About

I make work about what happens between people and power — funny, dark, human stories with their roots in the real world. I know that world from the inside: three decades of strategic communications, political campaigning, and institutions in every sector – across many continents.

There’s a moment in my 2021 dark climate satire, Skin in the Game, when the studio audience cheers for the game show host who is cheerfully dismantling what’s left of the planet. They don’t mean to cheer. They just can’t help it. That’s the territory I work in — the gap between what we know and what we do, played for laughs, with the lights going down.

I write political comedy with darkness underneath it. Work that makes audiences laugh first and think later — sometimes uncomfortably late, on the way home. For stage and screen.

What makes my work unusual is where it comes from. Before committing to writing professionally, I spent twenty years inside the institutions that shape public life — as a Westminster lobbyist, a parliamentary candidate, and a communications leader inside big British organisations like the Royal Shakespeare Company, West of England Combined Authority, Heathrow Airport, and the Department for Transport. I also advised, audited and trained organisations like Arts Council England, Bristol Old Vic, NATO Communications, and Adobe International.

I know how power talks to itself when it thinks no one is listening. That’s not research – that’s the other side of my professional life.

What’s next?

Skin in the Game — a dark climate comedy set in 2050 — was developed at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, funded by the Peggy Ramsay Foundation, and premiered at the New Wimbledon Theatre in November 2021 to four stars and an audience that left arguing. It is ready for its next stage — to be developed, on a bigger platform, or on screen, and to address the parts of it that we’re dystopian in 2021, that are already becoming political reality.

I’ve three other projects in development (March 2026) – for theatre, screen and books:

• One Bad Apple, a novel about corporate abuse, complicity and wilful blindness
• FFS, a TV comedy series: a late-career and very cynical tabloid columnist in an escalating series of battles (where she keeps ending up being the “goody”), against a god she’s pretty sure she doesn’t believe in
• Bottom Feeders: a play about cowards, in its very early stages