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Tom George Hammond
poor shirley must make her escape her escape
POOR SHIRLEY MUST MAKE HER ESCAPE
Writer/Director: Tom George Hammond
Shirley: Maya McQueen
Kieran: Will Taylor
Soldier: Daniel Copeland
The Nest | 6 – 7 Nov
Union Theatre | 10 –1 6 Nov
All images © Ross Kernahan, ChewBoy Productions
NOV, 5, 2025
On a train from Ljubljana to Budapest, two strangers collide - one running from her past, the other searching for a future. What unfolds is a transformative confrontation between dreams, regrets, and the courage to face what’s next.
Hi Tom, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me ahead of Poor Shirley Must Make Her Escape theatre return this month. What has it meant to you to be able to revisit your play and bringing it back to audiences?
It’s a pleasure. I had hoped I’d make some cunning plan to give Poor Shirley an extended shelf life. The plan was instead made by the very talented director Sean Turner, who helped set us up for this incredibly brief tour of Southern England. It’s been lovely going back, on slightly surer footing this time. Time is a useful creative tool. You can look at things with a lot more clarity.
Are you all set for opening night at The Nest, Chichester Festival Theatre before coming back to London at Union Theatre?
Christ, I hope so. I imagine a myriad of problems may yet present themselves. If and when they do, I will greet them with a zen-like calm.
Do nerves still set in ahead of a show’s run or are you able to sit back and not give it too much thought?
I can never relax. Not until the last audience member has left the venue. I hate being around people and their thoughts. Having said that, I am grateful for the people who have booked tickets.
Can you tell me a little bit about how Poor Shirley Must Make Her Escape came about?
My mother always wanted me to write something nice. Also I had begun to feel it was a real creative shortcoming that every other idea I had seemed to revolve around an act of violence. And I wanted to write a duologue for Maya McQueen and Will Taylor, both of whom are brilliant and willing to work with me.
Poor Shirley Must Make Her Escape is able to say so much with just three characters, it’s personal, touching, and at times heartbreakingly frank. What inspired you to write this play?
I think it might have been reading A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, a commentary on 19th Century Russian short stories by George Saunders. I’d never tried writing in the vignette form before, and those stories gave the blueprint of how to work in miniature. What’s very liberating about the form is that, because the plot is quite slight, there’s room for a tremendous amount of other stuff. There’s the Turgenev story, The Singers, which is just a bunch of people having an impromptu competition at a pub. But it’s very warm and very sad. Just a couple of guys having a singsong. But because the moment is so small, the story can take in the whole life of this little village, and slowly you get a map of the whole country, and then you pan back again, and Turgenev has only gone and shown you the whole world, all while a young man surprises a pub with his soprano. I hope that goes some way to answering your question.
When writing theatre do you draw from your own, lived experiences or do you prefer to keep your writing more fictional and far away from the personal?
Well, in a very real way, I did take a train from Ljubljana to Budapest, and it was very hot. A friend was also once on the Orient Express and met a soldier who didn’t speak a word of English but was keen to hang out. So I did combine those two happenings. I’m yet to flee a wedding, though. I think the more I try and keep myself removed from what I’m writing, the more likely it is that I daub myself in. It is a play that features a failed writer, which I happen to be as well, but I certainly didn’t put that in because I wanted to examine my own failure. Just meant I had to worry less about getting the details of that character right.
Has your production changed much since your premiere at the Drayton Arms Theatre?
It’s slimmed down, and I went a bit crazy and put four more jokes in. I think there’s more dynamism to the staging this time round. We know what the show is now, which is nice.
What has the experience been like for you getting to reconnect with your work and your cast Maya McQueen, Will Taylor, and Daniel Copeland?
It’s the first time I’ve ever done a play that’s actually, you know, come back. The rest have gone in the ‘nice try’ draw. So I’ve loved coming back to it, with just a pinch more confidence. Maya and I move in similar circles, so I’ve seen her a fair amount outside of rehearsals. Always nice to work with her, though. Will has untold energy, and just wants to interrogate everything. He’s terrific, and in another life would have done well in the Stasi. We were very lucky to get Daniel Copeland, who can always find a new joke and a new way of breaking your heart.
Due to the themes of your show, and the general nature of putting on a production of this quality, how are you and your team looking after your mental health?
I’m very bad at offering anyone support, and not just with this show. I remember reading that Pasolini, when making Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, made the set into one giant party, with feasts and booze every night, so the cast never got too engrossed in the horrors of the thing we were making. I’ve tried to mirror that approach. Not that the subject matter is at all similar, no one gets burned alive in our play. But still, it's good to keep things light.
How important is the creative collaboration between you, your crew, and cast when working on a production like this?
Collaboration is everything. I have no idea what I’m doing. It’s all been built with the cast, just throwing ideas around, some good, some completely terrible. But it means that the actors are the play, and everything is in service of them; aesthetically, practically, it’s all defined by what they’re doing, which is how I think theatre should be.
Have you always had a passion for theatre?
Yes. I used to like it because you could watch people from film and TV, from a distance, behind a pillar, play lithe gangsters in things called Bad Leopard and Shoot the Quaker. Now I like how, as with all non-literal mediums, you can ask the audience to lean in, to fill in with some gaps. I like how much you can build with so few tools. It’s all about simplicity and imagination.
"...as with all non-literal mediums, you can ask the audience to lean in, to fill in with some gaps."
Now that you can be reflective, what would you say where the most valuable lessons you’ve taken from working on Poor Shirley Must Make Her Escape?
Well that Will Taylor, the prat, was right and that the play could be shorter.
Is there any advice you wish you had been given before you started out?
Always book rehearsal rooms with a good source of natural light.
Do you have a favourite quote theatre quote? I like: “Don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t do it. You really have to ignore all the reasons not to do it and follow your heart.” – Lynne Meadow
I wish I had something as affirming as that up my sleeve. Will, who’s exceptionally wise for a man who drives a Vauxhall Corsa, once came into a rehearsal grinning and said “it’s just a play”. And he was right. There’s a lot of pressure, because money is tight, because everyone’s busy and working for peanuts, because we don’t get to do this very often, and because we’re a bunch of unknowns putting on a show where it’s just two people talking, for the most part. So, inevitably, you get to worrying about whether you’re wasting your chance, whether the play is good enough to go on, or whether we should actually be reviving Bad Leopard instead. Because obviously, we want to be liked, we want more than this. But, also, it’s just a play. If we’re not enjoying it, who else will? It doesn’t need to be our Hamlet, we just need to be having fun.
And finally, is your audiences could take away one message from Poor Shirley Must Make Her Escape, what would you like that message to be?
Sadly I forgot whatever the message was supposed to be midway through the second draft. It’ll be in there somewhere, hopefully revealing itself like a puzzle in a Dan Brown book. In the meantime, I refer everyone to the Baz Luhrmann song ‘Sunscreen’.