Dramatic Writing: Ali Muriel

Words: Louise Thacker
Photography: Elizabeth Gordon

A research economist who’s actually funny? We kid you not: meet Ali Muriel, the 28-year-old playwright who’s breaking all the rules.

I wasn’t prepared to let 200 miles get in the way of me catching up with the winner of the 4Talent Dramatic Writing Award, so I invite Ali for a live web chat. The inherently witty playwright soon has me ‘LOLing’ at his accounts of the success he has already achieved through his work.

“As part of the Future Perfect scheme, which I’ve been on this year, they locked us – seven of us – in the Paines Plough offices for a weekend,” he recalls. “We had to write a ten-minute monologue to perform on the Monday. Terrifying. Not least because I wrote a monologue about a guy who cloned himself, in order to have sex with himself. I mimed intercourse with myself in front of my mother.”

It isn’t just Ali and his Mum that are drawn into his bizarre situations: his audiences are thrown into the fantastical and humorously funny dramas alongside the characters. An event at the Oval House Theatre saw Ali write a five-minute play that would be performed in a random space within the building.

“I’m rubbish at writing what I know, so I asked for the space I know less about than almost anywhere in the universe.” The Ladies toilets it was.

The play, suitably titled Ladies and Gentlemen, is the story of a young couple that first ‘got together’ in a Youth Centre basement lavatory. It’s now their third anniversary, and the fella has an idea for a romantic ‘where it all began’ gesture, as Ali explains with relish: “She hates the fact that they got together in a lavatory – she wants to forget all about it. And so he has to win her back by being unbelievably romantic. In a lavatory. It was fun.”

Far from the whiff of public toilets, the sweet smell of success was in the air as Ali won Soho Theatre’s Westminster Prize in 2006 for his play Furnace Four, which the Dancing Shadows Theatre company are planning on touring.

Writing may be Ali’s biggest passion, but his nerdy alter ego is also something he’s proud of. “I studied Econometrics and Mathematical Economics,” he admits. “It’s basically the course where even the economists think you’re a geek. Now I work as a research economist, studying education, poverty and inequality. Best. Job. Ever.”

He actually believes the two careers complement each other rather well. “In economic research you’re trying to figure out what’s really happening in the world. In writing, you’re free to make it up,” he points out. “One keeps you grounded, the other cuts you loose. What’s not to love?”

Of course, there are only so many hours in the day. “I have to spend most evenings and more-or-less every weekend writing,” he confesses. “Sleep suffers, and my Facebook wall degenerates into my long-suffering friends writing, ‘Are you dead?’ I call it my Wall of Death.”

alimuriel@gmail.com