The Machine by Matt Charman is about the famous chess match between the then world champion Garry Kasparov and the chess computer, Deep Blue, which took place in New York City in 1997. The match captured the imagination of the general public at the time as perhaps no other chess match has before or since. Kasparov's face was hanging in Times Square and the New York Stock Exchange had the match on its screens.

Even now, as Edward Snowden floats in the diplomatic neverwhere of Sheremetyevo airport, someone somewhere is plotting the movie. Currently the story of the man who blew the whistle on the National Security Agency looks like it could still play out as farce, but it may yet turn to tragedy.

A few days ago I found myself sat in a Finsbury Park pub talking to a man who dismantled bombs for a living, who had completed two tours in Afghanistan fighting the unending war against Improvised Explosive Devices, and I will admit to being more than just a little nervous. You see, he had just read the script of my play Casualties.

Very few young people know her name today, but Dorothy Squires was the singing sensation of the Fifties and Sixties, and even 30 years ago this talented but difficult star was a regular feature of the headlines thanks to offstage dramas and scandals. But who was the real Dorothy Squires? I first remember meeting Dorothy Squires, as she renamed herself, when I was only three years old. My father, Bert Cecil, a pianist, had befriended her when, aged 15, she had gone to London armed with nothing more than hope and a train ticket.

If this native New Yorker were in a relationship with the city of London, our Facebook status would read: “It’s complicated.” We’ve been through hell together. London is one of my favourite cities. I blissfully cross the pond several times a year to teach and to see my mates. But, this fabulous city also bestowed on me the worst reviews I’ve ever gotten in my life. So, why the heck am I coming back to do yet a show about the very show that shattered my dreams? Insane!

In recent years theatre has sought assistance from a pair of popular art forms. Shows based either on movies, or on pop groups’ back catalogues, have become mainstays of the theatrical economy. So the latest musical to open in the West End has the whiff of  boardroom cynicism. What happens when you randomly select a famous film and an iconic songbook, yoke them together and shove them out in front of the footlights?

Knock knock. Who's there? Eamonn. Eamonn who? Eamonn Etonian. There's an Eamonn at No 10, an Eamonn is Mayor of London, an Eamonn is even Archbishop of Canterbury. Oh, and Eamonns are third and - for three more months - fourth in line to the throne. Recently Eton has started to dominate British film, television and theatre. In 2012 one Eamonn won an Emmy, another was given a Bafta and a third played a Shakespearean king on the BBC. 

It was over four years ago that I was commissioned by Michael Boyd,  then artistic director of the RSC, to write a play which I had vaguely pitched to him as “a costume drama set in the nineteenth century with Asians running around in it”. And here we are, finally, about to open an epic and ambitious play set over the last 14 years of Queen Victoria’s reign. My initial inspiration came from an old black and white photograph taken in an ayah’s home in Aldgate in the 19th century.

Mrs Thatcher famously presided over a huge rise in unemployment, but down the years she kept a large sorority of impersonators (and one male one) off the dole. She was lucky with her mimics, who included some of the great actresses of the age, and never luckier than when Meryl Streep (pictured below) inhabited the role of Britain's first female Prime Minister. To her three election victories, Thatcher was able to add - if by proxy - an Academy Award for Best Actress.

"Why write about Ruth Ellis?"  It’s a question I’ve been asked many times in the run-up to The Thrill of Love and it’s a good one.  I’d like to know the answer, too.