“There have been days when I’ve had my head in my hands thinking ‘I just can’t do this’.”
Playwright Mike Kenny on professional and creative survival during lockdown.
“It was spectacular. Within a week everything… I had plays in various stages of production all over the world. They all stopped. It was astonishing, really, how huge this thing has been.”
Mike Kenny has nothing to prove. Since he started writing plays in the mid-1980s (he previously trained as an English and drama teacher), he has won multiple awards including The Arts Council of England Children’s Award, several Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Awards, the Kinderteaterpreis in Germany and three LA Critics Awards in the US. The Independent on Sunday once named him in a list of the top 10 living UK playwrights.
Born and raised on the Welsh borders, he started out as a theatre in education actor and teacher at Leeds Playhouse. He has based himself in Yorkshire pretty much ever since. For five years he lived with his wife, film actress Barbara Marten, and his young family on a boat on the River Ouse.
“So how are you doing?” I ask him on a Zoom call during the …