Nick Payne is an award winning playwright and screenwriter. His plays 'Constellations', and 'If There is I Haven’t Found it Yet' have been performed in London and New York and his series 'Wanderlust' was recently screened on BBC 1 and Netflix. Nick adapted Julian Barnes's The Sense Of An Ending for BBC Films which was released in 2017 with Jim Broadbent.Jake Gyllenhaal will star in Nick's play A Life which will run at The Public Theater on Broadway from January to March 2019.

In this episode he discusses why publically funded arts are sacred to him, the difficulty of writing about religious belief as an agnostic, and why he thinks the theatre is vital for creating space to reflect on what kind of society we want to be.