Curious Incident playwright Simon Stephens: ‘I used to think my success was an administrative error’

Simon Stephens has written more plays than Shakespeare, goes on theatre dates with Gary Lineker, and ‘Fleabag’ star Andrew Scott is his muse. But even Britain’s most prolific playwright gets his work rejected, he tells Andrzej Lukowski

Simon Stephens: ‘I’ve been pretty steady in writing a play every nine months for about 20 years’ (Getty)

Simon Stephens chuckles incredulously at my first question, which is a query as to whether he knows how many plays he’s written. Because it’s a lot. “When I got past 38 I definitely felt a bit weird about it,” he says, sheepishly, “because that’s the number that Shakespeare wrote.”

After some deliberation over whether we’re counting adaptations of other playwrights’ work, or the early plays that he’s now pretty much disowned, the youthful, boomingly enthusiastic 52-year-old declares – with reasonable confidence – that the number is 45, running the gamut from the warm, naturalistic dramas, set in his native Stockport, that kicked off his career, to the bleak, cryptic plays that made him massive in Europe, and his one bona fide mega-hit: the National Theatre’s colossally successful stage version of Mark Haddon’s bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

Many of them have been written just a few minutes away from the waterside cafe in London’s Victoria Park in which we’re sitting. Though from Stockport, Stephens has now lived most of his life in east London, and it shows: when I arrive, he’s amiably chatting to a local young person, presumably a friend of one of his three kids, who still live with him and his wife, the actor Polly Frame.