A SCHOOLGIRL aged 17 will become the youngest person to have a play staged in a London theatre when her first work is performed early next year at the prestigious Royal Court.

Anya Reiss, whose father Robert is a canon at Westminster Abbey, wrote Spur of the Moment, an expletivestrewn family drama, while she was on a young writer’s course at the theatre.

“Lots of the narrative of the play is ‘what ifs’ from my own life,” said Reiss, who will next year take A-levels in English, theatre studies and history at Francis Holland school which, like the theatre, is in Sloane Square, central London.

The play has four main characters: 12-year-old Delilah, her warring parents Nick and Vicky, and a lodger, Daniel, who is brought in when financial difficulties strike.

A key moment in the play, which had a reading last week at the Royal Court, sees Delilah kissing the lodger, who is in his early twenties.

“It’s a shocking yet also funny play, which looks at taboos and, in particular, the transgression of an older person with a 12-year-old,” said Jeremy Herrin, deputy artistic director of the Royal Court.

Reiss insists the play is not autobiographical. “It’s more the what if I had done or said something when I was younger. When you are 17, the family is the thing that you see having the most power in people’s lives. You also get exposure to not only your own but other people’s families much more than at any other age. You see things that are forgotten or hidden to others.

“The key things in the play are lack of communication, impulse and its consequences, selfishness and the family dynamic.”

Reiss, who names Hollyoaks, Scrubs and EastEnders as her favourite television programmes, first attended a holiday writing course at the Royal Court three years ago.

“I went quite reluctantly, because I always wanted to be an actor and had never really considered writing,” she said. “But once I’d started, I realised it felt like improvisation just written down.”

Spur of the Moment is her first attempt at a play.

The Royal Court has a track record for new talent, having staged the first production of John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger in 1956 and premiered works by Arnold Wesker, Christopher Hampton, Hanif Kureishi and Caryl Churchill. It has never before put on a play by a writer still at school.

Its previous youngest playwrights have been Andrea Dunbar, who was 19 when her first play The Arbour was staged in 1980, and Polly Stenham, who was 20 when That Face was produced in 2007.

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