Leon Fleming was born in Castleford. He is a playwright, a producer and dramaturg. He is co-artistic director of 5Pound5 Theatre and is currently under commission to Leeds Playhouse. Leon’s writing credits include: The Chechnya Plays (5Pound5 Theatre, Theatre Deli Camberwell/Kings Head Islington with Ian McKellen); The Boy Next Door (Jersey Arts Trust, BBC Jersey,) and Monkeys in Toy Town (New Mercury Theatre, Crescent Theatre Birmingham). Leon is a trustee of Bradford LGBTQ+ Strategic Partnership. He has co-written A Proper Merry Christmess, a Red Ladder Theatre production, which opens in November this year.

What made you want to be a writer?

We weren’t a theatre family and my dad was a coal miner. But I’d written since I was a kid. I used to adapt little story books into plays for puppets. As a child I had this obsession with theatres even though I didn’t really go to them. My mum took me to see amateur pantomimes when I was a kid and on holiday I’d seen some of the end-of-the-pier stuff, but I didn’t see any professional, narrative-led theatre until I was 15. I went to Hull University to study chemistry but I left in my third year. I decided I wanted to be an actor and auditioned for drama schools but that didn’t work out. I started writing as a way to keep myself in the business (even though I wasn’t in the business!) I was 23 when I wrote my first completed play, a kind of gay Cinderella story back in 2001. It’s awful but I sent it off to three different places. In those days you couldn’t just email your scripts to people so I printed off some copies and posted them out. I sent it to the Bush Theatre in London because they had a reputation for doing a lot of new plays. They replied within six weeks saying they weren’t going to do it, but that they liked the humour and the characters which gave me a bit of a boost. The second place replied six months later and they clearly hated it and weren’t shy about telling me they hated it. And I’m still waiting to hear back from the third place 24 years later! But that one positive response spurred me on.

Was there a breakthrough moment in your writing career?

I kept writing plays and in 2006 I was living in Birmingham which is when I had my first play produced called Monkeys in Toytown, about gangsters and survival. It was quite gritty. That went on at the Crescent Theatre Studio. It was just a small production but it got my first review (a three-star review in the Birmingham Mail) and that felt like a big moment. I then moved with my partner at the time to Jersey for ten years which meant I was out of touch with what was happening in the UK, but it also meant I could spend time honing my craft. I won some writing competitions and formed a platform for new writing with another playwright.

What’s your earliest memory of going to the theatre and was there a memorable production that has stayed with you?

My mum used to take us to the amateur pantomime every year at the Civic Centre in Castleford which I loved. But it was when I was doing my GCSEs and we were studying Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and our English teacher said she and the drama teacher were going to see a production of the play at Leeds Playhouse. They asked if anyone wanted to go with them and a group of us said ‘yes.’ It was in the Quarry Theatre and Nichola McAuliffe was playing Katherina and it was just amazing. This production had a 1920s feel to it and I remember there was a jacuzzi on stage that the actors sat in and I thought ‘wow’. Around the same time we went to see another play. It was a family drama and it wasn’t great, but at the end of the play the main character turned round to his family and said ‘this family is all f***** up’ and I gasped. You heard swearing in films and on TV sometimes, but we didn’t know you could swear in a theatre. So I think seeing both these productions opened my eyes to what theatre could be.

What attracted you to writing for theatre, rather than for TV, film or radio?

I love telly and grew up watching it, but I loved this idea of theatre. It’s like there’s two worlds. There’s the place where the audience is with the velvet drapes and plush seats, and this is a completely different world to the other side of the stage with all the pulleys and ropes and people running about. That kind of dichotomy is magical to me, where these two worlds exist side by side. There’s nothing else really like it.

Why did you want to work with Red Ladder?

I hadn’t really come across Red Ladder until I moved to Leeds in 2015, but it immediately seemed like my kind of thing. It was a radical theatre company that had been around for ages, producing work that wasn’t just nice, polite theatre, and that drew me to it. Then I met Rod Dixon [the former artistic director] and we got on well. I helped out doing bits of marketing work and got to know more about the company and it went from there.

How did you end up co-writing A Proper Merry Christmess with Seeta Wrightson?

I met Cheryl Martin after she started at Red Ladder and she mentioned she was looking to do a Christmas show. She had read some of my work and said she would be interested in me working on this show in collaboration with someone else. She ran a course for writers, actors and directors last summer and afterwards Cheryl said, ‘I’ve found the person you’re going to write this show with. She’s called Seeta Wrightson. She’s really good and I think you’ll get on.’ And she was right!

Plays are usually written by one person, so what’s it like collaborating on a production?

I’ve never worked in partnership before. I work collaboratively with directors, but when I’m writing something it’s only been me. So this has been a very different experience. Neither of us knew how it would work exactly or even if it would work, but we met up beforehand and we got on well and found our outlook on life and our humour is quite similar. We knew the process would be a bit slower but writing it was fun and we’ve spent a lot of time laughing.

What are you looking forward to most about working on the production?

For me it’s that point when you’re sitting with the audience and you feel them enjoying it – hopefully. Often when I’m watching one of my plays I sit at the back and watch the audience to see how they interact with it. Seeing an audience being held by a show that’s what you look for and hope for as a writer.

A Proper Merry Christmas opens in November.