Stef Smith

Interview by Malachy Tallack

Photograph by Eoin Carey

Playwright Stef Smith is one of the most exciting voices in Scottish theatre. In 2012, she won an Olivier award for her debut, Roadkill, written when she was a new graduate. Since then, the plays – and the accolades – have kept coming. Her work has been performed at The Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, The Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, and the New Vic, the Royal Court and the National Theatre in London. In 2020, after the success of Nora, her reimagining of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, she was named a finalist for the Susan Smith-Blackburn Prize, the most prestigious award for female playwrights in the English-speaking world.

2024 was a big year for Smith. In August, her stage adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun premiered with a high-profile run at the Edinburgh International Festival. Meanwhile, her BBC television drama Float – an LGBTQ+ love story set in small-town Scotland – returned for its second season, and won a BAFTA Scotland Award. Stef spoke to Gutter’s Managing Editor Malachy Tallack.

MALACHY TALLACK: Stef, I want to start with a big congratulations for your BAFTA win. It’s a great accolade for a really superb show. And I wondered, first of all, what differences you’d found writing for television as opposed to writing for the stage?

STEF SMITH: I think the big difference for me ­– and something that I learned very early on in the process of making Float – is you have to think in pictures, very specifically. In theatre, I still think in pictures, but it's less connected to naturalism or reality, whereas with Float I felt like I had to have an understanding of the space the characters are in in order to let them talk in that space.

Part of that is a pragmatic element: We were on a small budget, we were only going to get certain set locations. But also, I feel like my scripts are maps for the other creatives involved, and I wanted to try and create a map that was transposable to places that I knew we might be shooting in, and that gave the actors and the creatives involved a  shorthand to the emotional language of the piece. So that was a really big thing for me: having to think very realistically and naturalistically in image and in pictures.

The other thing that is worth mentioning is that there is a format in television that we've become accustomed to as viewers. There is a tradition of how long a scene is, for example. You know, roughly speaking, a scene is one to two pages of final draft. And it was an interesting thing to work within the confines of expectation when it came to the medium.

MT: Well, I was going to ask about that, because one way in which Float goes against our expectations as viewers is that the episodes are very short: just ten to twelve minutes each. How did you think differently about telling a story when it's such a compact space you're working within?

SS: The thing about that short form is that it's deceptively tricky. In some ways it's easier to write half an hour of telly, or an hour of telly, because you've got more space, whereas with the short form you have to cram so much story in, so much understanding of character and plot, that it's actually a very technical task. Using those ten minutes to honour our expectations of television – ending with a hook, and each character having enough screen time that we felt like we understood everybody who's part of this ensemble – was hard. I wanted Float to have breath to it, and not feel rammed full of story and plot. You know, the type of television I like to consume is television that has space and breath, and trying to create that within a ten-minute format was very tough. It was something that I had to wrangle with in the whole process really.

MT: Because it could be limiting, in terms of what you can actually fit, I suppose. But it doesn’t feel over-full. There is breath within it.

SS: That's good. I'm glad. I think one thing that television is guilty of, sometimes, is patronising the viewer, assuming that people will turn off after thirty seconds if something huge doesn't happen. And actually, I think viewers are more sophisticated, in that, if we care about the characters we will go on all sorts of adventures with them, even if the adventure is slow and spacious.

And I think that’s what I wanted Float to do. It was a relatively low pressure environment, in regards to the television world – i.e. the budget wasn’t very big, we knew that we were going to exist within this quite specific format, these ten-minute episodes, and it was aiming to reach a young adult audience – and those sort of all stacked up to create a space where we could embrace some of the elements of telly I enjoy: that space and breath that you wouldn't necessarily find in, you know, 9pm cop thrillers.

MT: You wrote the series, but how involved were you able to be in others aspects of the show: the casting and so on?

SS: I was a lot less involved than I would be in theatre. And I think that is the nature of the machine of television. I think there’s more of a handing-over to the director and the production than there is in theatre. And so, for example, I watched all the shortlists for the characters [during casting] and gave my responses. And my responses were part of a pooled collection of responses, whereas with theatre it’s very much a conversation between writer and director.  

I went and visited the set on both seasons one and two. I went and visited the set for a day, and that was fascinating. I mean, it was very humbling. You watch all these people journey together towards a common goal of making the most interesting, thrilling, moving series they can. And it was nice to remember that this is a group endeavour. Because, more so than novelists or poets, my work involves a community of artists. And with television writing, it was easy to forget that until I visited the set, where I saw all these people and thought, Holy fuck! They’re all working on my script! And I found it very moving and very humbling.

MT: Float is about anger, it's about homophobia, and it’s about the things we find difficult to say to each other. But it’s also, at its heart, a very romantic story, a love story.

SS: Yeah, it's quite unusual for me to write a love story. But from the beginning, I knew I wanted this to be a love story, and part of the reason was that we so rarely see same- sex female couples on screen. And when we do, the story tends to be tinged with tragedy and, more often than not, violence. And I wanted to show a tenderness to this story, because the truth is that lots of teenage or young love is very tender. It quite often gets shown as being a bit more rock’n’roll than it actually is, and one of my aims was to try and write a tender queer love story between two women. I'm glad it shone through.

I suppose I was also trying to write what I never saw on television. When I was first approached about this – and it was very much about trying to access an audience between 16 and 22 – I thought, what did I want to watch when I was that age? What would I feel like I didn't want to miss the next episode of? And it was a queer, tender love story. So yes, I loved writing a love story. I would recommend it. It was very joyful. And I think the two [central] performers in the series did an incredible job of holding that space and tenderness. What's interesting is they didn't know each other, really, when we were shooting season one. I think it might have been the first time they met. But by the time we came round to season two, they had hung out loads, they'd really connected. There was a real, very truthful bond between them. And it was nice to sort of harness that in season two.

MT: I wanted to go back to beginning now and to ask how you were first drawn to the theatre.

SS:  My interest in theatre came from when I was in my early teens, and I joined the local youth theatre in Callander. And I loved it. You know, in many ways my love of theatre comes from a very instinctive, playful place. It didn't come from reading plays, it came from being in a tribe of people who felt as weird and wonderful as I did. That then evolved into being part of a youth theatre at the Macrobert [Arts Centre] in Stirling, and I can't remember who it was but somebody said, Have you considered studying theatre at university? So I looked up the course, at Queen Margaret University, called Drama and Theatre Arts.

I went on to that course, I think, having read three plays: Bold Girls by Rona Munro, plus Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. And so when I encountered A Doll’s House, for example, or 4.48 by Sarah Kane, my understanding of theatre sort of exploded. So to go back to your question, my relationship with theatre has always been one of collaboration, of play, of making, and it wasn't until I got to university that it became more academic and literary.

MT: So the interest in writing for theatre came at university?

SS: Yes, we were encouraged to write, and I loved that. I didn't have any particular craft or knowledge. It was very instinctual. It was very rough and ready. My writing started in poetry. I loved writing poetry as a teenager, as lots of teenagers do; it gave me a tool to try and understand the world, to try and express myself, and to explore the voices of different characters as well. That poetry was quite often written from someone else's point of view, not necessarily my own. And when I got to university, I think my love of theatre and my love of writing poetry crashed into each other and set me off on a very particular course.

MT: Are there many opportunities for younger people who are interested in writing for theatre in Scotland? Is this something that’s very difficult for people to get into, or are the opportunities there once you start looking for them?

SS: Most theatres will have some form of writers group that you can join, and sometimes there's a selection process involved, so you might have to do a short application. You've got organisations like Playwrights Studio who offer loads of free opportunities: they might be one day workshops or talks given by playwrights. So there are opportunities.

I think the opportunity to get your work made is harder, and I think as a playwright getting your work on stage is as vital to the learning process as writing the play in the first place, because until you got it there in front of an audience your play is incomplete. And so I think there are opportunities to do the writing, but fewer opportunities to do the making. And it's easy to sort of disconnect those two elements, but for me they are intimately entwined.

MT: It's interesting that. It's very different from writing a poem, say, or writing a book, where you only have to share your writing with one other person and it does its work. But a play has to be performed in order to come alive.

SS Yes, totally. I think that's what makes it so addictive. Making theatre is this extraordinary live, shared event, and it’s probably as much related to live music as anything else. There's something so extraordinary and irreplaceable about sharing a story with a group of people who are all bearing witness to something, and having individual experiences in a collective way, you know? There's nothing else like it. I found it very odd when Float came out on television, and I was suddenly aware that probably more people than usual were accessing my work, but I was just sitting at home and watching it come up on iPlayer [laughs]. And I was like, oh, this is not the same as a press night in theatre.

MT: Yes, it’s more like publishing a book, in that sense.

SS: Totally. I suddenly thought about my novelist friends, and I was like, gosh, this is bizarre!

MT: All these people have bought your book, and you don't know who any of them are or how they’re responding.

SS: Yes, whereas you are acutely aware of people's experience in the theatre.

MT: Let's speak about The Outrun, and your recent adaptation of it. Can you can remember what it was about that book that excited you, as a reader, when you when you first encountered it?

SS: I grew up somewhere very rural, and although [it was] very different from Orkney, I really connected with Amy's depiction of growing up. I feel like that's unexplored territory: what it means to be a young woman growing up in a rural space, and a rural space in Scotland. And so that element chimed with my own teenage-hood in a great way.

I personally have a deep love of nature as well and I felt like Amy was exploring that kind of relationship in a way that I hadn't encountered before. And also, I think, any memoir or work of fiction that explores women tackling the very need to survive, despite circumstance, is always going to draw me in. And so it was like a sweet spot of all those things that I felt connected with and am intrigued by.

MT: Could you say something about the challenges of adaptation, both generally and with this particular book, which perhaps doesn't feel like a natural fit for the stage?

SS: I think that one of the challenges of adaptation is my own cynicism, because quite often stage adaptations are done as a ‘safe bet’ in regards to [attracting] an audience who are familiar with the title. And so I always feel with an adaptation, for me as a writer, I want to really know why I'm doing it, and that can be a stumbling block straight away.

I feel like both with The Outrun and also when I did Nora, which is based on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, I had to tenderly take it out of the hands of the original author and figure out where my voice was in their work or their story – and that can be quite a nebulous, tricky process because it's not always obvious. And because with both of those works, I loved the original, it was a hard process sometimes because I knew I had to let things go. It felt like with every draft I managed to either shake off Ibsen or relinquish some of the less dramatic parts of The Outrun.

When it came to The Outrun, that was such a specific adaptation of someone's memoir, and someone who was still living, and I think for a long time I wore that responsibility quite heavily. I felt very protective of her memoir in a way that I was totally self-imposed. Nobody gave me that responsibility. That was just me as a hopefully empathetic human trying to connect another empathetic human's work.

Practically speaking, when I knew that we were going ahead with at least trying to move towards a first draft of the script, I wrote Amy a treatment of how I was going to handle her work. I knew that I was going to have to invent certain aspects of it, particularly people for her to talk to in moments of her life where, in the memoir, she hadn't specified who was populating that space. Because I always really fought for The Outrun not to be a one woman show. I think female narratives are so often confined to being one woman shows, but I actually wanted the sense of expansiveness that is definitely there in the memoir.

MT: The difficulty is, of course, that it's a memoir that doesn't have a lot of dialogue or reported interactions that could easily be constructed into dramatic scenes. So what were you starting with as you got to work on it? Is it a kind of narrative spine and, what, a feeling?

SS: Yeah, I actually think you've hit the nail on the head there. There's a feeling and a tone to the book that I wanted to stay true to. I knew it would have to be quite drastically transformed in order to be a successful stage play. (By ‘successful’ I mean one where the character has obstacles and has relationships they’re navigating, including the relationship the character has with themselves; and by the end of it, the audience should feel like the character has changed.) But if a book has a ‘soul’, then I wanted to keep the soul of the memoir intact.