Stage, Screen & Radio

The shows Julia devised in her early years as a playwright were influenced by her interest in politics and social justice, concentrating on the theme of female empowerment.

Experiencing an audience responding to her scripts and laughing collectively was, for Julia, ‘the best feeling in the world’. Just as she toured her own spoken poetry, often in cabaret with other writers and musicians, her plays toured successfully across England.

‘I have always believed in the ethos of Live,’ Julia wrote in 2005, ‘with its informal close theatre space and intelligent local audience. It has remained loyal to its political beginnings and still is for me the voice of the North East, and certainly the best place for a writer to develop.’

The sounds and nuances of the English language brought joy to Julia, so just as her lyrical poetry was suited to live performance, her stories were brought to life by radio.

Julia’s most successful adaptation for television was the ‘quietly radical’ secrets-and-lies drama Cold Calling. Originally written for Live Theatre as Attachments, the double-hander made a natural transition from stage to screen on Tyne Tees Television. Cold Calling was described by Julia in Eating the Elephant and Other Plays as ‘one of my most dramatic pieces, full of movement and conflict and all those things that theatre is supposed to have, whereas some of my other works show the definite preoccupations of a poet and a fiction writer.’

Eating the Elephant and Other Plays brings together Julia’s plays for stage and radio. This collection includes Eating the Elephant, Head of Steel, The Women Who Painted Ships, Venitia Love Goes Netting, The Last Post, Personal Belongings, Doughnuts Like Fanny’s and Attachments and her radio plays, Sea Life, Posties and Appointments. Each play is introduced by Julia.