Viv Hardwick asks Newcastle playwright Margaret Wilkinson about the challenge of creating a play involving a haunted social worker

BABY P, Victoria Climbie and, for those with even longer and more poignant memories, 1973 child neglect and murder victim Maria Caldwell, have been the shocking headlines haunting Britain’s social workers for generations.

Now, Newcastle-based playwright Margaret Wilkinson has applied her interest in the gothic to the social issue of children at risk and created the play Blue Boy about a senior social worker still struggling with an old case where a child died.

“The social worker, Alex, is very stressed and overworked, when a lost, young teenager comes to the door and he has the dilemma, ‘Do I let him in or don’t I’,” explains Wilkinson, who tests her audience with a gradually changing grip on reality as Alex falls into an ever more threatening world.

“So, it’s one dark night in somebody’s soul, but it’s not all dark there’s also some nice moments and lots of humour. I think what I was trying to do was probe these issues of looking after children and doing the work in a new way.

“I think there is something there for everyone. You can come in and see the play on a lot of different levels.

It’s a provocative night out, but it can also be enjoyed as a thriller,” explains mother-of-two Wilkinson, who teaches creative writing at Newcastle University and writing for the stage and fiction.

She admits she’s never had a conversation with social services about her own parenting skills, but did once get asked to create a writing workshop for social workers and quickly gained an insight into the enormous stress on these guardians of cared-for children.

On the plot she chose, Wilkinson says: “I was really interested to get to the core of blame, responsibility and guilt and wanted to find a basic human emotion that I could empathise with. I have been guilty myself and I have felt I haven’t done enough and worried about my response in certain situations and whether or not I was to blame for something going wrong... but obviously not on the level of a social worker.”

She needed a believable young actor to play the 15- year-old who appears to be seeking help from the social worker on a cold, shadow-cast evening. Eventually, Jack McMillan, a young Scottish actor who trained at East 15, in Essex, was chosen. “He is a very young 21, so we felt he could do it,” Wilkinson says.

And how did she see her social services manager on the verge of burn-out? “I was thinking of someone in their 40s who has let their standards slip and got a bit rumpled. Alex Elliott (who has starred in TV’s Waterloo Road and Emmerdale) may be a little older than that, but I think 40 is an interesting age for a social worker because it’s still young enough to remember going in with hopes and expectations and thinking you can make a difference. And in the past 25 to 30 years, things have changed a lot, so that must be even tougher these days,” Wilkinson says.

SHE focuses more on her potential audience and those involved in creating Blue Boy, rather than worrying about the region’s continuing difficulty with finding support from the London-based world of theatre.

Nothing touches hearts more than the suffering of little children and Wilkinson agrees that it’s been a tough project for her because she initially felt the subject was closed to her.

“I’m increasing interested in social issues, but I was never that fascinated with reproducing real life as a social realist writer. But I’m finding ways into it and that’s very exciting. I don’t think I’ve trivialised this issue, but I have come at it from a different direction,” says the playwright, who wrote the acclaimed Queen Bee for the North-East Theatre Partnership and has had several plays broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

Next, Wilkinson has almost finished writing a play about the long friendship between an Arab barber and a Jewish customer, which upsets the two’s fundamentalist children.

“They try to pull them apart, so it’s like Romeo and Juliet with old men. I’ve got some interest already in this play and I got the idea from a colleague who is Iranian and works with the Yemeni community which is huge in the North-East. So the Arab I use is a Britishborn Yemeni and there are again interesting issues to raise and bringing something new to the audience,” she says.

Tour dates:

October 24, 25, 26 and 27, Northern Stage, Newcastle. Post-show discussion with cast and director on Oct 25. Tickets: £14.50 and £12 (concs). Box office: 0191-230-5151 northernstage.co.uk

October 30, Durham Town Hall (as part of Durham Book Festival). £12 or £10 for concs and Festival Friends, £8 for under-18s. 0191-332-4041 galadurham.co.uk

November 3 and 4, Central Hall, Dolphin Centre, Darlington. Tickets £11 and £8.24 (concs). 01325- 486555 darlingtonarts.co.uk

November 5 and 6, The Studio, Customs House, South Shields. £12 and £10. 0191-454-1234 customshouse.co.uk