Swindon's limited cultural scene proved a boon for writer Matt Fox when it came to casting and producing his play To Sleep.

“I basically run one theatre company in Swindon and Peter Hynds runs the other,” says Fox as the play goes on a national tour.

“That’s it in terms of Swindon culture! Pete was someone I wanted to work with, and a brilliant director, so I wrote the piece with him in mind.”

Inspired when Fox saw the film of classic Russian drama Anna Karenina, To Sleep introduces the audience to two characters who meet for the first time in a hospital waiting room after failed suicide attempts.

Hynds, who also directed the piece, plays Martin, a middle-aged man who had a sensible job, wife, family and mortgage but unexpectedly lost them all.

On the night the play covers he meets a 17-year-old girl, played by Ellie Lawrence, who has attempted to take her own life that same night.

“I’m very interested in cross-generational relationships,” says Fox, who first met the now 19-year-old Lawrence as trustee of an arts education charity.

“It’s people who wouldn’t meet in normal circumstances but are united by this common desperate situation they are in.

“Her being 17 was quite important – she’s somewhere between a child and an adult. Their relationship is interesting – there’s a fatherly element in Martin. She has that worldliness which teenagers often have about them, but when it comes down to it you can see how vulnerable she is.”

Emotional journey

He deliberately tried to keep the story simple and focused on a short time scale.

“Lots of plays get bogged down in stuff happening and endless plot elements but this play is about the emotional journey of the characters,” he says. “It’s theatre in its simplest form.

“Because both have met after a failed suicide attempt it adds a level of urgency and intensity to their relationship. If I stretched it over a longer amount of time it would give them a level of reflection. It had to be over those immediate few hours.”

As he was writing To Sleep, Fox talked to people who had personal experience of suicide and depression. It was where he got much of the humour in the piece.

“In the most desperate situations people actually laugh for the most unsuitable reasons,” says Fox. “A lot of the feedback we have from audiences is people saying they didn’t think they should be laughing but that the play was really funny.

“The way people deal with this kind of situation is through a form of gallows humour. In the play there will be laughs and then one of the characters will drop some sort of bombshell and the laughter stops.

“I didn’t want the play to be melodramatic or the characters to be full of self-pity. They never wallow – they are quite matter of fact about what has happened.

“The characters are very different people – but this understanding of what the other one is feeling is really important for them. It’s the main reason their relationship blossoms over the play. They can each talk to somebody who gets them.”

Fox believes society still has a problem with mental illness.

“People with mental health issues are often really excluded from society,” he says. “It’s seen as an incurable and unfixable problem.

“If you look at the figures, a huge percentage of people will suffer some kind of mental illness in their lifetime, whether it is depression or anything else.”

Having written the play, Fox handed it over to Hynds and Lawrence and stepped back – only seeing what they’d done to his work on its first performance at the Swindon Fringe Festival.

“I had written three scenes, in the hospital waiting room, a bedroom and a living room, and I’d written it with the sense there would be scene changes,” remembers Fox.

“Pete used just three chairs for the entire thing, which he moves about on the set. There are no distractions at all from the characters and the conversations. It makes it more powerful.”

The play was offered a week at the 60-seater Tristan Bates Theatre, off Shaftesbury Avenue, following a run at the Camden Fringe Festival.

“It’s a hard sell – a lot of people have said it sounds depressing which is a fair reaction,” says Fox. “But we have built up a following, and the reviews have been good. It’s a powerful piece of theatre – you go through the mill with it but there’s humour as well as tragedy.”

The play is heading across the country to Bath, Manchester, Liverpool, Cambridge, Exeter and Cornwall after this Brighton performance, and has also received an offer to go to New York in 2015.

Fox is already working on a new piece, with an eye on Hynds as director again and Lawrence taking a major role.

“In Swindon the quantity of actors are limited to say the least, so I tend to write with people in mind,” says Fox.

“I like to visualise the person when I’m writing about them. For this new piece I’m interested in looking at the pressures on people to conform to certain ways of being. The play will be based around a group of people who don’t conform and the way society looks at them.

“I have written a treatment for the piece, so now I can get on with writing the dialogue. I love writing dialogue – it’s so immediate, it’s the most interesting thing to write. That’s where the play really takes shape and the characters come alive.”