“I’m not going to be nude,” Kat Griffiths tells me as we talk of her oncoming one-woman show. “If I was going to be nude, they would have had to apply for a special license apparently. Whereas with partial nudity, they are just going to put up signs; a bit like warning epileptics of strobe lighting.”

Having graduated with an English degree last year, this is Kat’s first project from the ‘other side’, as she calls it, and she is keen to stress that writing a column about sex doesn’t necessarily make her a sensationalist.

“A lot of students will have probably read my raucous, bag of laughs sex-column, ‘SWEARBOX’ and will think that my being half-naked on stage will be the play’s main thing. But actually, it’s not a gimmick, nor the point, it just happens to be so.”  The blurb for the show lists a woman chained to her bed centre-stage.  Viewers may be right, then, to expect much of the same wit and nerve that Kat’s blog showed.  What they would be missing, are the ways in which Cambridge has influenced her subtly as a writer and actress.

“I thought I was going to arrive at Cambridge and be this great actress who really loved acting and thrived off it. In fact, I got here three years ago and was too nervous to say any words in auditions.” She goes on to add wryly, “so that didn’t really happen.”  She did, thankfully, go on to act, in just a handful of things.  But they were parts in more unusual productions, shows that she’d heard about indirectly or that people had asked her to be in.  Things she didn’t have to audition for, in short.  Yet through them she has got to know some of the city’s more unusual venues.

The fact that she wasn’t quite suited to the ADC at first doesn’t come across as a restriction. We speak about the glut of venues in Cambridge, from the Corpus Playrooms to the Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio, and the choices that directors make when deciding where to put on a play.  It was through acting as Lady Macbeth that Kat first came across the Judith E. Wilson Studio Drama Studio, and was enthralled by the opportunities that the space offered, an 8m2 black box in the basement of the English Faculty.

“It couldn’t have been done anywhere else, the way we moved about, the way we took the audience with us through passages, acting in tiny [partitioned] rooms.  It was an innovative and charming production,” she says, talking of Isabel Taylor’s Macbeth.  This was put on in Easter term 2010; Kat would return to the Judith E. Wilson during her third year here, playing the lead in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.

“Somebody said to me after I finished Macbeth, ‘Yeah so some reviewers came and said it was great…but there was only a capacity of 50!’ So, it sold out every night, but not that many people around Cambridge saw it or heard about it.  And somebody said to me,  ‘Why is it you insist on doing great things in these tiny obscure theatres?’ and I was like, ‘Why is it you insist on not seeking out tiny obscure theatres in case they’re putting on these really great things?’ Which they are.”

Again, she remains upbeat about only having done a handful of shows as an actress.  There is the sense that if she had become fully involved in other people’s productions then she never would have got round to her own.  To hear her talk about putting on a show, of taking it up to the Edinburgh Fringe, as she did with The Cure, is to realise the slight shelter that Cambridge offers new-writers.  When I bring up the mass-migration of Cambridge students up to the Fringe every year, she grimaces slightly, remembering the madness.  “You hear of shows that only have two audience members.  And then they realise that they’re the only two audience members there, and then they leave too.”

This never happens to a Cambridge show, she implies, recalling her vocation as a committed audience member to her friends’ plays.  It just goes to show that the support is there in the most unlikely of places.