Regent’s alum Paul Kalburgi (MA in Writing for Screen & Stage, 2015) is currently showing his latest play, We’ll Always Have Paris, at the White Bear Theatre in London.
We spoke to Paul about this latest project, what he has been up to since graduating from Regent’s and his advice for anyone embarking on their Regent’s journey this autumn...
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What you have been doing since graduating from Regent’s – what have you been working on, which projects especially stand out?
Since graduating in 2015, writing has been firmly at the centre of my professional life. I’ve worked across theatre, television and film, and my career has taken me from London to Dallas, Auckland and back again.
In Dallas, my plays In The Tall Grass and Broadway or Bust received their world premieres, alongside writing for television — notably two seasons of the docudrama The Price of Fame and the authorised bio-doc Clint Eastwood: Hollywood Outlaw. In New Zealand, I wrote episodes of the long-running serial drama Shortland Street, while continuing to teach playwriting.
My resource book for writers, The Writer’s Toolkit, was published by Nick Hern Books in 2020, and my plays Almost The Birthday Party and We’ll Always Have Paris have since been published by Playdead Press.
Tell us about We’ll Always Have Paris. Where did the inspiration for the piece come from?
We’ll Always Have Paris follows Ginny, a cinema usher and aspiring screenwriter in her forties, who is trying to rebuild her life after the death of her fiancé. Cinema is woven throughout the play because it is central to the way Ginny understands the world.
I describe the play as 'a rom-com with a broken heart', or perhaps an anti-rom-com. It begins where most romantic comedies end: after the happy ending. It explores what happens when life refuses to follow the conventions of the genre.
The starting point was Aristotle’s idea that drama is an exercise in radical empathy: 'That could be me. What would I do?' I wanted to explore what happens when the happy ending we thought we had is suddenly taken away, and how we rebuild a life when the future we imagined has disappeared.
How did the collaboration with the White Bear Theatre come about? Why this space?
The White Bear felt like a particularly natural home for We’ll Always Have Paris. Ginny works as an usher in a vintage cinema, and she spends much of the play breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly to the audience. That direct, intimate connection is central to the piece: in many ways, the audience becomes her confidants.
I’ve sometimes described the show as Fleabag meets Brief Encounter — combining that direct, intimate connection with the audience with the romantic, cinematic world of old Hollywood.
The intimate 50-seat White Bear, with its corner-thrust space, allowed us to embrace that intimacy while also transforming the stage between Ginny’s world and the cinema where she works. The set shifts from the relative intimacy of her flat into the much bigger, more evocative world of an old vintage cinema, allowing the production to move between those two worlds.
How have your studies at Regent’s helped shape your career?
Returning to education was a deliberate turning point in my career. By 2012, I’d spent around a decade working primarily in television production, and although I was still writing, it had increasingly taken a back seat. The MA in Writing for Screen & Stage was my decision to put writing back at the centre of my professional life.
I always describe my time at Regent’s as my 'Educating Rita moment'. As a mature student who hadn’t experienced university life before, I absolutely loved being on campus and soaked up every minute. The course gave me the opportunity to step back, study the foundations and theory of dramatic writing, nurture my craft, and, most importantly, give myself permission to take my own writing seriously.
I left Regent’s with my MA, but also with a real sense of confidence and an enormous amount of inspiration to get out there and push forward as a writer. That combination of craft, confidence, and encouragement has stayed with me throughout my career.
What was one of the best opportunities you accessed during your time here and why does it stand out?
During one module of the course, we were given the opportunity to go to the National Theatre to see Alecky Blythe’s London Road, where I discovered verbatim theatre for the first time. The experience sparked a real interest in the technique which I’ve continued to pursue ever since.
My own verbatim play, The Countess, which was released earlier this year as an audio play, was originally developed and written as my dissertation piece at Regent’s.
When I moved to the US, one of the first projects I pursued was In The Tall Grass, another verbatim play. I received development funding for an R&D workshop in Dallas and immediately knew that director Anna Jones, who had been such a wonderfully inspiring mentor during the development of my dissertation, would be the perfect collaborator. By then, she had also relocated to the States, so she was able to come to Dallas and work with me on the project.
What advice would you share with Regent’s graduates who are hoping to get into the industry?
Be tenacious... knock on doors... but don’t wait for someone to give you permission to be a writer. The creative industries rarely offer a straightforward route in, so keep making the work and find ways to get it seen.
Writing can be an isolated profession, so build your own creative community. Find people who will read your work, challenge you, encourage you, and tell you when something isn’t working.
Above all... stay inspired!
What advice would you give to new Regent’s students who joined us this autumn?
Enjoy it. I genuinely loved being a student at Regent’s, particularly because I was a mature student who hadn’t had ‘the university experience’ before.
Make the most of the people around you, the workshops, visiting speakers, library and opportunities to experiment. You never know which relationships or ideas will prove important later.
Make things. Write the play, shoot the film, make the podcast, collaborate with the person sitting next to you. Your time at university is a rare opportunity to experiment and take creative risks without everything having to be perfect.
Most importantly, stay connected. More than a decade after graduating, I’m still drawing on relationships I made at Regent’s, both personally and professionally. Sometimes those five-minute coffee breaks with your cohort can lead to long-lasting friendships and, crucially, become the start of building your creative community.
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We’ll Always Have Paris is playing at the White Bear Theatre until 3 October.