Grey Swan interview with playwright Charlotte Jones

Grey Swan interview with playwright Charlotte Jones

Charlotte Jones is a British actress and playwright. Her first play Airswimming debuted in 1997 at the Battersea Arts Centre in London. Her other plays include In Flame, The Dark, The Lightning Play, and Humble Boy. Charlotte Jones wrote the book to the West End musical The Woman in White, in collaboration with the David Zippel and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

She won the 2001 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.


Grey Swan (GS): Charlotte, you originally trained as an actor. Did you think of yourself as a writer when you started “Airswimming”?

Charlotte Jones (CJ): I didn't consider myself a writer when I wrote it. I did it to fill the time when I was waiting for my agent to call. Having said that I loved the process- the research and the very act of writing.

GS: What do you feel about the play “Airswimming” now?

CJ: “Airswimming" is in fact the only play I have ever written on which I never did any revisions. When I doubt myself I look at it to remind myself of the honeymoon period I had when writing it- when the words came automatically and I had huge confidence in what I had created. I am amazed that the play came out in such a structured way.

GS: Did you start writing because you were frustrated as you waited for the call from your agent for acting work?

CJ: I don't think it was borne of frustration really because as soon as I started writing it was a joyful process- I couldn't bear to leave it alone. Often I wish I could recapture the innocence of that experience- the moment I fell in love with writing. Today I am mostly doing adaptations for TV which fit in with family life- I like doing them- they are like elaborate plot-hungry jigsaw puzzles- and I like the thought of a bigger audience for my work. But I don't write them from the same place as I wrote “Airswimming”. I wrote in a vacuum but weirdly from a place of greater certainty.

GS: What do you think you know now, as a writer or an artist, 13 years after “Airswimming”, that you didn’t know then, in 1997?

CJ: I think the same things inspire me now as inspired me then: people struggling with the big questions of life, facing death...the same questions- how to live in difficult times, how to transcend the everyday, the epic nature of the human spirit, the miracle friendship, love and dysfunctional family relationships. I think my plays are spiritual- which doesn't always make them fashionable or critic proof- but I can't help myself- I am interested in the human heart and all its vagaries...


AIRSWIMMING is currently being produced by CM Productions and is to be performed at the Hen & Chickens Theatre London 4th to 22nd May 2010 directed by Brenden Lovett, designed by Jude Chalk and with Jane Dodd and Ellen Gylen.

www.airswimming.co.uk