There probably weren’t many people who would describe the third Covid lockdown as creatively liberating, but for Newcastle playwright Alison Carr, the strange, constricted days of early 2021 produced a writing experience she remembers as unusually free.
There was no commission. No deadline. No theatre waiting for a script.
There was just an irresistible starting point: the almost unbelievable story of John and Anne Darwin and the canoe trip from Seaton Carew which ended with a supposedly dead man secretly living under the same roof as his wife.
By then, of course, Alison was already an established and award-winning playwright. Her credits include The Soaking of Vera Shrimp, Iris and North East Culture Award-winner A Street Like This, alongside work with the National Theatre, New Vic Theatre, Traverse Theatre and BBC Radio 4.
“I was writing a play for writing a play,” Alison remembers of the beginnings of All At Sea, the resulting play which opens at Live Theatre later this month.
She approached it differently too, writing individual scenes as they came to her rather than worrying too much about structure.
“I’d never written like that before and there’s a nice energy about that, and I think the script still has that energy in it.”
The idea had come from director Maria Crocker, with whom Alison had worked previously, although never on a full production. In February 2021, she got in touch to ask whether Alison might be interested in writing something inspired by the notorious ‘Canoe Man’ story.
“That story is so right up my street,” she laughs. “It’s so ridiculous and weird.”
Anyone familiar with Alison’s work will know her fondness for telling tales which are funny, dark, energetic and often populated by women trying to navigate, shall we say, unusual situations.
The Darwins’ story – if it hadn’t actually happened – sounds like something she might have invented.
In March 2002, John Darwin disappeared after apparently setting out to sea in his kayak from Seaton Carew. Presumed dead, he was actually hiding while he and Anne embarked on an elaborate deception involving insurance payouts, lying to their sons and plans for a new life abroad.
Five-and-a-half years later, he walked into a London police station claiming to have no memory of where he had been. Both were eventually jailed for fraud.
It has since become fertile territory for storytellers, inspiring books and television dramas, most notably ITV’s The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe, starring Eddie Marsan and Monica Dolan.
Despite being a big admirer of Dolan, Alison deliberately didn’t watch the ITV telling of the story.
By then, she had already begun creating her own fictional world from the same extraordinary seed and didn’t want another interpretation finding its way into it.
“This isn’t a true story. We’re not telling that story. It’s my take on it,” she says emphatically. “You might think that you know this story, but you don’t know this version.”
Alison’s take sees actors Phil Corbitt and Sarah Belcher play Colin and Deborah, a couple living in a northern coastal town whose spiralling debts and huge mortgage leave them apparently out of options. Colin decides the answer is to fake his own death, leaving his supposedly grieving widow to maintain the deception while they wait for an insurance payout.
From there, Alison has allowed her imagination to take over.
Quite where that ends up taking things is another matter. During our chat in Live’s bar, she is careful not to give anything away, but the sheer absurdity of the real events gave her permission to push her fictional version into some pretty wild places.
“This is a wild story. Let’s tell a wild story,” she says with a smile.
There is another curious echo of the circumstances in which it was written too.
All At Sea is a two-hander, confined to one room as Colin and Deborah deal with the consequences of the decision they have made.
With rehearsals now under way, Alison says there has already been a fair amount of Covid reminiscing in the room. A couple trapped together in a house, unable to go anywhere and increasingly consumed by their immediate circumstances? The parallels aren’t exactly difficult to spot.
“There’s a scene in it where he gets really, really stir crazy and he can’t look at this wallpaper a moment longer,” she laughs. “You can tell I wrote this in lockdown.”
There was some research and development on the play later in 2021 – still under Covid restrictions with its “masking tape floor squares” – before the script found its way into that drawer of possibilities and potential that every writer has in their desk.
Years passed. Then, like those double decker providers of public transport, two opportunities presented themselves in quick succession.
“It went quiet for years, and then lots of things happened all at once,” Alison says.
In 2025, she entered the play – at that point called Opussom – for the inaugural Rose Fisher Award for Writing, a prize for women playwrights in the North East. It won.
Barely a week later came renewed interest from Live Theatre. Five years after Alison began writing it, All At Sea was finally heading for the stage.
A co-production with Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, the play will be Alison’s first main house outing at Live since her first full commission for the theatre - Iris in 2016.
“Ten years is a long time and I’m a different writer – I’m 10 years different,” she says. “You just get more confident, you get more sure of your voice and yourself.”
And, increasingly, new avenues are opening up beyond the stage too.
Earlier this year she made her screenwriting debut with Doppelgänger, commissioned by the BBC as part of its Long Story Short series and produced by Gateshead-based Candle & Bell with support from North East Screen.
Filmed in Newcastle and Gateshead, the wonderfully strange 15-minute film follows a 10-year-old girl who meets her exact double – another girl with the same name – beginning a rivalry which stretches into adulthood.
It culminated in the “slightly surreal” experience of seeing her work on the enormous BFI IMAX screen in London.
The film (which you can watch on BBC iPlayer here) is continuing to make its way around the festival circuit and Alison is keen to do more screen work. There are developments in that direction which she isn’t allowed to talk about yet.
There is new theatre work on the horizon too – and again, lips are currently sealed.
It’s a good job Alison Carr is fun to talk to – otherwise this could be a pretty frustrating interview. Thankfully All At Sea gives us lots to go at.
Alison talks about being in a rehearsal room with a mixture of delight and nerves.
The first days have been about hearing the script properly - perhaps for the first time - with actors, director and creative team around the table.
Lines which have existed silently on a page suddenly have voices. Small inconsistencies reveal themselves. Things which made perfect sense in the writer’s head require another look and listen.
For Alison, that collaboration is one of the things she loves most about theatre: the point at which the playwright stops making every decision and other people begin bringing their own imaginations to the work.
“I never want to be making all the choices... because then it just becomes one person’s vision,” she says.
“It becomes a bigger, richer thing because all these talented people get involved... it’s becoming a bigger world than just words on a page. And that’s the bit that’s good.”
Seems like an apt moment to take a look at who will be making All At Sea happen.
Phil Corbitt’s extensive credits include Kinky Boots, Mamma Mia, Calendar Girls and Northern Broadsides’ The Tempest, while Sarah Belcher has appeared in the RSC and West End production of Hamnet, The Crucible at Shakespeare’s Globe and productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Almeida Theatre and Royal Exchange.
Maria Crocker directs, with Hannah Sibai designing set and costumes, Catja Hamilton on lighting, Roma Yagnik responsible for sound design and composition and Ziad Jabero also composing.
With rehearsals nicely under way, the play which began life in the strange circumstances of confinement is finally heading towards a live audience.
And Alison is ready for them to see it – albeit with the familiar nerves which come with the territory.
“The more I do and the older I get, you realise this doesn’t happen every day,” she says simply.
“It’s a privilege to get to be in that rehearsal room and doing that work because it’s rare, increasingly rare, that you get to have a main house production on.
“I’m really excited to share it... but I’ll be nervous because it’s very exposing putting your work in front of people.
“But I don’t write plays for them to sit in a drawer. I write them to be on a stage.”
All At Sea runs at Live Theatre, Newcastle from September 24 to October 10 before transferring to the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough from October 16-31.