Steve Pratt meets Newcastle writer Lee Mattinson who is enjoying success in the theatre and on Coronation scripts

TWO years after its first performance as a script-in-hand reading, Lee Mattinson’s play, Chalet Lines is at Newcastle Live Theatre.

During that time it’s been to London and back. After his play, Cilla And Me, was staged at Live in 2008’ he was asked to pitch another idea. “I said I wanted to write a play about relationships between mothers and daughters. I really wanted to write something set in Butlins because it’s a weird little world and potentially quite dramatic,” he says.

“I did a page outline and the theatre commissioned it. Then I went away and tried to cover 50 or 60 years of a family in two hours. I tried to be quite ambitious. And, yeah, it was epic.

“Then it was the trick of bringing it all down to what it’s all about and being really clear about the threads going through the family.

Originally it had 25 scenes and 20 characters, now it has four scenes and six actors, but still the same story. It’s really boiled down.”

The development process didn’t end there.

When the Bush Theatre in London opted to stage it, they asked for changes. “They were like, ‘Get rid of all the male characters and concentrate on the women’,” he recalls.

“It had been in development at Live and I was told, ‘Cut the men, cut men out’ and I’d always said, ‘I’m keeping them’. Just being really stubborn because they had some good lines. “But when the Bush say it and it’s six weeks to when rehearsals start, you’ll do anything. You’ve got to pick your battles, haven’t you?” he says.

He’s certainly had a few other comments about writing an all-women play. “How have you done that? How weird,” people have said.

The play – which returns to Live Theatre with a new cast – is set at Butlins, Skegness, where the Walker women have been holidaying since 1961. Mattinson follows them over five decades of birthdays, weddings and hen dos.

IT’S not about his family. “The story isn’t from my experience at all,” he says. “It’s a Northern family and I went to Butlins when I was little so I know that world. Apart from that’ it’s all fictional. There are little bits of my friends and family, but the main plot is completely fabricated. You always put in little bits of your life to give it that genuineness or realness.”

Mattinson has recently returned to live in his native Newcastle after being in Manchester working on TV’s Coronation Street. That coincided with the Bush putting on his play so he was doing two jobs at the same time. “I missed a lot of rehearsals because I was working fulltime on Corrie,” he recalls.

“I started at Corrie in January and until the end of February, I was doing rewrites on the play, epic rewrites, all the time. So it was hard doing a new fulltime job that was so intense and then going home and rewriting the play that was going to be so important for me. I was juggling these massive opportunities and trying not to let anything go.

I was dead excited, but it was terrifying too.”

His introduction to theatre was seeing a play called The Filleting Machine by Tom Hadaway at Live. “I just fell in love with theatre and started to write. It was never really TV I wanted to do, but I do like TV and am doing a lot of TV. I think my heart is always going to be in theatre.

It’s that immediacy, isn’t it?”

He was a story associate, plotting storylines on Coronation Street. It’s a brilliant apprenticeship, he says, and he didn’t find it frustrating plotting storylines rather than writing scripts because he was getting so much from it.

“I was doing out the storyline across weeks and months, and I found that really interesting. I probably couldn’t have done it for more than three months because it was really intricate.”

That job came about after he did a trial script for the writing team. “They said, ‘You’re not quite ready to write for the show, but we really like your voice’. So they gave me the job in storylining, a training thing to get me involved in that world and how it all works. Now I’m doing another trial for them to get into the writing team.”

Mattinson has started work on a new play.

It’s not a commission, he’s writing it for himself with the aim of sending it out once completed.

He’s also got some TV work on the go and a film, getting lots of interest off the back of the Bush production of Chalet Lines.

For now, he’s happy to be back in Newcastle and for Chalet Lines to return to Live.

“You work better when you’re surrounded by your loved ones, I suppose. My work is very North-East. I do tend to write about people from the North-East, mostly because it’s the world I’m from and understand.”

  •  Chalet Lines is at Newcastle Live Theatre until Oct 6. Box office: 0191-1231232 and live.org.uk