Gary Owen interview

In The Guardian, Lyn Gardner talks to Guild member Gary Owen about his two upcoming new plays: Love Steals Us From Loneliness and Mrs Reynolds And The Ruffian.

Now 38, he has put miles between his present self and the unathletic boy who so loved reading that his mother used to send him outside to play as a punishment. [His first play] Crazy Gary ['s Mobile Disco] was followed by two award-winning plays: The Shadow of a Boy at the National, and The Drowned World at the Traverse, an apocalyptic drama where the world is divided into the ugly and the beautiful ("radiants"); the radiants are hunted and killed because they remind ordinary citizens of everything they are not. But then all seemed to go quiet: what happened?

"I went home to Wales," says Owen. "If you're not having plays on at the National you're invisible, but I have been working." Projects include Bulletproof, a play about teenage depression for the Northern Irish company Replay, another for Bridgend Youth theatre, and a project with the Sherman theatre in Cardiff involving children on the verge of exclusion from school.