The Blind Spot is the first play that I wrote.
I began to write it just after I finished school, at the start of my gap year. It was the first time in a while that I’d had enough time to sit down and focus on something that I wanted to write about for a while: three years playing poker, online and in school, often for five to six hours every day.
It was an addiction, and a very profitable one. My parents didn’t give me an allowance for two years since I supplied the money from poker. In this sense, they approved – I was winning regularly and it gave them one less thing to worry about. My fifteen year old ego skyrocketed as I paid my own way and managed to talk my way into a casino membership and an online poker account.
The comeuppance was quick around the corner. Our game broke up, since the player who effectively funded it lost too much and girls arrived at school. Priorities shifted, power relationships were inverted and poker lost its spark.
A few years on, I wanted to explore the colder sides of my personality, and of my friends, that the long evenings spent locked in boarding school rooms gambling our parents’ money had exposed.
I stuck to poker as the dramatic form for writing about it. It is, as many writers have discovered, inherently theatrical. Conflict springs off the back of every card, character traits are ruthlessly exploited by the winners and money, power and status hang perpetually in the balance.
The result is a play that reveals as much about the nature of the players as it does the cocooned public school world they inhabit.
The Blind Spot is on in 5th week in the Moser Theatre, Wadham. Tickets are £5 from www.wegottickets.com
