Joe’s in the swing

AT around the time that most 15-year-olds are supposed to be in a hoodie gang terrorising shopping centre grannies, Joe Harbot sat down and wrote a short play which has helped make him one of the region's hottest tips for script-writing success.

Five years on, his latest project, The Boy On The Swing, opens and closes the month-long Building Works festival at Newcastle's Live Theatre, which runs until March 16.

"I did that as well I killed a grandma," he jokes about supposedly being a hoodie in the "beautiful, but really boring" Cumbrian town of Penrith.

He was talent-spotted as a result of the late Julia Darling being sent his script, called Gathered Dust and Dead Skin, by Andy Booth, who runs the Penrith theatre group. This was passed on to Live's associate director Jeremy Herrin who began working with Joe, who is now 20.

Jeremy is directing The Boy On The Swing, which satirises the corporatisation of God.

"I didn't specifically think of that as a subject I just make it up as I go along.

It's quite interesting I suppose. God's always top spot on the news. It goes God and then war and after that some novelty thing and the weather," says Joe who didn't know about the festival until recently and sent in the play after becoming a young writers' group member with London's Royal Court Theatre.

He claims that North-East successes such as Billy Elliot creator Lee Hall weren't an inspiration to him "although I enjoy his writing and The Pitman Painters".

"I never sat down with the idea of writing a play, but I had written a few sketches, but it just fell together as a whole thing," he explains and fields a question about creating economic work by replying: "You should be allowed to have a 40-strong cast, typhoons and shipwrecks and more, but you're advised to have two people sat in a kitchen. The advice I was given was to write plays about young people which I don't really have any interest in. Young people are quite annoying, and I include myself in that, because it's more interesting when you get to a certain stage in your life when you worry about where you're going with your life. When you're younger you don't really care."

Experienced actors like Joe Caffrey, Chris Connel, Brian Lonsdale, Michael Gunn and Jim Kitson are appearing in Joe's festival performances and he says: "It is nice to see your words being performed on stage, unless it's going horribly wrong and this isn't going horribly wrong. I don't feel under pressure because my play is opening and closing the festival. I'm grateful for the opportunity."

Joe is cautious about suggesting sweeping changes to the way plays are created and presented, but feels that an hour to two hours is probably a better format for snappy, fast-paced plots. "I don't know if I've got an expressed aim to change theatre as long as I can run free to express myself as I want to. It would be nice to write a play and send it off and it's put on mainly as it is with a little bit of tweaking. But there's a whole lot of **** you have to go through and then meet certain criteria," he says.

He's in his first year at Goldsmith's University in London studying English and Drama. "I don't know if I can maintain a writing career and study, but the writing comes first," Joe says, revealing that he hasn't told his lecturers yet about his script-writing fame.

Jeremy Herrin recently directed a rehearsed reading of Joe's play, The Running Machine, at the Royal Court, and his long-term aim is to try and making a living as a playwright.

Money isn't everything, as Joe explains: "Me and my friend got mugged by the friendliest mugger in the world he gave us change. He took £20 off us and gave us £15 change. I think if we'd have run away from him we'd have been all right, but as I didn't know the protocol for mugging I didn't do that this time."