Top 14 Laura Wade Quotes

Whether you like the look or not, that tailcoat is a tough shell, a suit of armour. The posh boy is a hardy species.

‘Posh’ is not really political. I didn’t want to aim a brickbat at the system. Or to bash Old Etonians. It was always the class and privilege aspect of that world that I was most drawn to. There is something endlessly fascinating about imagining something you could never be involved in.

I think we love watching rich people behave badly. It has a sort of grisly fascination for us.

In my final year at Bristol University, I wrote a play called ‘White Feathers.’ It was produced in the studio theatre at the students’ union in early 1999, when I was 21. It’s 100 pages long: a very traditional play, with an interval, about deserters in the First World War.

It’s very lucky to be able to do a job where I get to sit about writing plays all day and going to the theatre. The downside, I suppose, is that you put it out there, and people are invited to like it or loathe it.

I really don’t know where my interest in death comes from. Maybe I’ve just got a twisted imagination. The truth is, I haven’t had a hugely eventful life – maybe I’m compensating in my creative life. Or maybe I’m just a bit sick.

I’m not posh at all. I grew up in Sheffield but never managed to pick up the accent – which was careless because there’d be some cache now in being a northern playwright, but I missed out on that one.

Maybe if I’d had more direct contact with death, I wouldn’t find it so fascinating and I wouldn’t write about it so much.

It’s not a meritocracy until everyone starts with the same opportunities, is it?

I don’t like writing with real people in mind.

I think theatre at its best looks into the dark corners; clearly, my dark corners are full of doom.

I’m always drawn to writing things that feel like uncharted territory.

I think a lot of playwrights have a script in their bottom drawer that hopefully no one will ever see about a bunch of young people sharing a flat and getting up to crazy stuff.

I think it’s disingenuous to believe that being born into a privileged world means you feel like you are having an easy time.