Simon Stephens: Stockport state of mind

The Smiths, a dead sparrow, go home on the top floor of the bus 192 ... Simon Stephens wrote in the harbor, the people he thought he had left behind

One Monday morning before Christmas, I sat in a rehearsal at the National Theatre in London, and heard my game port read in English for the first time in 10 years. It was Graham Whybrow, literary manager of the Real Audience old, who suggested I write about my hometown of Stockport, Greater Manchester. Until then, all the work that has been written about the places where they had moved - York, Edinburgh, London. So when he received a commission from the Manchester Royal Exchange, it was logical to write about where I was born.

returned to the city for weeks at a time, my visits during the last months of the life of my father. The combination of seeing old friends, going to places I had not been in years, and watching my father fight cancer occur in the work, so that I now understand. Where he grew up became my spectacular: the Mersey Way Shopping Centre and Stockport bus station, municipal gray seashells sitting in the shade of the mighty viaduct. And the guys I went to school and worked in jobs fucking weekend gave me his characters. Were dryly funny, smart and broke. The music I had heard came to inform the structure of the work.

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is a place and a time - south of Manchester in the 1980s - who was accused of music. I wanted to stage this burden. I wanted the game to have the same effect on an audience that the Fall, New Order, The Smiths, Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses had on me. I tried to create scenes with the same pace and structure their songs. I tried to evoke the images of his letters in my box.

• I was not the only one who loved reimagining place: Marianne Elliott, who led the work in 2002 and revived for the National, has spent much of his childhood in Stockport. I think he wanted to revive the game in part because she loved to return to your imagination. Creativity and nostalgia from the same part of our brain.

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But it is not only important for me because this is my first piece in my hometown, but my first time with a female character in her heart. To start, I thought I would write about a man who goes back to Stockport - partly, I think, because I was raised as a writer to believe that the male writers could not write women. But while sharing an office with a colleague playwright Leo Butler, and one morning, I gave a copy of his extraordinary work, Redundant - excavation significance in the life of a girl in residential areas of Sheffield. I was inspired as I was excited. Instead of writing about a man who comes back, I write about a woman who goes.

So I went home and interviewed five women who had lived in Stockport all his life - family, old friends, friends of my mother. The oldest was 85 years old my girl, the youngest girl cousin. They told me about their jobs and their marriages, their aspirations and frustrations. Many of these stories - the discovery of a dead sparrow disastrous year in New hotel - it did in the plot of the play

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