As we look forward to the opening of My Brother's a Genius in the Playhouse in January, we put some questions to the show's creator, the acclaimed writer and poet, Debris Stevenson.
What inspired My Brother’s a Genius?
The only part of this play that is fact is the title - my real life brother is a genius. And one day I started thinking about how my dyslexia meant I couldn’t read till I was 11, and that plus a genius brother left me branded an ‘idiot’. I wanted to unpack that feeling from an entirely fictional yet truthful perspective and therein the twins Luke and Daisy and their ambitions to fly were born.
How has being a grime poet as well as a playwright shaped your writing?
My personal strap-line is ‘The body, is the music, is the word’. I learnt to read and write through grime music because it was an introduction to language through the body, the music and the word. What I know, now that I understand the neurodivergence of my own brain, is that I think laterally, and to isolate words to the page removes a context that makes them very hard for me to understand. As a result, I have never been one of those writers who hides in their cave - I like to develop words in spaces with people and their physicalities and rhythms.
This show was developed through many conversations and collaborations with young people through Theatre Centre’s Future Makers process – how has this process influenced your writing?
I love the minds of young people - I love a question - so to be developing the work in rooms with such inquisitive, playful minds has been a joy. To have my little desk set up in the corner of amazing young talent bringing Luke and Daisy to life is such a rare privilege and makes this script feel like a show not just for young people but made with young people which is 100% what my practice is about. These young people are shaping, informing and challenging the work in real time
One of the core themes of the show is neurodivergence - can you speak about how this development process has incorporated it?
I would say Genius is not just a show about neurodivergence, it is a show made with neurodivergence. At the heart of this show is the shame I hold, spending a lot of my life thinking inherent parts of my brain were ‘wrong’ or ‘stupid’ or something I ‘endure’. In this show I wanted to follow the parts of myself I had been taught to fight - and there has been something so healing about holding that principle at the centre of these spaces. To see young people be comfortable in themselves - to see little boxes open in their mind around what is possible with their art but also with their lives has been beautiful. It feels like work that isn’t just giving the young people very tangible tools for a career in this industry but also just tools to navigate life.
Do you have any observations from working closely with young people?
I've been so pleasantly surprised by the level of enthusiasm, curiosity, hope, and creativity in relation to theatre. There’s been such an eagerness. My style of writing is quite unusual, and I'm an actor as well, and even when I perform my work, it can be technically quite challenging. And I wasn't sure how young people were going to respond to that, but I feel like there is such an appetite for the challenge.
Seeing them spending hours working out how to fly with different contraptions, playing with sound and music, there's just been a real playfulness. I think they're really open about the challenges and the difficulty of life as an adolescent person, particularly at these times. I think in that creativity and innovation and excitement and tenacity, I really find hope for what theatre still can do and should do, which is enable us to understand each other and ourselves and imagine a future better than our present. To find solutions, to innovate, which is harder and harder as an artist.
And I say that particularly as one from a working class background, because sometimes I can lose hope. I feel like what I'm coming away with is the same creativity and innovation of finding the path from A to Z, even if you don't know how to read the alphabet, you know, which is the situation that I was in. We found a way. The area I grew up in, people made music out of wooden decks and PlayStations. That sort of innovation of scaling tower blocks to erect pirate radio station aerials to communicate the things you wanted to say to a world you didn't even really know existed because you hadn't been there. But you can imagine going and you connected with other people. I feel like that's the kind of energy that's in the room.
My Brother's a Genius runs in the Playhouse from Wed 28 Jan - Sat 14 Feb 2026.
