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| 1 Apr 2026 | |
| Alumni Stories |
In 2021, I moved to London to try to make a career as a playwright. I was fresh out of uni and, despite some small successes early on, I soon found myself crashing out of London unable to afford rent in a barren post-covid climate. I was unemployed and living with my parents - after 2 years I felt like I was making no advances.
But in April 2023 that all changed. Whilst training for a job as a tour guide on the river Cam, I received two notifications to say that I’d won the RSC 37 Plays Award and The Peter Shaffer Award. The first, a commission by the RSC to celebrate 400 years since Shakespeare’s first folio. The second, a year-long residency at Trinity College, Cambridge, funded by the Peter Shaffer Foundation. Suddenly, a career that felt dead in the water had a whisper of momentum.
Since then, my career has ebbed and flowed. I’ve been published with Methuen Drama and had two national tours, including my latest play American Candy, a comedy crime thriller set in an American Candy Store, which toured London, Oxford, Manchester, and Newcastle supported by Arts Council England. I’m not completely out of the water yet. I still have a part-time job punting on the Cam, which seems an apt metaphor for the relentlessness of a career that won’t come easily… That feels like pushing ahead against a heavy current.
Although it’s fashionable for artists to say they were overlooked and misunderstood during their school years, I’d be lying if I claimed that was true for me. Hills Road was such a fantastically formative time in my development.
My wonderful English teachers Mr Binfield and Mrs Butcher introduced me to Beckett, whose Absurdist influence still echoes through my writing to this day. Likewise, Mr Fredman’s anarchic approach to Theatre Studies, to my delight, stretched my understanding of what theatre could be and, at times, what an audience can tolerate. For better or for worse, I’ve been testing my audiences’ tolerance ever since.
Upon graduating Hills Road in 2018, I was given the Old Cantabridgian Society Award for my contribution to theatre along with a very generous £50 cheque which I almost certainly didn’t spend on play tickets like I should have. This epitomises what Hills Road has always been for me - a brilliant source of support and encouragement. I will always be indebted to it. And if at any point they should decide to give me £50 again, I promise not to go straight to the pub.
Tom Murray, March 2026