Cul-de-Sac writer and director David Shopland tells The Theatre Playbook about the long journey to bring his latest production to the stage, the mundane conversation that started it all and why he wants to get people talking, for good or bad.
It began with a conversation about lamp posts. David Shopland was travelling home on the London Underground when he overheard two people discussing the position of the street lamps in the cul-de-sac where they live.
Yet what might have been a very mundane discussion proved to be the inspiration for his latest play, titled Cul-de-Sac, which opens this month at the Omnibus Theatre in Clapham.
“I don’t think these two people realised how poetic their conversation was, and for whatever reason I just suddenly became really engrossed in these two strangers’ conversation about this quite suburban thing,” Shopland tells The Theatre Playbook.
“I just started to get really interested in this idea of finding beauty in the mundane, or finding poetry in normality. I literally ran home and started writing what I could remember of this conversation, and essentially used that as a jumping off point.”
That moment was seven years ago, during which time writer-director Shopland has redrafted and refined numerous times a story described as an unfiltered look at suburban life. A “wine-stained comedy-drama about the chaos behind closed doors,” it opens in Northwood Hills, Zone 6 on the London tube map and the middle of nowhere, where Ruth is questioning every decision she’s ever made. Simon is grappling with a personality he can’t quite define. Marie is keeping a secret that could shatter everything. And Frank just wants his driveway back.
What starts as a quiet evening rapidly unravels, as polite smiles give way to sharp words, truth spills as freely as the booze, and when an unexpected guest arrives, the night explodes.
Shereen Roushbaiani plays Ruth Townsend, with Ellis J Wells as Frank Townsend, Lucy Farrett as Marie Gilchirst, Callum Patrick Hughes as Simon Waller and Behkam Salehani as Hamza Al-Haytham.
“Normally when I write, I will have a story idea first and I’ll storyboard it out. There’ll be a structure and then we’ll fill it in from there,” says Shopland. “But this is the first time I’ve ever been flying blind, so to speak. I just started writing. I didn’t know how many characters were going to turn up. I didn’t have an ending in mind. I didn’t even really have a story in mind. It organically grew from me writing and that’s perhaps one of the reasons why it’s taken so long, because when you do approach a play like that, it needed a lot of rewriting because the first draft was almost a stream of consciousness. I just had to get something out and then it’s been a period of refinement over the seven years and making sure it’s still reflective of where we are.”
While writers are often told to “write what you know,” it’s notable that Shopland’s previous work includes musical Lessons Learned, Orson Welles biopic Raising Kane and the smash hit Saving Britney, which starred Roushbaiani as a Britney Spears-obsessed superfan in a show that is a reflection on celebrity culture and the real popstar’s fight for freedom.
Those stories, he notes, are “as far away from things I know as possible. I suppose if I was to dig into it, I’m probably a little bit scared of that self-reflection. So this is the first play that I’ve really looked at myself.
“I’m in that millennial age bracket and approaching my fourth decade, I’m seeing a lot of my friends in similar places in their lives, or how they’re thinking about their lives. Four out of the five characters are all [in their] late 30s to early 40s, and I guess they’re people that are in the middle. They’re in the middle age, they’re in the middle of their careers or they’re in the middle geographically – it’s set in Zone 6. If you live rurally or if you live in a town completely outside of London, you probably view somewhere like Northwood as in London. If you live in Northwood, you’d absolutely not view it as living in London. So it’s a falling between the cracks of two kind of geographies as well. Class wise they are people that would probably not necessarily consider themselves middle class even though they’re definitely not working class. And what does that mean?”
But while there’s a lot of “big conversations” through Cul-de-Sac, “it’s also hopefully very humourous,” Shopland says, likening the play to melancholic farces belonging to the likes of Alan Ayckbourn and recent National Theatre hit Till the Stars Come Down by Beth Steel.
In fact, Till the Stars Come Down was the proof Shopland needed that a state-of-the-nation piece could also focus on the microcosm of a family or group of friends – and find an audience. But while it was clear there was the appetite for that kind of story, bringing Cul-de-Sac to the stage was altogether another challenge.
Initially unsure how he might produce the show himself through his own company, Fake Escape, which had previously supported one or two-person shows, he sent off the script to numerous venues. But when he couldn’t find the right place for it, the script went into a drawer.
Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and he began working on Saving Britney, which opened at The Old Red Lion Theatre in 2021 before touring around the UK and then transferring to New York off-Broadway, becoming a juggernaut in the process.
Fake Escape then produced The Boy in autumn 2023, and Shopland started to believe he could raise the budget needed to produce Cul-de-Sac.
“Especially in the arts, we’re all guilty of that imposter syndrome and you never realise where you are in your career until [you’re looking] retrospectively, so it was one of those moments where I suddenly went, ‘Oh, maybe I am capable of doing this. Ok, well, let’s give it a crack myself.’
“Going to see Till the Stars Come Down at the National and seeing a play that I think exists in a similar universe, doing so well and people really resonated with was just that final kick I needed to go, ‘OK, let’s make it happen.’”
Shopland secured some funding that allowed him time to do some rewrites, before Marie McCarthy, artistic director at the Omnibus Theatre, agreed to stage the play around Easter 2024.
“She was a real champion of the script and she said, ‘Yeah, let’s get this on.’ That gave me a window to try and raise the money and we were lucky enough that towards the turn of last year, we got the Arts Council funding to be able to do it, which is fab, and here we are.”
Once the script work was completed, Shopland then turned his mind to directing the play (he’s also the designer). But how exactly do you present a “wine-soaked post-mortem of contemporary Britain?”
He describes Act 1 as a throwback to an old fashioned British farce, complete with mistaken identities and slapstick comedy that plays at a “frenetic pace.”
“It’s not a pre-existing dinner party [at Ruth and Frank’s house] that’s been arranged. So there’s a lot of coming and going and a lot of surprises turning up and leaving again,” Shopland teases. “So there’s a fluidity and a perpetual motion throughout the play.
“In Act 2, once everyone’s arrived and the dust has settled, that’s when we start to get those big conversations. But there are still moments where that’s broken up and there are theatrical devices that are used that will add a bit of levity to it.”
Whatever audiences make of the show, Shopland just hopes it sparks a conversation when it opens on Tuesday, May 27, while he also has ambitions to take the show on tour.
“I’d rather you hate my work than you come out of the theatre and not talk about it. So as long as they’re talking, that’s kind of all I want,” he says. “For me, the biggest criticism you could give to a piece of work is if you leave the theatre and the first thing you say is, ‘Where are we going for dinner?’”
He adds: “I want people to have conversations about the work. I want people to have arguments about the work. I want them to disagree with it, but I want people to talk about it. That’s all I ever want.”
Cul-de-Sac runs at the Omnibus Theatre from Tuesday, May 27 to Saturday, June 14, 2025. Tickets: Cul-de-Sac