Al Smith, last year’s winner of the Sunday Times Playwriting Award never thought that play writing would feature so prominently in his life. “I thought writing my first play, that it would be the beginning and the end of it,” the 25-year-old says with a laugh.

More than a half-dozen awards later, with several productions staged at home and abroad and more writer’s residencies than he has time for, it seems that putting that first pen to paper was an inspired decision.

For the South Londoner, it all started with a dramatic production of his first play, Chalk, which he staged while an undergrad in English Literature at Edinburgh University. Talented mates and peers were cast and the curtain lifted before an audience of fellow students. Save a few important exceptions. Tucked away in the audience was a member of the Fringe Festival, who, impressed, approached the young playwright and offered him an hour’s slot at the next instalment of the festival. “I didn’t have a play written for that hour slot,” Smith remembers ruefully. So, out came the pen, and a second authorial effort, a play by the name of Enola, was born.

Enola tackles the deeply trying controversies surrounding the creation and deployment of the atom bomb during World War II. Interwoven in the skirmishes between megalomaniacal physicists and moralists who objected to their tinkering with atoms, are psychological dramas in miniature: a suicide, a damaged young woman. Again, Smith’s work caught theatre professionals’ eye. This time selectors for the National Student Drama Festival, 2006. Enola went on to win the Sunday Times Playwriting Award and a career – that has included taking his plays to London and New York City – was born.

“I was untrained; I didn’t know I could write at all. I thought [my first play] would be the last time I put pen to paper,” he says. “What NSDF does is create a really lovely step between student theatre and professional theatre. It allows students to be recognised, it’s a springboard.”

Presenting work at the NSDF was a first step, but not an all-access ticket to the world of professional theatre. Even for student productions that make it there, “success is entirely self-produced,” Smith says. On low or non-existent budgets, Smith, along with his student actors, lighting designers, costumers and stage crews cobbled together productions that needed to stand up to the scrutiny of professional critics.

Financial impediments aside, student theatre also faces damning audience preconceptions. Many don’t give these productions a chance, believing that necessarily amateurish and weak in subject matter. Smith disagrees: “You learn a huge amount [as a student] doing shows. We should celebrate people who are flexing their muscles creatively.”

“People have a perception of student theatre as not as highbrow as they’d like,” he says, “because students are by-and-large untrained.” Al Smith seems to be proving them wrong.

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