A 22-year-old drama student wrote the play you NEED to watch this week

IT IS AN INCREDIBLE FEAT just to write a play, never mind have it be performed in a professional setting. Add in the fact that you're still a student, and jaws should instantly drop the moment you tell people.

The time it takes to put a script together could easily put any writer off. Plus, when you've got deadlines and coursework to deal with, you aren't usually able to make said time anyway.

Drama student Conor Burke, however, was not put off by these obstacles. His play, 'Sophie, Ben, and other problems', is a gift to us millennial kids, who think our lives and relationships are poorly misrepresented by out-of-touch adults. Let's face it, life isn't all about hashtags and fidget spinners, guys.

The 22-year-old aspiring playwright hasn't even left university yet, and has already achieved incredible success in the theatrical sphere. His first play to be recognised was 'Leaving Narnia', which was included in the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival in 2015.

'Sophie, Ben, and other problems' is about a couple, Sophie and Ben, who are both in their late twenties, and are helping their friend James with his university dissertation on modern-day millennial relationships. James has asked the pair to come into his university and talk to an audience about their experiences as a couple. The hour long comedy reflects on many different issues, including their sex life and experience on the dating site Tinder.

It is playing from the 25th of October to the 1st of November at The Lion and Unicorn Theatre in Kentish Town, London.

Today I was able to interview Mr Burke in one of the Queen Mary University drama studios, to discuss his new play, his inspirations, the highs and lows of the scriptwriting process, as well as any advice he might have for playwrights at university.

So, I assume you've written some plays before this. Were any of those also successful?

Well, I've been writing for a really long time, since I've been quite young, and I think I realised a while back that I wasn't a very 'castable person'. The best thing for me to do was write my own stuff and put myself in it. The biggest play I wrote was a one-man play called 'Leaving Narnia' in 2015. I was 19 when I wrote it, and it appeared in the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival back home.

It was a one man play about a guy called James, who was about to come out of the closet to his parents. The show began at the end, basically, so the first scene was James telling his parents that he was gay. For the rest of the hour, it was entirely flashbacks about what led him to decide that.

This would be my second play; I mean I've written a lot of other things that I haven't staged, just out of choice, but the next one that I am eager to put on is a one-woman show called 'Absolutely Fabulously Ridiculously Ugly', about a girl who gets an internship at a modelling agency.

Fantastic! So clearly you've been quite successful with the plays you have put out there. What would you say about that? Do you think it was luck, or something just bound to happen?

Well, when I did 'Leaving Narnia', I was only 19 at the time so that meant I was the youngest writer ever to have a play in the festival. It is the biggest gay theatre festival in the world, so it was such an achievement to me. I think the play got in thanks to the artistic director of the festival. His name is Brian Merriman, and he is the most amazing man. He's the guy who picks which shows are going to be on. I think that, at the time, even if he wasn't totally impressed with my play, he was impressed that such a young person had submitted to it.

I think he might have said to himself 'wow this person's 19 and the youngest people we get are in their late twenties' so maybe that was why I got accepted. I definitely think for 'Sophie and Ben' I just got really lucky. I think luck is something you can't really control but you can work hard and try to get things out there as best you can. I think everyone has that ability of just being lucky I suppose.

That's true. Going back to 'Sophie, Ben and other problems', do you think millennial relationships are accurately portrayed in the media?

That's such an interesting question! Err...I don't know! Maybe not, I don't think anything is a hundred percent accurately portrayed in the media. Hopefully this play shines some light on that, and gives the characters a little bit more of a solid grounding. But no, I wouldn't say that everything in the media written about young people is accurate, particularly their relationships with one another. It's not all like YOLO and selfies.

So as a young person yourself, do you think you can more accurately portray the situations you are writing about?

Yeah, I hope so. I mean I've always felt like a 78 year-old woman in a 22 year-old man's body but err...I hope I'm shining some light on the situation!

And what inspired you to write this play? Were their any issues you faced that sparked an interest in this theme?

A lot of people write their plays, and then come up with a title, because they can see what the play is about and this lets them come up with their titles. I am a bit weird in a sense that I need to have the title first, or else I can't write the play. I don't know why that is, but I just like good titles. The name itself sounds so cliche like, you know, JK Rowling on a train, but Sophie and Ben...those names just popped into my head one day. In retrospect, the reason why they did was because when we were growing up back home in primary school the first book we were ever given was a book from the series 'Tara and Ben'. I don't know if you have the equivalent here in England, but they were literally five pages long, and on one page it would say 'Tara is running' and that's how you learned to read. Then I realised 'oh my god, I thought of that and somehow switched out the name Tara and replaced it with Sophie'.

The play is kind of loosely based on my older sister, who's 30 now, and her fiancé. They met when they were just 13 years old and they've been together ever since. I just kind of found it fascinating how they've literally been together more than half their lives, and to me that's such a bizarre thing. I've always wanted to hear what they think of each other and the things they do to annoy each other, and in the play Sophie and Ben literally just talk directly to the audience. There's no fourth wall which I think is a really interesting concept.

So I suppose my sister is kind of a weird inspiration for it, I don't think she knows that!

So as you developed 'Sophie, Ben and other problems', did you encounter any difficulties?

Ooh, that's a hard question. I think I found it difficult to write some of the more emotional scenes. Near the end of the play, it gets quite heated, and they argue and stuff. I think I found it cathartic to write about as well, maybe there were a lot of hidden emotions deep down that I obviously went through! Writing that section helped me go through something that I obviously went through before. Also the way it is written. It is very snappy, and the two of them constantly interrupt each other like people do in real life, so it was difficult to write and figure out when they will interrupt one another or cut each other off. From a logistic point of view, that was difficult.

Looking at it on the flip side, what went particularly well within the process?

There's a scene in it where they talk about people they met on Tinder, and there is a section where Sophie and Ben read out their Tinder biographies. They are actually real bios that I found on my Tinder as I was swiping alon! I just thought 'I can't believe someone actually wrote that!' There was also a lot of very controversial Tinder bios that I had in and edited out-that was really easy because I was writing completely from experience there. Some of the funnier stuff was easy to-I like comedy.

Okay, so you mentioned that luck was a big part of how you got 'Sophie and Ben' into the theatre, but do you have any advice for aspiring playwrights around our age, in university, that want to get their work noticed?

Just write it. At the moment we're sitting in one of the performance spaces from my uni's theatre company, so right here is where loads of the student drama goes on. Get involved in student societies to, I know it's one of those things you always hear when you go to university, but honestly all of my best friends are in the theatre company and through them I made connections with people on the outside. Doing this play I didn't know Dylan or James beforehand, but now I know that once I've done this I am building up a community of people you can work with again and hopefully plan for the future.

Visit http://www.lionandunicorntheatre.co.uk/ to learn more about this fantastic performance.

Interview footage coming soon!