"Winning the Kenneth Branagh New Drama Writing Award last year felt a little bit unwarranted, because Waiting for Hamlet was my first attempt at writing a play, and it’s only in hindsight that I realise how lucky I was to get any recognition at all with my first script. I didn’t even know how to lay out the pages correctly, and looking back at the version that the judges saw eighteen months ago, I’m surprised I even had the nerve to submit it. I’ve always written, and maintained a reasonably successful blog for ten years, but I had no idea if I had anything to say that would appeal to anyone but me and a few hundred internet geeks. It’s very easy to tell yourself you could have been a half-decent writer if only you’d had more time and fewer distractions, and I nearly let myself get away with that, but then at the age of fifty-four I decided I really should go and find out whether that was true or not. This is the reckoning. Sitting in the audience waiting for Waiting For Hamlet to begin was one part terror, because you have a firm conviction that your jokes aren’t funny, your dialogue is clunky and the clever-clever literary allusions that made you snicker with pride on the sofa when you wrote them will be exposed as hideously pretentious hackery by the stage lights. And one part the firm knowledge that the professionals out there under those lights will paper over all those cracks with their skill and craft and breathe more life into the words than you ever imagined. The writer’s the least important person in the production, I’ve learned, and far too close to the words to be of much use to the performance.