Jamie Armitage - The Recs

A compelling new voice in British theatre, Jamie Armitage is a British playwright and theatre director whose work spans both innovative new writing and bold theatrical productions. He co-directed the global hit SIX: The Musical, earning a nomination for Best Direction of a Musical at the 2022 Tony Awards. As a writer, his debut play play, An Interrogation, opened at Summerhall, Edinburgh in August 2023, where it won the Lustrum Award and a 5-five review from The Recs, before transferring to Hampstead Theatre in 2025 – enjoying entirely sold-out runs at both venues.

The Recs’ editor Steve Coats-Dennis chats to Jamie ahead of the premiere of his second play, A Ghost In Your Ear opens at Hampstead Theatre.

SCD: You seem to have taken a rather unusual route towards becoming a playwright. You’ve been a very successful and accomplished theatre director: you co-directed the worldwide smash musical, Six, and Straight Line Crazy, which ran at New York’s The Shed. So where did the impulse to write come from?

JA: Even though I wrote sketches when I was at university, when I started working in theatre, I thought I had to choose between the two. Directing took off more quickly, so that felt like my avenue. Yet when the pandemic came, I finally had the time to explore a project, which would become An Interrogation, and I rediscovered how much I loved writing. Yet it’s also important that there are other writer/directors, like Robert Icke & Simon Stone, who normalise the dual role, as it’s still not that popular a combination with a lot of people…

SCD: Your first play was An Interrogation – a psychological thriller that took some inspiration from a real-life Canadian police case. Am I right in thinking that this script had a long gestation period?

JA: It went on a journey from being a verbatim play in 2019, then I decided to fictionalise it and worked on it during the pandemic in 2020. But then paused, as I had to focus on SIX again, but after that I had time to reflect about what I’d most like to do next, and the idea of putting the audience in a police interrogation room came back to me, so we took it up to the Fringe in 2023, and then it came to London in 2025. So, an almost six-year journey from the initial idea to its being on in London.

Nothing was more satisfying than the tense silence of the audience while watching that show.

- Jamie Armitage

SCD: What were the biggest lessons that you learnt while writing it?

JA: From the writing process itself, that the most important thing is to finish one draft then keep refining it. The play then reveals itself from the block of the first draft. From putting it on, it was how much an audience loves a thrill. Nothing was more satisfying than the tense silence of the audience while watching that show.

SCD: An Interrogation debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe 2023 at Summerhall and was met with tremendous box office and critical success. I’m happy to say that The Recs gave it 5 stars and called your writing debut a “remarkable feat”. How helpful is the Fringe for new writers being able to put their work in front of a range of audiences for a whole month?

JA: The Fringe is still a hotbed of exciting new talent. Yet I do think that is under jeopardy, as the rising costs mean it’s harder to take new work up there. Even this year, there was a phenomenal breakthrough play, EAT THE RICH by Jade Franks, yet that show was in a tricky place with funding before the festival. Imagine if it hadn’t made it up there? That would’ve been such a loss. What worries me is that we’ll never fully know which other new gems are being priced out of the Fringe.

SCD: And now you are ready to premiere your second play, A Ghost in Your Ear, at Hampstead Theatre. What can you tell us about this work? Where did the idea come from?

JA: I’ve been curious to create a binaural horror show for a long time, but wanted a concept which justified the technology so it didn’t feel like a gimmick. Eventually I came up with the idea that the reason why the audience are wearing headphones is because they’re watching the audiobook recording of a ghost story in a sound studio. I was delighted with this idea until I realised I actually had to write a ghost story… So then spent six months reading around 250 stories, before I felt ready to write.

SCD: As you say one of the really distinctive aspects of this production is going to be its use of binaural sound. I’ve only experienced this once – at the David Tennant Macbeth at the Donmar, where the sound had such a transformative and revealing effect on a play that is so well known. Why is this technology so important to A Ghost in Your Ear?

JA: The technology is bedded into the fabric of the play. It’s not an exterior addition but is an inside-out choice, as the story was written to justify the technology and unlocks all the exciting potential for creating horror. When the audience are wearing headphones, it means they can experience someone whispering softly into their ear, even though the actor is metres away from them and behind a Perspex wall. I loved the potential for this to create an unsettling piece of theatre where the lines of reality and what we hear can be blurred.

SCD: One of the things that seems to be emerging from your writing is that you seem to want to put your audience through the ringer. We called An Interrogation “a real pressure cooker”, and your second seems to be no different. Is that a priority for you as a writer – to make the audience collectively share in an experience?

JA: Exactly this! Giving a group of strangers a collective emotional experience is something theatre does uniquely well. And at a time when the medium needs to work harder for audiences, I think it is important to remind them just what a rollercoaster ride an evening at the theatre can be. It makes it worth leaving your home! Those are the big theatrical experiences I remember most from when I was younger, most notably seeing The Woman In Black, so that’s what I’m most interested in creating for audiences.

SCD: Was writing your second play easier than your first – or was there any pressure to match your debut success?

JA: It was certainly faster! Only one year from typing to rehearsing. But I don’t really feel the pressure, no. Crime dramas are more universally popular than horror, so I feel comfortable that it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I hope it pleases horror fans and surprises non-horror fans that being scared (in a safe way!) is actually quite fun!

SCD: What’s your best tip to keep writers motivated when the blank page is staring back at them?

JA: I tend to trick myself into starting to write by typing up all the scribbled margin notes from the research in my notebooks. This means that there’s never a fully blank page, as the first thing I do is find ways to connect the random assortment of lines and ideas. And then, the writing process has already started without my really realising!

SCD: And lastly, a question that we may well ask every playwright: What is the greatest play ever written? (And why?)

JA: The play that I come back to again and again is The Father by Florian Zeller. I read it every year. It was especially influential on A Ghost In Your Ear, not only for being the scariest non-horror play ever but also for its phenomenal creation of a subjective reality, where we’re experiencing one character’s perspective. That is very, very hard to do in theatre, yet so powerful when done well. It still makes me cry whenever I read it!