Helen Blakeman

Helen Blakeman
Born	1971 Liverpool
Occupation	Playwright, screenwriter
Language	English
Genre	Drama

Helen Blakeman (born 1971) is a British playwright and screenwriter from Liverpool. She has written three plays. Caravan, her first, was written while she studied at Birmingham University and won her the George Devine award. Her second play, Normal, was followed by an entrance into screenwriting. Pleasureland is a 2003 television film about teen sexuality, for which Blakeman was nominated for the British Academy Television Craft Award for best new writer in 2003, after which Blakeman wrote her third and most recent play, The Morris. In 2008, she wrote the screenplay for the award-winning television film Dustbin Baby, which was well received by critics, and for which she won the British Academy Children's Award for best writer.

Blakeman became involved in female morris dancing at age three. It was this dancing, combined with watching pantomimes and plays at Butlins, which led to her going into a career in theatre. She then joined the National Youth Theatre and studied drama at John Moores University. It was at university that she began to write. Blakeman then took a Master's course at Birmingham University under David Edgar.

It was at Birmingham University that Blakeman wrote Caravan. Terry Johnson saw a performance of the play, and took a script to Mile Bradwell of Bush Theatre. The play was then shown at the Bush Theatre. The play tells the story of a mother and her two daughters staying in a caravan in north Wales, and Robert Butler of The Independent described the play as displaying "a lively gift for dramatising family disputes and representing young people's sex lives with a good-humoured frankness". A black comedy, David Benedict, also writing for The Independent, criticised the plot as "contrived", saying that "The problem with this kind of writing on stage is that unlike a soap, it has to have theatrical shape, not least in that it has to end". The play won Blakeman the George Devine award. Blakeman's second play, Normal, also opened at The Bush. Normal tells the story of a mother who lost two children in child birth and her surviving daughter, and the play alternates between a character's monologues in a police station and the events leading up to the incident which brought her to the station. Butler described this as "tougher going" than Caravan, and said that "Blakeman's talent for unlikely scenes is largely on hold".

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