Introduction

In September 2025, I joined the creative team of After: A New Musical. Within this team I took on a number of roles including co-producer, administrator, dramaturg and, most prominently, book writer. Throughout the process I have learnt a great number of things about creating theatre and the difficulties that come with it. In this portfolio, I will aim to explain my process, how the show changed and developed and why, where the future of this show is hopefully going and finally the financial structure of the show.

Development of Book

When After was first pitched, it had no semblance of plot, only a concept: How do we, as people, cope after things in our lives get difficult, whether that’s the death of someone we love, a breakup or moving away for the first time. 

During a consultation with Matthew Bugg, we were encouraged to decide on what message we wanted our show to convey to the audience (Bugg, 2026). We came to the decision that the primary message of the musical would be that of communication and acceptance. As people, we all cope with our struggles differently and everyone’s reactions are relative to their own life experiences. We decided that our show needed to demonstrate how we need to communicate our needs and accept that people will deal with things differently. I personally found that having this message helped my writing enormously, often helping me get over ‘writers block’ by giving me a strong basis to return to when I was unsure what the story needed next.

In our team’s initial idea for the show, we had 5 characters, each with their own struggles, including moving away, difficult relationships, breaking up with a partner and losing a parent. What I quickly came to realise when trying to create a plot was that there were too many characters to care about and so I didn’t feasibly have the space within the story to let an audience care about any of them. In one of our lectures with Matthew Bugg, we discussed how this style of writing can work very well in a series since you have time to learn about each character in depth, however in the time span of a single musical, an audience does not have that time and so you end up with 5 under developed characters (Bugg, 2025). Learning from this, I decided to focus on one character, Olive, as our primary protagonist and let everything in the show stem off from her.

The next big change to our characters was the addition of Noah, Olive’s brother. From our original draft of the show we discovered that we wanted to see an opposing reaction to Lottie’s death and by adding Noah, we could see 2 people in the same situation reacting completely differently. The addition of Noah also allowed us to connect Archie to the story by putting them in a relationship. This gave us 2 clear storylines for the first act of the show, which can be seen in an early draft of the plot in Image 1 and Image 2. 

Along the way of writing the book, I got stuck over who these characters were and what needed to change in order to make them more interesting. During another consultation with Matthew Bugg, he gave us a number of suggestions to help, one of which being the ages of the characters (Bugg, 2026). Giving the characters specific ages really helped with power balances and gave me ways to understand what level of understanding they had when events happened in their past. For example, Olive and Noah’s age gap being increased meant that when Noah left home before the events of the show, Olive wouldn’t have been old enough to understand Noah’s perspective, leading back to the communication struggles between these characters. The biggest change I made at this point was the age of Mabel. Before this point Mabel was the same age as Olive, however I decided to make her the oldest character in the show at 68. My reasoning for this was that it put more emphasis on the injustice of Lottie dying at such a relatively young age, allowing us to question the unfair situation our characters are faced with and how Lottie’s death goes against the ‘natural order of life’.

When we went into our Research and Development week, my main goal was to figure out who these characters really are. I did a lot of work with the actors alongside our director to hear their opinions on the characters and looked at how many different ways we could play them. Something that we discovered during this process was the idea of Noah having unresolved anger issues and being unable to be in touch with his emotions (See Video 1). This allowed the story to have a touching resolve in act 2, where Noah is finally vulnerable with Archie (See Video 2). This was found just from the actor’s interpretation during a rehearsal and it is an aspect of Noah’s character that I would like to delve further into in the future.

Management

As this was a collaborative project, the management was of high importance so that we could create a cohesive piece of theatre. In our first meeting, we delegated tasks within our team. As a team, we discussed what we wanted to get out of this process and which areas of the creative team we were keen to explore so that we could delegate roles fairly. After delegating the jobs, we discussed how we wanted the show to be created since it was only myself writing the book but we still wanted the show to tell the stories of our team. I made the decision that people within the team could come to me with ideas for characters and plot, but the final decisions would be mine to make. This part of the process became a challenge as I was faced with lots of differing opinions about how the story should be written. I quickly came to the decision that, as the book writer, I needed to take charge over the plot and characters rather than trying to include every single idea that was given to me.

Since my roles on this project included administration and Co-producer, I was particularly management-minded on this project. Early on in the project, I became aware that not everyone was up to date on the constantly changing plot and character developments. In order to help this, I organised weekly meetings with the aim to both discuss new ideas as a whole team and to ensure everyone had something to be working on, whether that is writing new songs or researching movement ideas. Checking in this often ensured that we were always on the same page, which was especially important when there were major plot developments.

I also managed the rehearsal process during our R&D week. Part of my responsibilities during this week was to book rehearsal spaces, organise call sheets and check in with the creative team at the end of each day to determine what needed to be done the next day. Something I learnt very quickly in this role was how flexible rehearsal schedules needed to be, especially in R&D weeks as the show is still changing. As seen in Image 3, and Image 4, call sheets were subject to change and often did throughout the week based on the needs of the creative team.

Finance

One of the biggest questions we as a team needed to ask ourselves was “is our show financially viable?”. There are lots of different potential costs that need to be budgeted for.

When writing the book of After, there were a number of financial factors that impacted the way I wrote. The first aspect of the book that we thought about financially was simply the number of characters that were written into the show. According to the Equity Commercial Theatre Agreement, the minimum wage per actor for an 8 show week is £498.16 per week during rehearsal periods and £526.49 per week during performance weeks. In order to keep costs as low as possible, we initially decided that this show would only include 6 actors. The problem this eventually caused was that I was very restricted in terms of possible interactions the characters can have outside of each other. I debated ways in which I could keep finances down whilst fixing this problem. I came to the decision of adding one extra actor who could be used as these extra characters. During our R&D week, we played a lot with this ensemble track, looking specifically at the importance of the role and whether what we wanted was possible for one actor. In the end, we decided it would be beneficial to have 2 actors, one female presenting and one male presenting, play this ensemble track. This would also allow us to have onstage swings, so that if there was actor illness we wouldn’t have to immediately cancel a performance. Financially, this would be an additional £21 per role/per week and £32 per performance, which would likely be better than refunding an entire audience. (UK Theatre / Equity Commercial Theatre Agreement – 8-Show Rates for 2023 -2026 WEEKLY SALARY MINIMA 8 Show Weeks, n.d.).

Another financial factor that affected the way I wrote the book was the set, props and costume design. When writing we decided that the show would be set in modern day. This was financially helpful for us as it meant that costumes could be easily sourced and we wouldn’t need to spend unnecessary money searching for costumes from a specific time period. Looking at the set, I wrote the book with as few settings as possible and the settings we do need could have interchangeable props and sets so that we could keep set costs as low as possible. Something I discovered as the process went on was that this was quite restrictive on the story I was trying to tell. I came to the decision that in order to have important set changes, I needed to compromise on other aspects of setting. For example, in an early version of the script, I wanted to have a girls night at the pub, going on to a club, however, I decided to financially compromise on this so that we could afford more important sets, such as the hospital at the end of act 1. From these decisions, I also decided that in the future of the project, a lot of the scenes could be simply shown via lighting. The average cost of a lighting designer in the UK for the type of show that I am creating would be somewhere between £2,750 – £3,500 per project. (ALPD Substantiated Fees for Lighting Design, n.d.)

In order to be able to do this show financially, we would need to apply for financial support. In the future of the show, I would like to take it to the Leeds Theatre Festival so that we can invite potential producers to see a complete version of the show in hopes that we could receive some financial support for future iterations. The Leeds Theatre Festival is an ideal place to start out this production because as students of Leeds Conservatoire, we are provided rehearsal and performance spaces, technical equipment and we can utilise other students for the cast (Harrison, 2026). I would also use the facilities at Leeds Conservatoire to record demos of the music so that we can send some content to any potential producers who were unable to attend the festival. I would also be interested in taking this show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and as I am a Welsh artist, I could apply for funding through Arts Council Wales, who have a ‘Wales in Edinburgh’ fund for Welsh artists who wish to take their work to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (Arts.wales, 2026). We could also apply for funding from Arts Council England and Arts Council Scotland.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this project has taught me a great number of things, not only about being a creative behind the scenes, but also how to be a better performer. Being a book writer and dramaturg really made me think about how characters are created and how much care and detail goes into them. Working with actors on the show also highlighted to me how a well written script can determine how easily an actor can portray what the writer has intended. This process also allowed me to have a new found appreciation for the amount of work producers need to do in order to make a show viable. Going forward I would be interested in continuing to write new projects alongside this show, however I would also be interested in working on other projects in an administrative or Stage Management role as this is a role that I found myself able to thrive in during this process.

Bibliography

ALPD Substantiated Fees for Lighting Design. (n.d.). Available at: https://www.thealpd.org.uk/sites/default/files/resources/ALPDSubstantiatedFeesForLightingDesign20211105.pdf. [Accessed 20 Apr. 2026].

Arts.wales. (2026). Wales in Edinburgh | Arts Council of Wales. [online] Available at: https://arts.wales/funding/individuals/wales-edinburgh. [Accessed 20 Apr. 2026]. 

Aveline, J. (2002). Production Management.

Bugg M (2025), Professional Studies 2: Theatre Project Pitch [Lecture] MTH5C006R~001

Bugg, M (2026). Conversation with Rebecca Snowden, 3 February.

Harrison, S. (2026). Conversation with Rebecca Snowden, 12 March.

UK Theatre / Equity Commercial Theatre Agreement – 8-Show Rates for 2023 -2026 WEEKLY SALARY MINIMA 8 Show Weeks. (n.d.). Available at: https://uktheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/190324-UK-Theatre-Equity-Commercial-Theatre-rates-2023-2026.pdf. [Accessed 20 Apr. 2026].