Guest Blog: Playwright Louise Wallwein On GLUE At Ovalhouse

Glue is a love poem to my past. Writing it has allowed me to revisit the past, but in the present.

I have had four years to develop this work, which has also become a radio drama and a volume of poetry. This in itself has been an epic journey, let alone the voyage of my messed-up childhood.

I was handed over at birth by my Irish mother, given to people who adopted me and then beat me on a daily basis until I was nine. I was then removed from that home and ending up spending the next nine years in care in roughly 13 children's homes. Then jettisoned by the system into a hard poverty of 1980s Britain. Then my fight back to recover, learn, and become the quite magnificent and flawed human that I am. The poet.

In 2013, I was a writer-in-residence at the CCWOC, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg. It was the year of the polar vortex - it was colder than Mars when I arrived and I spent the next three months absorbing that beautiful part of the world and their stories. And the story I kept hearing was like my own.

Canada, up until the 1980s, was removing the children of First Nations people and putting them in so-called residential schools. This generational damage that ensued was the subject of a truth and reconciliation commission. This was coming to an end, and everywhere I went people wanted to talk about their story when they heard mine.

I blogged about it, and back home Liz O'Neill, CEO of Z-Arts Theatre in Manchester, asked me to write a monologue for the Family Arts Campaign, questioning how to make family theatre more relevant to diverse audiences. It was the right question at the right time.

Liz then played a master stroke in reuniting me with Sue Roberts, who directed my first radio play Dirty White Girl for BBC Radio. I wrote a short monologue, Sue did her editing mastery and the audiences went wild for it. There was a hunger for this story to be told. So many people are affected and deeply moved to tears even by this work.

Then Sue wanted to develop it for radio and then we unpacked it further, discovering new voices; this fed back into the development of the full-length show. And then it was clear the book was needed, so I worked with the poet Ann Sansom from The Poetry Business to create Glue, The Extended Remix.

It's been the best of times and the worst of times, because all the while, I've been rigorously examining the self, myself, me. I plowed on though and now this work is done; it is my past and it is a love poem.

The audience has been the biggest surprise as I have woven them into the show. I always need that first public performance, and I really wasn't sure until I walked out in the beautiful echoey halls of the Royal Exchange, but it worked. Grown men who I'd known, proper hard producers, were in bits. Floods of tears.

And then the questions from the audience - they all wanted to talk about why this story is important to them. I performed in a 16th-century barn for some young care leavers at Arvon in Devon and the kids stormed the stage.

From the first breath in this performance there is no turning back, and I must keep this ship steady - I am the captain and the audience is my crew. And we sail the odyssey of my life until I met my mother in The Shadows, and the audience go wild, they are up on their feet dancing, giving me love. I wrote the emotional score of this work very intentionally, everything within it to make you feel, and the audience does.

Glue is at Ovalhouse 3-7 October