I went to Morocco a few years ago with a very clich?notion of female Asian body language in mind. And these days, many are either choosing to throw off the shackles of this symbolism by rejecting their faith completely, or are embracing it with open arms.Last year Shabina Begun took her school to court for refusing to allow her to wear a jilbab (a long overgarment) in class. So that was another element: this young girl can accept the idea of killing herself and other people, but can’t accept the idea of sleeping with someone.”In basing his play around a daughter, Tiller has gone straight to the nerve centre in Asian and Muslim families, where daughters tend to carry an awful lot of symbolic weight with regard to ideas of sexuality and purity, honour and family duty. At one point the daughter is offered a deal whereby she can sleep with an Israeli to help save her father, but she refuses. And I’ve also interwoven elements of Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure, partly because I’m also very interested in this idea of purity. Yet where Warcrime was based on a true story, The Daughter is not.”I’ve fabricated a lot of my material because the play is in many respects about different fictions It’s about who you believe.

We tend to see women as the people who protest against war or who suffer the most, who are good. But it’s more interesting to look at a woman who wasn’t good, or who was troublingly heroic.”Initially, he used verbatim techniques to construct both plays, researching The Daughter through extensive interviews with people who lived under curfew and under threat of suicide bombings in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Hebron. “As a kid, I was always struck by the idea that, were I to never do anything meaningful, would I be capable of bumping off some tyrant to make something of my life? That was just a childish attempt to battle with ideas of heroism, of course, but I’ve always been interested in the idea of someone killing themselves for a purpose rather than for nothing, or out of a sense of being locked into depression. I got interested in this idea of a woman as a voluntary participant in war, and through that, I came to write The Daughter – which is set in the occupied territories about a woman who openly embraces the idea of conflict.”The Daughter is the second in a projected trilogy of plays from Tiller’s company The Wedding Collective, which he co-founded with the Asian designer Nadia Lakhani, all of which will challenge perceptions of women in conflict and defy the usual motif of women as carers and pacifists.Woven into all this is Tiller’s own mother, who committed suicide several years ago after the death of Tiller’s father. “I used to work with a load of Serbian, Bosnian, and Macedonian actors, so when the bombings started in Sarajevo I was obviously following events through my friends in Belgrade,” he says.”When I went out there, I came across this true story about a woman killed by a cluster bomb in an anti-Milosevic town who may or may not have been involved in the war. The play no longer just asks questions about a type of warfare far away but about a conflict that has been brought to our front door.Inevitably, the genesis of both projects had less to do with prescience and more to do with Tiller’s fascination with different cultures and religions. Within two months, four suicide bombers have hit London, and once again, the play he is writing has suddenly gone beyond its intended sphere of relevance.
That play, called The Daughter, is about a young girl who takes on a deadly mission but who is persuaded by her dad to let him go in her place He in turn is then caught.

Tiller’s play Warcrime, written under the pseudonym David Wallace, was waiting in the wings, and when it opened in St Andrew’s crypt in central London in April 2003, it became one of the very first pieces of new writing that was seen to be commenting on the Iraqi invasion.Fast forward a couple of years, to May 2005, and Tiller is in Ramallah, researching another new play, this time about suicide bombers. Stephen Tiller has a knack for timing. He spent the latter part of 2002 researching a play about precision bombing during the 1999 Kosovan war. A few months later, America declared war on Iraq, and within weeks the newspapers were full of stories about cluster bombs killing civilians.

“I hope to really take advantage of being in a group of like-minded writers and the interaction with the industry.”The other chosen writers are Moira Buffini, a playwright; the novelists Lana Citron, Helen Cross and Donna Daley-Clarke; and Andrew Holmes, a journalist and novelist.. “I’ve got an idea for a screenplay I want to write over the course of the next nine months whilst a member of the Writer’s Circle.” he said. “I even went to Los Angeles in 2004 with my wife and child in order to pursue a career in it that went pear-shaped,” he said.He said he hoped that this might finally help him break through. It’s not as if they’re beginners in any sense expect in the transition to film.” Scripts were the foundation of a good movie, he added. “You can ruin a good script in transforming it into a film but it’s very hard to make a good film out of a bad script.”Toby Young said he had always wanted to write a film, had previously attended several screenwriting courses and produced three or four scripts without success before now.

“It makes sense to assume that people who know how to write can make the switch than gamble on people who have never written before.”The best screenwriters had often come from other genres, such as Anthony Minghella, who started as a playwright, and Richard Curtis, on television, he said.”And in this group there are really quite starry writers. “At the end of this year, we want to think that there will be people of great talent who have a good chance of getting through the doors and getting films made,” Ms Hanson said.Duncan Kenworthy, the chairman of the British film academy, Bafta, and producer of hits including 28 Days Later and Love, Actually, addressed the inaugural meeting on Tuesday.”This is one of those ideas that you know is working because you think, ‘Why hasn’t it been done before?’” he said yesterday. Subjects will include the structure of the industry, a writer’s working relationship with the director and the development process. But more than 500 people applied.”We thought we would look at some of the most interesting writers and see if we could persuade them to dip their toes into the screenwriting business. We’ll give them some facts, some skills, some tools, that might help them make that leap.”There will be workshops followed by dinners with senior figures. A sing-along-phonetically encore of “Jimi Renda-Se” rounded things off nicely..