Claire Wood

Claire Wood is a playwright based in Edinburgh. In 2017 she founded Production Lines theatre company. During the lockdown of venues and creative spaces in 2020, the company turned its attention to creating theatre online. Recent productions have been performed in the digital space and on stage. Claire’s latest piece is SHINJUKU which debuts at the Fringe in August. We spoke to Claire about the show, the depths of the manosphere which inspired it, and her hopes for the play during the Festival.

Can you tell us about SHINJUKU?

SHINJUKU is a play about a single mum who has a 12-year-old son, and she’s been called imto school because her son’s class teacher thinks her son has been radicalised. She can’t imagine anything more far-fetched and ridiculous than this. She has done her best to raise her son as somebody who will respect women’s rights, who would describe himself as a feminist, who actively goes out of his way to look out for women. So the idea that he has been drawn so far the other way along the spectrum to be a block to women getting what they want in their lives is far-fetched and absurd to her.

When the class teacher puts to her that he thinks her son has been radicalised, she scoffs at the notion. It seems ridiculous to her, and the evidence is laid out in a sort of jumbled fashion by the class teacher, who’s a little bit nervous. She’s younger than [protagonist] Abby. She’s finding her way as a teacher. She’s sort of stumbling around the topic and has her own reasons for thinking that [the child] Baxter has been radicalised, and then the headteacher rocks up. It’s clear that there is unfinished business between the mother of the boy and the headteacher, and a whole scrambling chain of events unfurls.

So it’s set in real time. It’s set from the beginning to end of this conversation. Also, we might think, as the audience, the director has got some notions about how you might stage it to maybe mess a little bit with your idea of time and whether it actually really is in real time or is a sort of truncated version of an actual conversation. But it’s a fun little piece, hopefully topical, a little bit dark.

What inspired you to write the play?

I set out trying to write about toxic masculinity. Someone had said to me he thought it’d be really interesting if I tried to write about that, and at the same sort of time, someone that I work with had told me about one of his sons who had wanted to go to school wearing a dress, and it had generated this huge conversation between him and his wife about whether it was right for the son to go to school wearing a dress. I thought, ‘How interesting that would be if you had a child that was so sort of advocating of women’s rights that he tried to empathise to the extent that he would put on a dress and try and walk in our shoes,’

That led me into thinking about how could you raise a boy child in a way that is going to encourage that child to entirely reject any sort of privilege that comes with being a man, and instead try and make all of his choices in a way that would allow for equal chances for everybody? Would that even be a possible thing to do? And this strange sort of tension that exists between what that child might set out to achieve and how it be interpreted by everybody else could obviously spawn a million different plays, but having set out with those two ideas in my head, I’ve ended up somewhere actually entirely different.

I seem to find it very difficult to write about anything other than women’s plight in life. So, ultimately, this is not an exploration of toxic masculinity at all, but an exploration of how women operate and can make choices in and alongside a world that is patriarchal. I think the manosphere is really only a very particular manifestation of misogyny, as opposed to a whole new danger that is lurking out there to trap us all, and so I suppose some of what the play is doing is exploring that. Whether this is something new or whether this is just the same wolf in different clothing.

Was it based on any sort of particular incident that you’ve heard about, or is it a kind of distillation of numerous stories that I’m sure every woman will have?

It was heavily influenced, as far as the content and detail about the manosphere is concerned, by a book written by a lady called Laura Bates, who’s a journalist who writes a lot about online harm, violence, and misogyny, generally expressed towards women and girls. She wrote in 2020 a book called Men Who Hate Women, and that is very much about all sorts of online badness. She’s written a couple of books since, but she’s very interested in the way in which harm can play out online as much as in real life, and how the two sort of coexist and feed each other.

I’ve been interested in the topic, the manosphere, incels, all of that for a long time, and I’ve obviously been interested for longer in the general ways in which the world that we live in is stacked against women having equal chances. I suppose from a personal point of view, no different to any other woman in the world, I’ve experienced 1000 small belittlings or passing overs or not being chosen, or not feeling like you have power to make a decision that you’d like to make in different situations. There’s no sort of spectacular headline event that happened in my life that yielded this, but I have a million different little versions of events sort of added up to a bigger story.

With the play, I was really interested in looking at how women could or should coexist alongside the manosphere. Since I wrote it, there’s been a glut of other things that have come out in a very high-profile way that have explored the same topic. Adolescence aired about two months after I’d written the script, which infuriated me, because I’m like, ‘Damn it, they’ll all just think I’m copying!’ And the premise, of course, is very similar. A young boy is accused of doing something terrible. My little Baxter isn’t stabbing anybody. There is no violence actually doled out. It’s all incipient ‘might happen’ stuff rather than actual concrete stuff, stuff spoken rather than stuff done. Obviously, very recently, Louis Theroux’s documentary has come out, so I feel like it is a topic that I’m hoping is going to be covered a little bit more in the Fringe.

I don’t see that the manosphere, incels, men’s rights activists have been terribly well covered in theatre to date. Certainly not in Scotland. I’ve seen little bits of it in England, but I’ve not seen a whole lot up here. So I’m interested why that hasn’t happened, whether it’s just things taking longer and there’s about to be a glut of things unleashed upon us, or whether it’s just a really tricky topic that people don’t know how to write about.

Can you explain the reason behind the title of the play? I know Shinzuku as a district in Tokyo.

It actually is in reference to the station in Shinjuku. Someone brilliantly said, ‘Is it because it’s a really busy, buzzy, overwhelming area, and so you’re trying to create the sense that this is a busy, buzzy, overwhelming world?’ And I thought, ‘Actually, that would be a great rationale for the story,’ and entirely true to the character Abby, the single mom, but that’s not the reason behind the title.

In Shinjuku, there’s a train station that has something like 56 platforms, and there are 200 exits to the station. It’s gigantic. It’s considered to be the biggest train station in the world; something like 3.6 million people go through it every day. It’s enormous. I’ve been in it, and it’s totally terrifying, and it would be very easy, as someone that doesn’t speak Japanese, to feel entirely trapped and just give up. So it’s an analogy the lead character makes, an analogy to her life trying to navigate the world in this sort of patriarchal awfulness to being trapped in this train station that she traveled through when she was younger, when she was free and had choices; choices she no longer has. So that is the backstory.

And how was the writing process? How do you write in general, as a playwright?

I wrote it very quickly. I wrote it over a week back in February a couple of years ago, but since then I’ve been revising it pretty constantly for about two years. It started out much longer, but it’s been condensed now to a Fringe venue-worthy length, so all of the nuance around the characters and some of the backstory has been stripped out to make way for the nuts and bolts of the plot.

It’s taken a long time in the editing to do it justice. I’m not sure how much is commonly known about the world of the incels, so I felt I needed to do a little bit of explaining about what the culture is and how it can manifest. I feel people are very keen not to know about it. It’s very easy to look away and think that you know it’s just an online thing, it’s just a thing for people that are in forums, or maybe it’s just a thing that’s on Reddit. It’s like not real people who live in the real world, and I feel like I want people to think that actually this is a problem that we ought to be taking on as a society.

Laura Bates is very good at telling this story, she’s very good at entreating government and influential organizations to get involved and have an opinion, and be speaking about this to make sure that it’s a bit more out in the open. I suppose the thing about the online world is that unless you’re in it, it’s largely invisible to people walking about the street, so I think it is important to generate discussion about it, so that people, particularly people with kids, particularly people with boy children, are really aware of the sorts of things that their kids might easily be seeing without having to look very hard and go very far on YouTube. These sorts of places, it’s not like it’s just tucked away on Reddit.

Actually, Andrew Tate, with his views, is very easy to come across and very seductive if you’re a person that feels like they don’t have very many chances in life, so I think it’s an important thing for people to be thinking about and learning about. Not that I’ve set this, not that I’ve created this, trying to educate people at all, because I think theatre isn’t necessarily the right place to do that; but I think if it generates conversation about it, then that can only be a good thing.

And who would you say your influences were as a playwright?

I really want to be Sarah Kane. That is my dream. If I could be one person, I would be her, because she writes so beautifully, and so poetically, and I’m so far away from being like that. It’s a little bit sad, but I think her work is poetic and wonderful. I think Stef Smith writes really beautifully. Hannah Moskovich did a really wonderful play called Red Like Fruit in the Fringe last year that was really super. It was all about consent, and he said she said, and what actually really happened in the end, and who was taking advantage of whom. I like stuff that is exploring what you think are important issues of the day that we ought to be thinking about, and looking at it through different and interesting perspectives to make people think, and that was a really nice example of that.

And what are your hopes for the show itself? What would constitute a successful Fringe for you?

Well, the first thing would be, if I could sell all my tickets that would be a significant success. But even if I sell all my tickets, I’m going to lose money. So I suppose to find people that would be interested in seeing a show like this and generate interesting conversations. Some of the things that I’ve been most touched by, and it stayed with me most from work that I’ve staged before, were people that really knew the topic and felt that my discussion of it, or exploration of the themes around it, was really thoughtful and thought-provoking. So, if I can encourage people to see and think a little bit more about what I consider to be a massive societal issue, I would be really satisfied with that.

What for you are the best and the worst things about the Fringe?

I love the Fringe. I keep thinking I should move away from Edinburgh, and then the Fringe happens and I’m like, ‘Why would you ever want to live anywhere but here?’ It’s like living in a fun fair for three weeks in a row with just this total overload of everything, and the atmosphere in the city is magnificent, and the energy and the enthusiasm, and this sense that round every corner there’s something amazing that you will be able to discover if you just walk 10 paces more and disappear into that dark doorway. It’s just the most extraordinary privilege and opportunity, and as a way of sort of feeding your creativity, it’s absolutely incredible having all of this on your doorstep.

I suppose I think what is sad is the answer you’d expect me to give as a writer, that it is now [the case that] entry level costs are getting so high that the people who are really doing the interesting stuff are finding it increasingly difficult to finance it, and so we’re having fewer people coming from overseas, and we’re having fewer people doing anything other than one person shows, because who can afford to write and get someone else to direct and get three other people to be in the show and bring it all over here for three weeks?

It’s so difficult for artists who are suffering from less funding and less everything to use the Fringe for what it’s intended for, which is a sort of training ground, breeding ground, exploration place, and instead all the stuff that everybody says it becomes about big comedians and huge circus tents on the Meadows, and these things are wonderful, and these things get audiences, and these things were a really lovely part about what makes it all so eclectic. But it makes it harder for people that are doing the really interesting, cool stuff until they have financial backing behind them to get that to the audiences that would really love to see it in this in the city in August.

Would you say it’s even more difficult for playwrights and for theatre performers to get audiences than, say, comedians, because it seems like you can rely less on a name to pull in a crowd?

I don’t know if I’ve got a good answer for that. I’m really scared of comedy because my sense of humor is so strange. If I go and see it, I’m inevitably disappointed. Not that they’re not funny, but I just.. I just find the whole thing a bit uncomfortable. I guess because I’m so interested in theatre I know what I’m looking for, so I go and find it. I suppose when you chat to like ordinary people about what they’re going to go and do in the Fringe, inevitably it’s related to comedy, or maybe they’re taking their kids to see a magic show or something.

I feel like theatre isn’t front of mind for regular Edinburgh locals who want to go and see something in the Fringe. They might go and see a burlesque act, Shrek burlesque, for example, or they might go and see Neverland, you know, there’ll be shows that sort of catch the popular imagination. I suppose the trouble is they’re often the shows that have publicists that have budgets that are able to get their show into the inbox of the people that are writing the ’10 Things You Must Do This Fringe’ lists, and I guess it is harder. There’s often less money in theatre, isn’t there?

Are there any other shows or performers at the Fringe that you recommend that we should check out?

Mayflies by Grid Iron as I’m a devoted follower of pretty much everything they’ve ever done. I love site-specific work and they are a class act.

Tether (인연) by Wonder Fools as they also make really interesting work. This looks to be about bringing people together, another really pressing topic in this increasingly divided world we live in.

SLAYERS by Corinne Salisbury, a Scottish writer who’s exploring how you can bring up girls in a world in which the manosphere has too much of a say. Same topic as my show but an entirely different take – so I’m excited to see what she’s come up with.

SHINJUKU is at Olive Studio at Greenside @ George Street from Fri 7 to Sat 15 Aug 2026