Tamsin has been a member of the Royal Court Young Writers’ Programme (2008); the Soho Young Writers’ Programme (2008) and Royal Court Invitation Programme (2008).  Her play, THE WAKE (2008) was short-listed for the Bruntwood Award at Manchester Royal Exchange and was called back for script development.  Her recent work includes LOVE FOR LORNE, a radio play for Menagerie Theatre’s Echoes of the East project in conjunction with BBC Radio Cambridge.  Furthermore, she has developed two scripts for radio for Fiona Kelcher, BBC Radio Development Producer.

Tamsin studied English at Cambridge University and has an Mphil in Playwriting from Birmingham University, where she received a distinction for radio playwriting.  She has produced, written, directed and performed many pieces for fringe theatre and radio, including MY NAME IS DANIEL and THROUGH THE DARK – two miniaturist radio plays for Bunbury Banter Theatre Company for broadcast on Hayes FM, NuSound FM, Audio Book Radio.

Tamsin’s Hotbed play is called KITCHEN SINK. Katie is a housewife, a Conservative counsillor and child of a single mother who’s just recognised her ‘chains’. Her great-grandmother was a suffragette, her grandmother Dora demonstrated against her Party believing their cuts chain women back to the kitchen sink. Through Katie, come four generations of women’s voices and an exploration of the qualities and inequalities of female experience.

Interview with Tamsin

What was the inspiration behind your play?

On 19 November women dressed in 50’s frocks and chained themselves to kitchen sinks demonstrating with the Fawcett Society about cuts made by the Government to alleviate the deficit which would turn back-time on women’s equality. Women like Dora went on that march; women like Katie made them march.

What is your greatest ambition?

To be mistaken for Tom Stoppard. No, seriously, to write as much as I can, and as well as I can, to get my work seen and heard and read, to be a professional and maybe one day a set-text, and be underlined by students in small sixth-form buildings. We can all dream otherwise what’s the point.

When was the last time you laughed out loud and why?

Perhaps watching Spaced, or Gavin and Stacey or Flight of the Conchords, all things that keep me smiling; witty and zany and unexpected, the abnormality of normality,  expressed, really rather well. Or mostly life, day-to-day, which never ceases to amuse.

Who is your favourite writer(s)?

This is an unnecessarily cruel question (but I’m very grateful for the plural). To start with the Greeks, I began with them and will never leave them behind. Tom Stoppard, Samuel Beckett, Chekhov and Ibsen, I have a leaning towards tragedy, and an English degree that wouldn’t forgive me if I didn’t, Crimp and Williams (Tennessee), Miller and McPherson, McEwan, Bowen and Woolf. A love affair with Murakami and post-apocalyptic fiction that’s lasted for years and of course I don’t have to mention Milton and Shakespeare…