Step one to connecting to the play: print your own script.

Fact: I feel absolutely out of place when I don't have a script that's rightfully mine. Ownership of the character comes from ownership of the play and what better way than to have it in your hands in a script that is yours and yours alone? I have intimate relationships with all my scripts because they were there right from the start: the first dramatic reading, casting, plot analysis, character analysis, adaptation, and the going off-script. Even with Introspection, a fully self devised piece, my script was one of my biggest companions other than my fellow cast members.

Apart from being the seed to the play, my scripts have always been diaries in productions. From random doodling in tedious refining times, to fierce note-taking and attempts at translating and coding my own stage directions, it has always been training wheels to me.

My wrinkly, previously stiff scripts turn into sponges of perspiration, sometimes heavy tears, desperate memory work and long nights. It can't be anymore intimate than sleeping with your scripts. Or disgusting. Which is why I hate sharing scripts. My scripts are probably the only things to see me at my best and my worst in productions, other than my living breathing pillars of support standing down stage left.

Let's not even talk about the major separation issues I get when I lose my scripts during rehearsals. It's like a personal inauguration when I write my name on the front of my script. On the back too. In between. In the notes to myself hanging out of margins. It doesn't get bigger than this hi-lighting of lines you have to master. From here on, it only gets better.