David Storey interview

In The Daily Telegraph, Japser Rees talks to David Storey ahead of the West End revival of his play, In Celebration.

Storey fell into theatre in 1967 when the Court finally staged a play he'd submitted eight years earlier. The Restoration of Arnold Middleton earned him a share of the Evening Standard's award for most promising playwright. It took his co-winner, Tom Stoppard, four years to come up with a full-length follow-up to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In four months, Storey wrote several of the plays on which his reputation still rests.

"I don't think I'd been to the theatre more than a dozen times in my life," he says.

"All the plays were written out with no knowledge of the theatre at all. The only plays that have ever worked are when I start with the first line and a vague idea of what they might be about and they write themselves."