience it.

Theatre does it with bodies, voices, light and sound. Writing does it with carefully chosen words, strategically weighted to deliver the best sense of the story possible. They are cousins, really. Two branches of the same creative development.

Even now when I sit down to write a scene I often think in theatrical terms. Who enters. Who exits. Where the tension lives or when the silence lands. A good story still feels, to me, like a stage where something is about to happen, the tension building and the slight changes growing.
It feels like the promise of that wild magic I first saw on stage.