Beginning this week at the White Bear Theatre is a staging of ‘We’ll Always Have Paris’, a new play by experienced playwright and screenwriter Paul Kalburgi. 

The play is about grief and starting again, and focuses on Ginny, who is trying to get over losing her fiancé. And that might sound sad, but this play also has all the characteristics of a romantic comedy and a cinematic style, and to me, that all adds up to something interesting and special. 

I spoke to Paul to find out more about the play, and about the writer himself. 

CM: Can you start by telling us about the narrative of the play? Who is it about and where does the story take us?
PK: ‘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.

She’s spent much of her life believing in the stories that cinema tells us about love – the meet-cute, the grand gesture, the happy ending – so when her own love story ends very differently, she has to work out what happens next.

It’s a story about grief, but also about starting again. Ginny is forced to confront the gap between the life she thought she was going to have and the life that is actually available to her.

And because she speaks directly to the audience, they become part of that journey with her – almost her confidants – as she tries to work out where her story goes from here. She’s sharp, sassy, witty, irreverent and gloriously unfiltered, with a wicked sense of humour that often becomes her way of navigating the darker moments.

CM: What themes are explored through the play?
PK: Grief and loss are obviously central, but I think the play is ultimately more interested in what happens after grief. How do you rebuild a life when the future you imagined has disappeared?

Strength and human resilience in the face of devastation are also a big part of Ginny’s journey – perhaps the bravest thing she has to do is accept that her story has changed and somehow find the courage to keep writing it.

There’s also a lot about the stories we tell ourselves about love and happiness, and the enormous influence that films and popular culture have had on our expectations of relationships.

Cinema gives Ginny a vocabulary for understanding love, but it also gives her some pretty unrealistic expectations of what a happy ending is supposed to look like, and the play forces her to navigate a much more real, raw and messy rom-com.

CM: How would you describe the play in terms of its genre or style?
PK: I describe it 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 definitely has the ingredients of a romantic comedy – humour, cinematic references, nostalgia, romance and plenty of warmth – but it’s interested in what happens when life refuses to follow the conventions of the genre.

Stylistically, cinema is woven right through the play. There are film references, visual echoes, quotations and little Easter eggs for people who love movies, but you absolutely don’t need to be a cinephile to follow the story. The film references are really part of the way Ginny sees the world and we bring the audience into that.

CM: What was the inspiration for it? What made you want to create something that covered this topic?
PK: ‘We’ll Always Have Paris’ began with Aristotle’s idea that drama is an exercise in radical empathy: “That could be me. What would I do?”

I wanted to take that idea and place it inside a romantic comedy – to explore what happens when the happy ending we thought we had is suddenly taken away.

What happens when the person you thought you’d grow old with dies, or the relationship ends, or life simply takes you somewhere you never expected to go? That became the starting point for Ginny.

It’s fair to say the play also grew from a personal reckoning with the clichés of the romantic comedy – a kind of rebellious rom-com, that explores a messier, more human love story.

CM: As playwright, how actively involved with the production are you?
PK: Ha! Very. Given the realities and economics of bringing new work to the stage in independent theatre, I’ve been involved in pretty much every aspect of it – from the writing and casting through to production, marketing and all the slightly less glamorous practical jobs that come with putting on a fringe production.

As a writer, though, my main focus has been making sure the play we’re putting in front of an audience is the strongest version of the piece.

After being selected as a finalist for the Adam – New Zealand’s national playwriting award – in 2024, and upon my return to London later that year, the play has been through a solid development journey of workshops, staged readings and a considerable amount of rewriting over the last eighteen months.

I’m also deliberately very involved in the visual world of the production. Because cinema is so central to the play, and a lot of the production elements are in the ink, I wanted the production itself to feel cinematic.

In terms of the staging generally, we’re very much ‘thinking outside the black box’! This is not your typical 50 seat pub theatre play.

CM: Can you tell us about the cast and creative team?
PK: We have a fantastic three-person company. Miranda Colmans plays Ginny, with Cyril Blake playing Jerry and a number of other characters, and Eliza Williams playing Trish alongside multiple other roles. These guys are all seasoned pros.

Miranda has an enormous amount of dialogue to learn and a real rollercoaster of an emotional arc to ride, while Cyril and Eliza are a real powerhouse duo who orbit her world, each playing a really varied ensemble of characters.

The production is directed by Kay Brattan, who has been a really important creative partner throughout the process – Kay’s vision for the play and insights have been extraordinary. 

We also have solid support from George Bird as our ‘Walking’ Stage Manager, she’s pretty much on stage as much as the cast, herself assuming a variety of costumed roles!

Plus Annie Power as Associate Producer, Liz Kent working with us as Intimacy Director, and Gabriel Burns bringing together all of the technical elements that make this production something really special and seldom seen on the fringe.

CM: Can you now tell us a bit about yourself? How did you get into all of this?
PK: I’m a British writer, originally from Teesside, and I’ve been writing for stage and screen since first moving to London in 2002, when I sold my first pantomime script in the back of The Stage newspaper and decided I might be on to something!

As soon as I moved to London, I found my creative circle and started putting work on the fringe. Somehow, for the next decade, I found myself producing television, with my writing often taking a back seat. So, in 2012, I decided to change that, returning to study for an MA in Writing For Screen & Stage at Regent’s University London. Since graduating in 2015, writing has been firmly front and centre.

After Regent’s, I moved to the US with my husband and sons and spent three years living in Dallas, Texas. My plays ‘In The Tall Grass’ and ‘Broadway Or Bust’ received world premiere productions there, while I also wrote for local TV news, the authorised bio-doc ‘Clint Eastwood: Hollywood Outlaw’, and two seasons of ‘The Price Of Fame’.

Six years living in Auckland, New Zealand followed. There, I wrote episodes of the popular Kiwi soap opera ‘Shortland Street’, while continuing to teach playwriting workshops and courses.

CM: What have been the highlights of your working life thus far?
PK: Seeing my name in the opening credits for ‘Shortland Street’ was a definite high!

I’ve also been immensely proud to have my book, ‘The Writer’s Toolkit’, published by Nick Hern Books, and to see my plays ‘Almost The Birthday Party’ and now ‘We’ll Always Have Paris’ published. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of seeing them on the shelves of the National Theatre Bookshop!

Finding an unlikely home for my backstage comedy, ‘Broadway Or Bust’, in the US was a real treat too. It was originally set in my native North East, but – after finding myself teaching playwriting at Theatre Britain in Dallas – I realised that all of the same characters that populated that world were alive and well in Texas.

That prompted me to revise, rewrite and set it firmly in Dallas, where it was staged by Pegasus Theatre at the Bath House Cultural Centre in 2019.

CM: What aims and ambitions do you have for the future?
PK: The ambition is fairly simple: to keep making work that people connect with, and to find more interesting ways to get that work seen on stage, screen, audio and in print.

CM: What’s coming up next for you after this? What else are you working on?
PK: I have a couple of new plays in the works.

One a little further along than the other, which I am hoping to share through some work-in-progress readings early next year, and another that will, in contrast to ‘We’ll Always Have Paris’, be far simpler to stage, while being very unique in its presentation and the way in which audiences will interact with it. 

I also have an idea for a second book, which I’m looking forward to having more time to explore and really just enjoy the process of writing, as it speaks very much to living a writer’s life.

‘We’ll Always Have Paris’ is on at the White Bear Theatre from 15 Sep-3 Oct. See the venue website here for more information and to book tickets. 

LINKS: whitebeartheatre.co.uk | paulkalburgi.com | instagram.com/paulkalburgi