Jack Thorne is a furiously busy scriptwriter and, although he’s celebrated for bringing Harry Potter to the stage and His Dark Materials to the screen, he loves a chewy subject. In recent years, he’s tackled child abuse, the plight of care homes in the pandemic, and a Grenfell-like catastrophe that devastates a community. At the moment, his play The Motive and the Cue, about the famously rocky process of putting together John Gielgud’s production of Hamlet starring Richard Burton, is at the National Theatre in London.
He will soon have another play on in the city. When we meet, Thorne – tall, gangly, scrappily bearded, wearing a T-shirt with a printed design that instantly calls to mind the armoured bear in His Dark Materials – is on a break from watching a run-through of his newest work, When Winston Went to War With the Wireless. It stages an early crisis for the BBC that shaped its future and set the tone for the way it handles political pressure to this day.
