The plays that make nothing feel like everything

Julia Grogan on Island Town, small-town theatre, and why Simon Longman writes like no one else

There’s a line Julia Grogan uses in our conversation about Island Town that I keep coming back to.

Talking about the way Simon Longman writes his characters: three teenagers in a dead-end British town, going nowhere, drinking cheap cider and dreaming of an escape that never quite arrives — she says: “He makes them feel epic and almost Shakespearean.”

It’s a striking thing to say about a play in which, on the surface, almost nothing happens. There are no kings. No grand speeches. No murders, betrayals, or battles. Just Pete, Sam, and Kate, loitering around a ring road, falling in and out of love with each other and their circumstances, watching time pass and options narrow.

And yet. Epic. Shakespearean.

Julia is exactly the right person to be saying this. She’s a playwright who has made her own work in precisely this register — small communities, big feelings, the weight of ordinary life rendered theatrical. Her debut solo play Playfight charted three teenage girls growing up in a forgotten small town, grappling with desire, violence, and what it means to come of age when nobody’s watching. Her company Dirty Hare won a Scotsman Fringe First with Gunter, a wildly inventive retelling of a 1604 witch trial that also turned out to be, at its core, a story about power and powerlessness in a community with nowhere to hide.

When Julia Grogan calls a play Shakespearean, she’s not reaching for the first playwright she can think of. She’s making a claim about scale. About the idea that the interior lives of people the world ignores can be as vast and as tragic as anything you’d find on the stage of the Globe or RSC.

Island Town premiered at Paine’s Plough’s ROUNDABOUT at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2018, in a coproduction with Theatr Clwyd directed by Stef O’Driscoll. Simon Longman had already announced himself as a significant voice with Gundog at the Royal Court. This was a play about rural isolation that won him the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright. Island Town felt like a deepening of that obsession: what happens to the people left behind in places that policy, capital, and culture have quietly abandoned?

The play spans several years in the lives of its three characters, moving in jagged, non-linear jumps from their early teens to their mid-twenties. Director Stef O’Driscoll described the approach as catching “snapshots of adolescence crystallised”. These moments frozen and then released, like photographs from a life that’s slipping away faster than any of them can hold onto.

The ROUNDABOUT space itself became part of the meaning. The very reason for ROUNDABOUT’s existence is to take theatre to places where there is no physical theatre. To create a community where there was none before. This is the play that Simon Longman writes about. The venue is in the round, with audience obsessively watching every action. There is a circularity to the play, as there is to the venue. You couldn’t watch from the outside. You were in it with them.

Katherine Pearce won The Stage Edinburgh Award for her performance as Kate. The Sunday Times called it a “smashing state-of-the-nation play.”

The second thing Julia says in our conversation that stays with me is this: “Achieving nothingness is achieving everything.”

It sounds like a paradox, but it’s actually a precise description of how Longman’s dramaturgy works. The play is built around a car crash — an event that, structurally, ought to be the climax. But the crash is almost beside the point.

What the play is really about is the slow accumulation of small nothings: the evenings with nowhere to go, the conversations about futures nobody believes in, the tiny acts of loyalty and love between people who have very little else to offer each other. By the time the catastrophe arrives, you’ve come to understand that the real tragedy was already happening, one uneventful day at a time.

This is a hard thing to make theatrically. Drama, we’re taught, needs incident. It needs conflict that builds, stakes that rise. Longman refuses this. And somehow, in refusing it, he creates something that cuts deeper than most plot-driven plays manage. The bleakness isn’t imposed. It accumulates. You feel the trap closing without ever seeing the door shut.

Julia, who has navigated similar territory in her own work, is alive to the craft involved. “Achieving nothingness” in this sense requires enormous structural precision — you have to know exactly what you’re withholding, and exactly when the absence will hurt most.

There’s a conversation happening right now in British theatre about whose stories get told, and where. Longman has been making this argument with his plays for a decade: that the countryside, the small town, the forgotten postcode is not a backdrop but a subject. That the specificity of these places — their economies, their silences, their particular mix of community and claustrophobia — is as dramatically rich as anything you’d find in a city.

Julia’s work comes from a similar place. She grew up in the Midlands. Her characters are grounded in a kind of rural and semi-rural English life that theatre has historically either ignored or used as shorthand for a certain type of failure — a stage direction that says provincial and means lesser.

What both writers do is refuse that diminishment. They take the provincial seriously. They render it with Shakespearean seriousness — which is to say, they treat their characters as people whose inner lives are fully, irreducibly human, regardless of postcode or prospects.

You can listen to the full episode with Julia Grogan wherever you get your podcasts.

Island Town is, among other things, a love story. The love between Pete, Sam, and Kate — platonic, desperate, occasionally furious — is the engine of the play. They cannot save each other. They cannot save themselves. But they hold on to each other with a ferocity that Longman refuses to sentimentalise and refuses to dismiss.

That, in the end, might be what Julia means when she invokes Shakespeare. Not the language. Not the form. But the insistence that ordinary love, in ordinary circumstances, is worth the full attention of the stage.

There’s a reason Island Town was called earth-shatteringly sublime by one reviewer and reduced entire audiences to tears. It’s a play that trusts its characters completely. In a world that has largely stopped trusting people like them, that trust is itself a kind of politics.