1.17am, or until the words run out - Zoe Hunter Gordon Interview

How well do you know the people you love?

Katie and Roni were best friends, until they weren't.

Now Katie’s brother is dead, and the two girls unexpectedly find themselves together again – in his bedroom.

Tonight they’re going to tell each other the truth.

Because the truth will set you free – won’t it?

A claustrophobic, unexpectedly funny new play about friendship, lies and the things we can’t say to the people we need most.

First developed with support from HighTide, 1.17am… now receives its world premiere, following a critically acclaimed sell-out preview run at Theatre503.

Giada sat down with writer Zoe Hunter Gordon to learn more about the play.

Your play is titled 1.17am, or until the words run out. What exactly is happening at 1.17 a.m.? And because I love a long title, what are you trying to tell us with that second half? What does “until the words run out” mean for this story?
Thanks so much! I’m glad you love a long title. Well - practically, 1.17am is the time that Katie and Roni, the central characters in my play, meet. And then emotionally, I think early morning environments do strange things to us. We’re all a bit weird just after midnight, aren’t we?

I’m interested in the limits of verbal language, in how humans communicate without words. Our body language, facial expression, tone of voice: these also carry signals. Especially to people who know us very well. The second part of the title is a nod to this.

Katie’s brother is dead, yet Katie and Roni find themselves in his bedroom. What are they doing there? What does the room look like? Is it frozen in time, exactly as it was on the day he passed away, or has it been altered? Is there a particular object in the room that holds the key to their story?
When someone dies, they leave behind the detritus of a life. The people that love them must decide what to do with the objects. Keep them? Give them away? Bin them? And if they have questions, they’re looking to answer – they may hope to find them in what’s left behind.

Katie is drawn to the room in the hope that she may understand her late brother, Charlie, if she can spend enough time in his space. Roni finds herself there as Charlie’s friends have thrown a party and invited her. The room looks like what you might expect a 28-year-old man’s room to look like: with all the details that our domestic space reveals about how we live.

Sarah Stacey, the director, and Mim Houghton, the designer, have decided that Charlie’s room has not been disturbed since the day he died. The objects on the stage tell a story about him, and his relationships and what kind of person he was.

I’m very interested in the clues we leave behind when we die, the jigsaw puzzle of identity that grieving people must piece together. The set is full of objects that Katie and Roni have to piece together.

We learn that Katie and Roni are no longer best friends, as if something has fractured their bond, and the play slowly uncovers why. What kind of friends were they before everything fell apart? And more broadly, what does friendship mean to them?
The friends we make before we become adults are special. They’re more like family. The children we befriended as children know us in a particular way: they witnessed our adolescent mistakes, our decisions, our hopes and dreams – and saw our family unit and our place within it. Roni and Katie share this kind of bond: they were each other’s witnesses. They remember how they used to be.

Grief plays a central role in this story. How do you write about grief with honesty, making it recognisable and relatable, while keeping enough distance so it doesn’t consume you, again and again, as a writer?

Grief is painful, but it is the flip side of love. To experience the joy of loving deeply is to be open to the excruciating pain of loss. It’s a cliché but it’s true. So, to write honestly about grief is to write honestly about love. Create a character who you love, create a character who they love: understand why they love each other, then imagine the loss. Write it…

I can only answer for my own process, but I think that to write honestly about any subject is to dive into the specificity of character. To me, my characters feel as real as the friends in my life. Brilliant actors also help.

When it comes to keeping distance from grief… I don’t know if I do, really. To be consumed by grief is to be consumed by your love for that person. And that’s a beautiful thing. Isn’t it? Perhaps it sounds strange, but I try to welcome the experience. And, as Julian Barnes says, “just because someone is dead, it doesn’t mean they no longer exist”. Grief morphs and changes, just as our relationship with the dead does.

I’m very lucky – by writing, I get a chance to explore all this. Creating art is a privilege. I really don’t experience it as a struggle. All humans need to tell stories and pose questions to make sense of their experience. I write in the hope that fictionalised, heightened versions of things I’ve felt and thought get to be realised by brilliant fellow artists and meet an audience. And when they do, it’s a joy.

The play can be described as a “pressure play”: two characters locked in one space, with tension building in real time. This form is often considered one of the hardest to write. How did you approach that challenge? Was this structure always the plan, or did it feel like a natural choice for this story?

I often find that form comes to me first. I saw David Elridge’s Beginning, back in 2017, and immediately knew that I wanted to write in the same form as that play: closed time, closed space, but with a friendship on stage rather than a romantic relationship. There are very few plays that showcase relationships between women as the dominant narrative, in traditional theatrical forms. I was politically interested in how a play like that would feel. As a writer, I think I wanted to show that I could take on the technical challenge and pull it off. I also wanted to give two young female actors a chance to showcase a brilliant technically difficult performance. There’s nowhere for the writer or actors to hide, we all need to bring our best for the play to work. That’s very artistically exciting.

Technically, you approach it by dissecting the brilliant work of writers who’ve done this before you – Masha Normans’ Night, Mother, David Eldridge’s Beginning, Middle, End and a lot of Pinter’s work.

The play was first developed with HighTide, then staged at Theatre503, and now at the Finborough Theatre (shortlisted for The Stage Awards 2026: Fringe Theatre of the Year). Has that journey been reflected in the script itself? If so, what are the most significant changes?

As a dramatist, you have the pleasure and privilege of an audience responding in real time to your work. You can sit in the back of a screening room or theatre and watch people's bodies move and hear the laughter. Every time my work meets an audience I learn about it and learn what I want to change. There have been huge changes made to the script at every stage – characters radically altered, form refined,
many pages cut. At this stage, I think I have written upwards of forty drafts: it’s almost impossible to track. All I know is that by hearing strangers respond to my work I can refine and make the gesture clearer.

You write for both theatre and cinema. Could you give one major advantage and one limitation of each medium? And looking ahead, what’s next for you?
They’re so different. Another cliché, but screenwriting is primarily about images and theatre is primarily about words. Dialogue carries the weight of most narrative meaning on stage. On screen the images do. This also means that, I would argue, writing and directing for film is much more like drawing a comic book in real life on set with a camera. I think graphic novels are much closer to cinematic expression than a playscript. Also, because theatre is live and film is not, I do think that theatre is closer to somatic expression – dance, mime, clowning – than cinema. As an audience member sitting amongst other humans’ bodies watching a body live, there is a quality of expression that feels more ancient, perhaps? Films are also digital products now. Most people of my generation watch them on a phone on a commute, or alone by a laptop. This is not the reason I make drama – I believe we need to watch other humans telling stories surrounded by other humans. And I find it interesting that recordings of theatre always include audience responses to the work as part of the recording – if you watch NT live you watch how the audience reacts. We seem to know feeling part of a collective watching a story communally is what theatre is about. Even if we’re forgetting that films are meant to be watched in the cinema, in the same way.

I love working in both and am developing work across both mediums. It’s about what the story, ideas and gesture demands and choosing which medium will help those meet an audience best.

Staying with the present a little longer, 1.17am opens in less than two weeks and will soon be reaching many more people. Is there something specific you hope audiences take away with them after seeing the show?
I hope that they have a very entertaining, moving, enjoyable night out at the theatre. I hope they feel for Katie and Roni and can see a little of themselves in the women on stage, and in the man who has died. I hope that people who are grieving feel held by the piece, and nurtured.

More widely, I’d love them to feel that watching stories together communally is special and remember that it needs to be nurtured. Fringe theatre needs support – Arts Council England needs support – independent cinemas need support. Politically, we need to fight for arts funding. Fringe theatre is the lifeblood of so much that’s rich about the UK’s artistic culture, and in 2026 and onwards we need to wake up before its gone.

1.17am, or until the words run out runs at Finborough Theatre from 10th February until 7th March 2026. Tickets are available from https://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/productions/117am-or-until-the-words-run-out