While he did not necessarily plan to write for the stage, Tom Wells has proven to be a generous, sympathetic, and heartfelt playwright whose work focuses on everyday life, especially for members of the LGBTQ community, sharpened by a degree of politically relevant and emotionally substantive realism.
Wells was raised in a farming family in the town of Kilnsea, East Yorkshire—45 minutes away from Hull, the setting for Jumpers for Goalposts and inspiration for most of his work. After graduating from Oxford University with a degree in English, Wells attended a course in dramatic writing at the West Yorkshire Playhouse; his post-graduate finances and well-funded theatres prompted him to try his hand at playwriting, though he never saw it as a long-term career. In 2009, Wells became a member of the Paines Plough Theatre Company and Channel 4’s Future Perfect Scheme; that same year, his play Me, As a Penguin premiered at the theatre where he had once attended class.
In Me, As a Penguin, Wells creates realistic LGBTQ characters and storylines, combatting hackneyed imagery that he finds untrue to life: “I wanted to write a straightforward play that has gay people in it. The thing about just having one gay character is you can only tell one story, and actually there are lots of different stories.” The political undertones in Wells’ plays were inspired in part by personal experience: in 2011, he was the victim of a homophobic hate crime outside of his East London home.
Though 2011 proved to be challenging, it was also a year of success. His play The Kitchen Sink, which follows a family over the course of a year in the rundown resort town of Withernsea, Yorkshire, premiered at the Bush Theatre in London, earning Wells the Most Promising Playwright Award from the Critics’ Circle. Jumpers for Goalposts, Wells’ most recent triumph, toured across Britain in 2013—stopping in Hull—and ended with a widely lauded run at the Bush in 2014.
What unites Wells’ body of work is that his plays are “about people trying their best.” Wells revels in transforming the quotidian into affecting, powerful theatre, noting that “the easiest way to make dramas, it seems, is to go to extremes, but most people just plod along. My friends just have ordinary lives and within that there are moments of elation and genuine struggle.”
—Alexandra Kennedy