In 2013, I was desperately looking for a way to quit writing plays. I’d had a terrible, scarring artistic collaboration a couple of years prior, and it broke me. And on top of that, I was actually broke, financially. So I decided to give up playwriting, move to Los Angeles and make some money writing for film and television. But just as I’d made that decision, I received a three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation. It came with a significant chunk of money, so I was thrilled. Only it also came with conditions: one of which was that I needed to write a new play. “Fine,” I thought. “I’ll write a very short one-act to fulfil the requirements of the grant and then be done with theatre for ever.”
Months later, I was on an aeroplane listening to in-flight radio when Led Zeppelin’s cover of Babe I’m Gonna Leave You came on. I knew the haunting opening chords because when I was little my brother used to play them over and over to teach himself guitar. Until that moment, though, I don’t think I’d heard the actual song. What struck me most was the absolutely searing, raw vocals of Robert Plant. He was threatening a breakup, but the threat was delivered partly as a seduction, partly as a nervous breakdown. Underneath the “I’m gonna leave you” was the opposite: “I can never ever leave you and don’t you dare leave me!” Listening to his hypnotising vocals, I began to imagine what it must have felt like in that studio, the strange intimacy amid the technical weirdness of an analogue recording studio. I instantly knew it was the setting for a play.
