The play that changed my life: how a pratfall in a student fringe farce made James Graham a playwright

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It was 1999. I was doing A-levels in Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, the former mining community I depict in my TV series Sherwood. My comprehensive school was one of the biggest in the country, one of a very small number with a working theatre. I wouldn’t be doing what I get to do now without that massive bit of luck.

I started doing loads of acting, and the department decided to do the first A-level drama they’d ever done because there were about a dozen of us who wanted to keep going after GCSEs.

The course introduced us to commedia dell’arte and we got to do a scene from Accidental Death of an Anarchist. The plot is inspired by a real event that happened in Milan in the 1960s when an anarchist died after he “fell out of the window” from a high floor of a police station. The wisecracking fraudster Maniac arrives to be interviewed by a low-level inspector. When the inspector is called away, Maniac answers the phone and learns that a judge is coming in to review the case. He sees the opportunity to impersonate that judge by working with them to generate “a better version” of the lie. So he begins joyfully unravelling their story. I and a bunch of other lads thought it was the most hilarious thing we’d ever read.

We all had to do “work experience” – go to, say, Halfords and stack shelves. We thought, let’s see if we can convince our teachers that we’re going to do a production of Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Under the pressure of weekly rep. Monday morning you learn your lines, Friday night you’re on stage. And it went so well that in 2000, we took it to the Edinburgh festival.

I was the constable, a barely speaking role. But I loved it because you got to be part of the whirligig of madness as it begins to spiral out of control. They let me choreograph the beginning of the scene when the constable was on his own waiting for the senior officers to arrive. I was just sweeping up, listening to some music, and it turned into a dance sequence in that classic cliche of a private moment when a character gets taken by the music and starts to dance with his broom. I’m not saying it was stage magic but it always ended with my arse stuck in a dustbin, legs over my head. The audience just roared. I couldn’t really understand why but I remember looking out as they applauded, thinking: “God, this is interesting”.

I get to write big political plays these days but I feel very fortunate that my introduction to live theatre was the low-art laughs that unite an audience. I probably take it too far sometimes in my own work, but the shameless search for a gag is never far away. Whenever I’m watching one of my own plays and I know there’s not a joke coming for the next three or four minutes I start to fidget.

I was quite an introverted, shy kid. But finding a bunch of mates whose enthusiasm and commitment carried me along gave me the confidence to keep going. Along with another lad in the show, Gary, I went on to study drama at Hull and we were both the first in our family to go to university. It was a big deal for us.

They called Fo “the Master” and Anarchist is a Venn diagram of perfection for me when it comes to political anger: a play in search of justice, exposing corruption, but also just the most impeccably crafted escalation of farce and stupidity and silliness and wonder.