INTERVIEW By the Dart INTERVIEW


STEPHEN BERESFORD


THE PLAYWRIGHT WHO GREW UP IN DARTMOUTH TALKS ABOUT HIS RECENT DEBUT AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE.


M


ost playwrights start small: they have a play on at a small venue, sometimes not even a theatre


and then build over years to getting their big chance to appear at a prestigious theatre, such as the National in London.


Not so Stephen Beresford, formally Stephen Roberts


of Dartmouth. 3So, not the normal manner for getting your work seen by the public for the first time. “I sent it to the National, received a call asking me to come in to have a chat and then got the confirmation it was going to be put on from Nicolas Hytner, the National’s Director. I’ve been working in TV for years with nothing being produced, if I’d known about this I would have done it years ago!” he said. I ask him what it was like to be walking into the National Theatre as a first time playwright. “The first few days were an exercise in managing my terror,” he laughs. “The rehearsal rooms in the National are enormous and the production department had created a mock full size version of the set in the middle of it. Going in there on my first day on the job as it were, and Julie Walters walks up and introduces herself: it was very intimidating. “It sounds a bit strange to say it, but when I was there


a both wonderful and terrible few days of realising I had to step up to the mark. But after a little while I began to absolutely love it and have the time of my life.” Born in London, Stephen and his family moved to


Dartmouth when he was very young. The family moved around a lot in the area, living in Higher Street, Above Town, South Town, on Browns Hill Steps and Kingswear. He recalls being ‘slightly unmanageable’ as a young


child.


Going in there on my first day on the job as it were, and Julie Walters walks up and


introduces herself: it was very intimidating.


“I was frustrated, unruly and bored,” he said. “My mother and stepfather didn’t really know what to do with me – I was very demanding.”


Then he met the Dartmouth


woman who ‘transformed’ his life. “When I was about nine I met


a woman called Judy Lewthwaite,” he said. “She ran a group for children called the Strolling


Playhouse and it was a revelation. I was transformed pretty much from the minute I met her. She wasn’t judgemental in the way many people are – she was interested in anything that showed someone expressing themselves.


“She was an extraordinary and inspiring person, who


I kept thinking ‘I have to make the words better because Julie, Helen and Rory are going to be saying them’. It was


was very alive and a total libertarian. She would ask me about the latest pop bands or whether gangsta rap was any good – she could never sit


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