Rosie Day’s wonderful rollercoaster ride of a debut play Instructions for a Teenage Armageddon, which she also performs, ends with the by-then 16-year-old protagonist writing a letter of advice to her younger self (and younger stepsister).
I love some of the gems on this list. Wise – and true – for any age or gender. In the same spirit, at my post-show Q&A for Instructions for a Teenage Armageddon at Southwark Playhouse, I couldn’t resist concluding by asking Rosie Day as well as director Georgie Staight and producer Katy Galloway what message they as adults would pass on to their 13-year-old selves. Mine: “Resilience is your superpower.”
It was fantastic to reunite with Rosie and Georgie, who I’ve previously done Q&As with on two other great new plays (Sarah Rutherford‘s The Girl Who Fell at Trafalgar Studios and Christopher Chen‘s Into the Numbers at the Finborough Theatre respectively).
Instructions for a Teenage Armageddon centres around a wayward teenage girl who, after her older sister’s untimely death by a Yorkshire Pudding, joins a scout group to help her navigate the kicks and punches of adolescence with varying degrees of success.
As Rosie, an extremely accomplished stage and screen actor, revealed in the discussion, she wrote the one-woman play as a dare. Well, the dare has paid off. I do hope she’ll continue to dare and write more plays. I’ll be there when she does.
Terri Paddock founded WhatsOnStage.com and the WhatsOnStage Awards, running the company and its events from 1996 to 2013. Terri is also the author of two novels, Come Clean and Beware the Dwarfs, and has previously written for the Evening Standard, Independent, The Times and other national publications. She is renowned for her 'legendary' post-show Q&As and also produces the annual Critics' Circle Theatre Awards and acts as a digital, content strategy and event consultant for theatre, producers and other clients. She tweets about theatre at @TerriPaddock.
