Poldark star Aidan Turner heads to Brighton

Aidan will star alongside Jenna Coleman (The Serpent, BBC One; All My Sons, The Old Vic). The piece enjoyed a limited run at the Harold Pinter Theatre from January 18-March 18 and a few days at Manchester Opera House before heading down to the south coast.

Imagining a world where the government has limited the number of words you can say in a day, Sam’s debut play received great acclaim when it was first staged at Warwick Arts Centre in 2015, winning three Judges' Awards at the National Student Drama Festival. It has since been performed at Latitude Festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Camden People's Theatre. It has been regularly revived since, particularly by student groups and newly-graduated actors – perhaps reflecting the fact that Sam was only 21 when he wrote it.

Who is Aidan Turner and when did he become a household name?

“I wrote it in the autumn of 2014 and we first did it in January of 2015 at the Warwick Arts Centre which is an amazing place. We did some edits between then and our Edinburgh show in the summer of 2015 and since then it has pretty much stayed the same until this new production came about, since when I have been diving back into the play and just trying to grow it which is really hard. I was 21 when I wrote the play and I'm going to turn 30 the day before the first show and I feel very different as a person to how I was back then. I'm not the same guy that wrote the piece and I wouldn't write it now but I was just wanting to grow it in terms of making it more mature and using some of the things I have learnt as a writer, but at the same time I don't want to lose the spirit of the play. If I was writing something from scratch now I would write something completely different and in some ways that's what makes the piece special now.

“The original director and I came up with the idea together, this idea of a world where the number of words you can use is limited, and really all that came about out of practicalities. We had two good friends that were great actors and we didn't have any money so we thought let's try to tailor something to these people and let's try to make something that made a virtue of our lack of resources, the fact that we needed to do it on an empty stage. Essentially it's a romantic comedy set in a world where the government has put a daily limit on the words you can say and it's about exploring relationships within that limit. It is about how we communicate with people either in a personal or in a political way. It is also about the things that we can put in the silence. It points to just how difficult it is to communicate in those circumstances but also looks at the other ways we can communicate which are maybe more imaginative. And it is so exciting to be going back to it now because you can't just fill in with the linguistic tricks that you use because the language here is so specific. It has shaken me out of the patterns of writing that I have fallen into. Every writer has their shtick, their voice or their ways of phrasing or their rhythms but I just can't do that here and that is part of the challenge.”