Who Laughs Last?

Every now and then, particularly at a dinner conversation, people will suddenly have a look of horror on their faces that "uh oh, this is going to go in a play".

– Roger Hall on taking writing inspiration from his own life

To have the original cast, I think that's sort of a Guinness Book of Records thing. I don't know that anyone has ever done a sequel to a play 27 years later with four of the major original cast members.

– Spreading Out director Ross Jolly on directing the sequel to Middle Age Spread

A playwright has become a brand. People will ring the theatre and they won't mention the name of the play; perhaps they don't even know it. They’ll say "I’d like to book for the Roger Hall please." That is huge for any playwright.

– Actor Ray Henwood on Roger Hall

I love the process of developing characters and making them come to life and then seeing them performed on stage, and just sort of great joy to sit in a theatre where people are enjoying it — and seeing them enjoy it is a fantastic feeling.

– Roger Hall on why he loves being a playwright

Well I probably appear in most of my plays in one guise or another, even if it's an all-woman play. Inevitably one's passions and beliefs and things come through, sometimes to the detriment of the play or the character and you have to hold back.

– Roger Hall on drawing on himself in his writing

From the first read-through in the green room at Circa we all knew. We just fell back as if we'd done Middle Age Spread a couple, three weeks before. The characters were all there.

– Actor Dorothy McKegg on acting in Spreading Out, the sequel to Middle Age Spread, early in this documentary

The times I've heard people say "How did you know?" "When did you put the microphone in our house?" "This is our story." And I think by being honest about myself in a way and putting it on paper, I find that I'm just the same as everybody else. And Woody Allen says humour is letting the audience know that they're not alone.

– Roger Hall on audience response to his plays

I've been accused of being a workaholic and I'm not sure that's quite true. But my day usually is to get up reasonably early depending on the weather and things like that, and very often I'm at work by eight o'clock in the morning. I do a solid day's work really, and I'm often seven days a week, and I've done a play a year for 30 years in effect, plus a lot of TV and other stuff.

– Roger Hall on his work day as a playwright

Many years ago, I think before I'd even written my first play, I read a statement by Lord Willis, who was one of the pioneer television dramatists in Britain, who said that any marriage is more interesting than any murder. And I thought yes how true that is.

– Roger Hall