So what is Papercuts?

“Papercuts is a programme of rehearsed readings for student writers like me whose plays are a bit too long for actors to remember the lines.” There’s an answer straight from the horse’s mouth – and when I say horse, I mean Nathan Hardisty, the student writer of the upcoming Trimalchio.

A tragicomedy about a young playwright drafted in to adapt The Great Gatsby for his billionaire friend, Trimalchio explores how Mark slowly sinks into the mind of F. Scott Fitzgerald and finds himself dodging demons from his romantic past. “It is a play about our relationship with theatre and fiction itself and why we indulge in the comfort of storytelling,” Nathan tells me.

He explains how he first read The Great Gatsby almost seven years ago but never really understood it until A Level when his teacher highlighted the symbolism of the death of the American dream. Then something clicked and Nathan thought “this is an interesting story”.

“All of the film adaptations have been straight-faced A to B narratives and have not actually got to the core of what makes Gatsby tick,” he explains. “When I got my heart broken, I thought I’d write this really milquetoast tragic paeon about a guy that becomes trapped in romantic notions of what happiness really is.”

The story then evolved from a novella published online to a play as Nathan dabbled with writing for the stage, adapting this “story about a white guy getting over himself” into something funny with a unique “meta” spin.

“I have written for the stage before” Nathan adds — two consecutive years of pantomimes for the Churchill JCR, with the most recent one entitled The Wizard of Ozbridge and directed by yours truly. “But with those,” he continues, “I was a part of them, I was acting; I could hear the laughs but I didn't really get to experience what the audience were watching. Now it’s weird seeing your writing in other people’s hands and seeing what they create and put more emphasis on. I do generally prefer having little to no input in the production aspect.”

Last month another of his plays, Losing My Religion, was also given a rehearsed reading in the Larkum Studio. He tells me that he has since trimmed the script down — and maybe has taken the programme title Papercuts a little too literally — by cutting scenes which seemed repetitive when staged. He gleefully recounts how he heard an audience member comment after the show that it was “ridiculous”, and then five seconds later, “a bit interesting”. He continues: “What I’m really happy about is that everyone who’s directed or acted in the plays enjoy it. Looking past the audience, at least I’ve given some joy to the world.”

What was the process of writing Trimalchio like? “You know me – it was sporadic,” he jokes. “I think it was Steinbeck who said that the best way to write dialogue is to speak it aloud to yourself. When I finished writing a sequence, I read it back to myself aloud. I wasn’t quite at Aaron Sorkin levels of arguing with myself alone in a room for 12 hours when I re-read the dialogue but I did like to find the natural rhythm.

“These are plays; they’re meant to be performed. They don’t work quite as well as a piece of literature.” With Trimalchio Nathan wants to find out whether “people can enjoy a play that is about a playwright and if they can understand it.” He adds: “you don’t have to have read Gatsby to get it but at the same time you’ll lose something if you don’t. At the moment I don’t know if I’m targeting a niche audience or whether I need to broaden the play’s appeal. Also there could be a few jokes that go a bit too far.”

“The play is for people who like theatre; like talking about theatre; who’ve ever had a conversation after a show asking ‘what if they did this differently’ when it comes to the staging and the mechanics behind theatre. Also you’ll like it if you’re a complete nerd and/or you’ve read Gatsby.”

I ask what the end goal is. “Maybe I’ll oversee full productions of these plays next year,” Nathan replies, “I’ll hand the finished scripts over to the directors and see what happens.”

Papercuts: Trimalchio is on Friday 20th May 2016 at 8pm in the Larkum Studio of the ADC Theatre.