Arriving at the ADC to talk to Harry Michell and Will Attenborough about the play they’ve written together, next week’s lateshow Post, I am greeted by the frankly startling vision of Michell sitting outside smoking a cigarette whilst wearing half of a pantomime dame costume.

This, whilst not entirely unpleasant, sets a slightly surreal tone for a discussion about a play that I’m assured is actually more tragic than comic, something that might confound expectations, coming as it does from the current Footlights President and seasoned sketch show veteran Attenborough. 

Michell initially wrote Post on his own, in eighteen hours straight: intending to enter the play for the annual Harry Porter prize he was scuppered by the unwelcome realisation that the play “isn’t actually that funny”. He asked Attenborough to come on board and they proceeded to re-write the play together; Attenborough, who jokingly referring to himself as the “doctor” of the play, spent a significant amount of time on the first draft just “cutting out all of the appalling jokes”.

The play centres upon the life of a postman, Terry, and uses the multitudinous letters that fill his Post Office as a gateway to the story of his own life and of the characters confined within the letters. Both Michell and Attenborough have furnished the narrative with anecdotes from their own pasts. Although the stories have been sufficiently twisted into entirely fictional episodes, both admit to being “really quite worried” about the semi-autobiographical nature of some of the content; “there is some pretty personal stuff in there”.

Neither of them have shown the script to their loved ones and both have banned their respective families from coming to see the show, aware that however much they have distorted things, people who know them will recognise familiar stories in Terry’s reminiscences. They also acknowledge the difficulty of writing about something beyond their own experience:there is, unsurprisingly, ample material for Terry’s life up until he reaches his twenties, but once they were no longer writing about what they knew the process became significantly harder, particularly in the effort to avoid generic clichés.

Both writers agree, however, that the process was overwhelmingly an enjoyable one, partly because the actual business of writing was “very organic and constantly mutable”: the play grew out of the stories they wanted to tell. Neither Attenborough nor Michell have had a hand at all in the actual business of the production: they have handed control over completely to Charlie Risius and Ed Eustace, who are respectively directing and taking on the daunting prospect of playing Terry.

The pair haven’t even attended a single rehearsal, emphasising their “complete faith” is Risius’ direction and Eustace’s “phenomenal” acting ability. Although letting go of a script can be difficult, inspiring a severe case of separation anxiety, Michell believes it is an important thing to do: “the only way to make a play three-dimensional is to give it to somebody else”.

Whilst Cambridge possesses an undeniably impressive theatre scene boasting as it does a positive smorgasboard of opportunities for the theatrically-inclined, whether it provides quite as fertile ground for new writing is a much-debated subject. Both Michell and Attenborough are positive about the unique environment the university provides –“there isn’t any real pressure with anything you put on here, it’s a playground, really”– and Michell goes on to say that the fact that there is a real possibility anything you write might get put on is a key factor in motivating writers, along with the all-important provision of deadlines.

Attenborough does, however, acknowledge the fact that more could always be done to encourage new writing, noting that there is a perennial temptation to put on traditional works instead of trying something new: “I spent my first two years here performing in stuff that you could see on the West End, and it was absolutely brilliant, but I’m glad I’m trying my hand at something else in my final year”.

The business of writing is a difficult one, and as English students they are both also painfully aware of the difficulty posed by the unrealistically high expectations that come from reading a lot: “it’s very easy to read a lot of stuff that you think is brilliant, sit down to write your first play and immediately become outraged that is isn’t Pinter”. Although ‘Post’ is by nature technically an amateur production – it is the Amateur Dramatic Club, after all, however easily forgotten that is – one of the chief problems that besets any new play is the task of avoiding the overtly amateurish. Both Michell and Attenborough talk about how difficult it is to avoid the temptation (again perhaps particularly prevalent for English students) to be overtly “writerly”, cramming the play with allusions and ignoring the importance of showing rather than telling.

In a self-mocking (I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt) nod to the overly literary, Michell finishes our discussion by referencing a Yeats essay that talks about the very particular state a play’s audience are in – somewhere halfway between waking and sleeping– and ruminating that the mark of amateurism is intruding into that state: “hearing the writer, or seeing the mark of the director, is what breaks that. A good writer has to be totally invisible. We don’t want the audience to hear a line and think ‘what a great one from Will Attenborough’, we want them to believe without thinking about it that it’s Terry”.

I leave with my interest piqued (there’s a twist! A promised secret twist!) and with a few more thoughts to spare for the contents of the Post Office I walk past on my way home. And, of course, with the image of a Pantomime Dame quoting Keats quite possibly burned into my memory forever.

 ‘Post’ runs at the ADC Theatre 28th November-1st December at 11pm