Billie Collins

Tell me about the show.

The play is about a teenage boy called Noble, who, on his 15th birthday, finds out he can transform into a bird. He plans to use this new power to fly to his sister Cleo, who works on a remote island with the British Antarctic Survey. The show is about family, nature, climate change, home and queerness. I wrote the first draft as part of a one-year attachment with Box of Tricks Theatre in 2019. It gave me free rein to write whatever I wanted, which made it exciting. I just had this question: ‘What if a boy could turn into a bird?’ I have no idea where it came from, but I was obsessed with it. I felt it was an exciting starting point and made a really theatrical image. From there, I did a lot of research about birds. Once you start looking at things like migration, you get on to the climate crisis pretty quickly.

The show tackles a lot of themes. Was that clear early on?

They got in by stealth, in a way. I didn’t set out to write a play about the climate crisis, but what has been challenging and interesting about writing this play is discovering its scale and realising how it touches everyone. I grew up on the Wirral, a little peninsular between Liverpool and Wales, and I spent a lot of my teenage years stomping around beaches. So now I think about that area as a place affected by the climate crisis. It was an important thing for me to talk about, but it was rooted in my world and a world I understood. Hopefully, other people will find resonance there. And I grew up in a place where there wasn’t a thriving queer community. So I turned to TV to find representation, and the representation I was seeing was very metropolitan and people who were older than me, braver, smarter and funnier, so it was also important for me to present queerness in a different way – making the kind of thing I would have wanted to see when I was that age.

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