In 2010, I was down on my luck – and down in the dumps – when a friend gave me a life- changing gift: a free ticket to a funny play.

It’d been a brutal year. Since 2003 I’d lived in London, stringing together enough fringe shows and little writing jobs to make something of a modest apprenticeship as a playwright, if not quite a career. Alas, the 2010 election of a new conservative government in Britain saw the end of my limited opportunities and I was back to working behind a bar. The days were hard. I sometimes slept under left-behind coats in the wine cellar rather than trudge home through the snow to the cramped bedsit I shared with a terrible boyfriend. The London cold had entered my bones.

Then, that play. The ticket was from my friend Mike; it was David Johnston’s adaptation of Madness in Valencia, a comedy by the 17th Century Spanish playwright, Lope de Vega. Two people wrongly incarcerated in a mental asylum fall in love and then have to prove to the world they’re sane enough to leave. Yes, it implicitly poses questions around reason and unreason, but mostly there are mistaken identities, deceptions, confusions, a lot of running around and, at one point, everyone pretends to be a horse. Hilarious.

The western canon’s most prolific comic playwright, Lope De Vega is believed to have written over 1800 plays, and a staggering 431 are extant. His expertise with stage comedy not only made him beloved of his day, but has kept his plays on stages, around the world, for 400 years. For two blissful hours that night at Trafalgar Studios, I forgot about my dead-end job, awful relationship and ugly flat and laughed myself silly. When I got out, all of London felt a little warmer, even on the bus home.

I’m long home now in Australia, making a living from writing and married to an absolute champion – yet a muscle memory of Madness in Valencia awakened in 2020 when STC approached me for a follow-up to Banging Denmark, our hit collaboration of 2019. Amidst the slow-motion catastrophe of the pandemic and the silence of lockdown, my own need for comedy suggested a Lope De Vega adaptation. His original La Dama Boba of 1613 certainly asks the questions I like to ponder about wealth, class, status and opportunity... but, honestly, A Fool in Love came about because in these rough times, the best honour I could pay my Spanish hero would be to tell some jokes, celebrate the wonderful irrationality of love and gather an audience in a room together for a simple good time.

I have enjoyed every minute of bringing this play to production. I hope that warmth finds its way into your bones, too.