Your new play, Dogstar, opens at Hampstead Theatre next month. Dogstar is the name of a ship, right?

Yes, Dogstar is the name of a ship, a nineteenth-century whaling ship. The play is set about 1860, which is when the Arctic whale fisheries had been massively overfished. They hunted bowhead whales up there and the stocks had completely declined. This ship has been stuck in the ice for months. Everyone has got scurvy. A lot of the crew have died. There is just a handful left on board, waiting for the ice to melt so they can go home. Then things take a turn for the bizarre.

Where did the idea of a whaling ship come from?

I wanted to write about a whaling ship but I can’t remember where that came from. I used to be really scared of whales when I was a child. Maybe that is in there somewhere. I think that fear started with The Tweenies. There was a bit where they showed you how big a whale was compared to a person and I couldn’t deal with that as a kid. The play is a bit like a fairytale, too. I love fairytales. As I was writing it and redrafting it and working it out, I was thinking about The Little Match Girl a lot. She goes out selling matches. It’s freezing cold but she can’t go home because she hasn’t sold any matches. She strikes the matches, one by one, to keep warm, and every time she strikes one, she sees a vision. Structurally, the play is very similar to that. Although I find that story quite morally bankrupt because it never questions why this small child is being forced to sell matches.

Did you do a lot of research into nineteenth-century whaling?

I wanted the play to be researched enough that it feels solid, but beyond that I let myself be quite free because I was not trying to create an accurate period drama. I am not really interested in educating people about what it was like to be a whaler in the nineteenth century. I did read a few books, though. The best one I read was called Leviathan by Philip Hoare. The most niche one is called Scottish Arctic Whaling by Chelsey W Sanger, which is full of tables about oil and stuff like that. It is not a super accurate play, though. I was happy for it to be a sidestep from reality.

Who are these whalers? Tell me about the characters in the play.

There is a young whaler called Sam, who is a real stickler for the rules. He is on his first trip and it has gone disastrously wrong. There is an older whaler called Babben, who has done well for himself in whaling and is close to retirement. Then there is one in the middle called Gorey, who has just ended up on this ship. There is not a lot of love between them. They find each other quite annoying. They are colleagues, I guess. I find colleagues so interesting. You are not really friends and they can annoy you so much, but you can feel a deep sense of loyalty to them at the same time. That is what it is like in the primary school I work in. It is like that with waitressing, too, I think. Waitressing and whaling are so similar.

What is the play about beyond whaling? Or are you a writer that just puts characters in situations and sees what happens?

Sometimes, I just put people in situations and work out what the play is about later. With this, though, I did know what I wanted to say. The challenge was to do that through an exciting plot and interesting characters. It is a play about a resource that is running out, about humans having a devastating effect on the environment, and about how we think about nature. One of the most interesting things I learned in my research was how different our perception of whales was back then. Now, we think of whales as these beautiful, peaceful giants, but the Victorians thought of them as these terrible sea monsters. I was thinking a lot about blame, as well.