Upon entering Natalie’s room in Jesus Lane, I almost believed I had accidentally stumbled into a supervision: a sprawling space filled with little ornaments, posters stretched languidly on the wall, black and white photographs perched delicately in their frames on the mantelpiece. A clutter of culture drinking in the light from the array of windows lining the room, I discover that it is doubling up as both a bedroom and a rehearsal space for Natalie’s play, Mary & Claire: A Defence of Poetry. Running at the Corpus Playroom on Monday 26th October only, there is a buzz in the room as the two English undergraduates, writer Natalie Reeve, also playing Mary Shelley, and Ellie Heikel, playing the excitable Claire Clairmont, discuss the exhilaration of being able to perform their original piece on a relatively mainstream stage.

After having scrolled through their publicity photographs – Natalie scowling and draped in black, Ellie almost nymph-like in white – I ask them to explain the premise to me, intrigued by the images. “People have started publishing biographies and memoirs about Byron and Shelley which are very inaccurate and have problematised their reputations, and their poetry is starting to become unpopular because of it,” Natalie speaks of her creation, “Mary Shelley is like ‘no, I’m going to stop this’, so in desperation she contacts her step-sister Claire Clairmont - who she doesn’t really like that much actually and Claire kind of knows this - and they come together for this higher cause of restoring Byron and Shelley’s reputations. And Claire, who was once an actress, decides that the only way they’ll get enough attention is if they perform it themselves, playing all the characters between them”.

A plot that seems as if it was written with Cambridge students in mind, then: where did it all begin? “I remember having the idea for it quite distinctly when I was back in my house in Wales, thinking ‘I really want a show in which the women get to play shedloads of fun characters as well as themselves, but then I also want to write a show about Byron and Shelley, so how am I going to combine the two?’”, enthuses Natalie, a self-confessed Romanticist fanatic. “Then this very macabre idea of Mary and Claire wanting to play Byron and Shelley, and wanting to sort of play-act their way into this very male Romanticism just sort of came out and I was just like ‘Yes! Yes I can write this! This will totally work’’‘. The fruit of Natalie’s labour was initially evident when they were allowed to perform an extract for ‘Smorgasbord’, a festival that showcased the best in student writing last Easter term. “We basically said if this is well received we’ll put on the whole thing. And it was well-received and people were laughing at lines which we didn’t think were funny. Like it was a really serious Byron monologue and they were just laughing. So we thought: Why not? Let’s try and put on the whole thing”.

From a house in Wales to a student writing festival to a pitch at the ADC: “I didn’t have really any experience of producing plays before or applying to the ADC”, Ellie confesses, “so that was an interesting experience”. “We’re both quite comparatively unknown’, teases Natalie, ‘“so I was just like ‘I want to put on my play!’ and they were like ‘okay’, and probably remembered me as that really awful stage manager who really mistakenly stage managed.”

There have been some teething problems regarding being an original production with a small cast and crew. “When I first read Natalie’s script, it was like ‘and then Byron brings on his overlarge canon-bearing ship’” laughs Ellie, “I just said, ‘Natalie, what? This is in the Corpus Playroom on a one night stand on zero budget’”. They have, however, used it to their advantage: “The fact that Byron couldn’t have his canon-bearing ship became a sort of plot twist about the limitations of the Corpus Playroom as a space”.

I’m surprised at how straightforward applying to the ADC with a piece of original student writing is. There is a noticeable dearth of it in Cambridge, although as Ellie points out, “there is a lot of space for comedy whereas not for actual drama. Though Mary and Claire is comedic, it’s not a sketch show.” Natalie agrees, “I think there’s quite a lot of pressure as a student writer to be funny. I mean I felt it whilst writing Mary & Claire but it’s quite daunting doing the serious scenes because then you’re thinking ‘are they going to take this seriously?’’’. The main predicament, they both agree, is audience numbers, which are difficult to garner when the powerhouse that is the weekly ADC main show and familiar productions dominate the Cambridge student consciousness. “Everyone is very busy in Cambridge, and I rarely get to see original student scripts because I tend to prioritise the ones I definitely want to see,’ Ellie confesses, ‘I think it’s a shame, but I don’t really know how it could be fixed’”.

As well as the brilliance of the script, I remark how refreshing it is to have two women staging a production that incorporates comedy, and ask them whether they fear being approached with trepidation because of it. “I think when something has a female protagonist it’s always boxed into ‘this is a woman’s play and it’s for women and it’s about women’ when it can be for everyone,” Ellie rebukes, “what is quite interesting is that whilst there are two female protagonists, for most of the play they’re not themselves, they are playing male roles and it almost gives them a legitimacy.” Natalie nods in agreement: “There’s been quite a few productions where the casting has been genderblind, and I’ve gone for a male role, and got it, and some people are like ‘well, maybe let’s put in a joke about how you’re not actually a man’. But you really don’t need to be so self-aware about it, people shouldn’t care, as long as you’re playing a character and you’re good on stage it should be fine. With this you know from the beginning that it’s Mary playing Byron or Claire playing Shelley and you don’t sit back and spend all your time thinking ‘this is a girl playing a boy’ because you know it is, it doesn’t matter, it’s moved on from that”.

In one word, what would convince the hoard of Cambridge students to see their production? “I want to go for cannons, but I feel that that would mislead. There aren’t any cannons”, “I want to say Byron, but then I don’t because I know Byron would want me to say Byron”. After asking if there is anything else they want to add, they inundate me with cries of “Support your local student writers!”, “It’s only one night, it’s only on for an hour, it’s only £6!”, before Natalie calmly muses: “And you will learn something about some very horrible and lovely people at the same time”.

‘Mary and Claire: A Defence of Poetry’ runs on Monday 26th October at 9.30pm, the Corpus Playroom