North-East theatres are about to benefit from a regionally funded play, Queen Bee, commissioned from Newcastle-based playwright Margaret Wilkinson. She talks to Viv Hardwick.

DO you believe in ghosts, I ask playwright Margaret Wilkinson, who is about to unleash the latest spooky play, Queen Bee, on the region and she reveals her own brush with the spirit world.

The US-born, mother-of-two recalls a time at her Sandyford, Newcastle, home when she found herself talking to an elderly aunt from New York. “I complimented her on her outfit which was a circa 1945 suit, and she told me it was her travelling clothes. Then I got a call saying she’d died in New York, so I’m left wondering if I imagined it, dreamt it or saw a ghost that day,” she says.

Her latest project has been funded by the North-East Theatre Consortium – involving Darlington Arts Centre, The Customs House at South Shields, Hexham’s Queens Hall Arts Centre and Newcastlebased New Writing North.

Having studied plays like Woman In Black – a 1983 by Susan Hill adapted for the stage by Stephen Mallatratt in 1989 – Wilkinson opted for the traditional setting of a large, lonely, semi-ruined house in Northumberland. Three female occupants, who live in one room, feel increasingly threatened by a figure lurking outside who may or may not be a ghost.

The play stars Rachel Donovan, Joanna Holden and Karen Traynor with writer Wilkinson admitting that her current obsession is wondering if there is life after death.

“On television and in film ghosts, vampires and spirits seem to be everywhere. Why aren’t there more stage plays with ghosts? I wanted to write something scary for the stage that would have the audience arguing about what was real and what was imagined,” she says.

The prose writer from New York met, married and had two sons with her North-East husband after moving with him to the region 20 years ago.

Wilkinson also teaches a creative writing MA at Newcastle University.

About six years ago she started writing plays and has had quite a number of projects taken up for radio. “My producer at the BBC told me recently it is easier to get a first play produced on Radio 4 than a second because they have a commitment to new writing,”

she explains.

Even so, Wilkinson has gone on to create Women’s Hour fiveparters and Saturday plays for radio before landing the North- East Consortium commission for 2009.

❛ I think when you start writing plays you learn how to do it by doing it.

The consortium approached me knowing that I’d been writing for the stage with some frustration. At the time I was kind of caught between Live Theatre and Northern Stage and Claire Malcolm of New Writing North liked a play I’d written called Swap (about a women’s clothes swap party), which has yet to be produced. I talked to her about Queen Bee and then pitched it to the consortium.

They trusted me to write the play even though they hadn’t seen it, which was great,” she says of the commission awarded last June.

“What was nice was that they had the confidence in me in spite of nothing being on paper at that point, because writing with confidence is wholly different to writing with fear.

I’ve been in both places,”

Wilkinson adds.

She’s also planning an adaptation of the Oliver Sacks’ book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.

On the creation of Queen Bee, Wilkinson says: “Dialogue can paper over a lot of cracks with language. I didn’t want to do that. I thought for a few months about the play and then wrote it quite quickly. “The reality of it is heightened, the characters and the situation are slightly surreal and so are the settings and visuals, but I hope and trust that this play is emotionally true. The play is funny and scary and that’s risky, does that work? But you have to take risks and there are moments when the humour lets you release some tension. Sitting in the dark with other people watching something scary is tense.”

The atmosphere music, and the sounds created like the buzzing of bees, will come from musician John Alder who is learning to play the cello specially for the play’s run.

“One of the things the director (Wils Wilson) was interested in doing was having no doors or windows on the set, although it is multi-layered. So there are not conventional scenes. Sound effects will come from strange places giving the illusion that this is an enormous house, unoccupied in the main.

Is it the plumbing or is the ghost making a baby’s cry?

“I do love the North-East. I love the vitality and it feels like we’re in a crazy edge of the world and it seems like we’re very far from the capital and having to make our own entertainment,” she adds.

■ Queen Bee opens tonight at the Customs House, South Shields, and runs until Saturday. Box Office: 0191-454- 1234.

The tour includes the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds and The Dukes Theatre, Lancaster and then moves to Northern Stage, Newcastle, May 13-16, 0191-230-5151; Queens Hall Arts Centre, Hexham, May 18-19, 01434-652-477 and Darlington Arts Centre, May 20-22, 01325-486-555