Posted August 19, 2026

The Interview – Kole Durnford

Kole, let’s start with your wonderful play Horseplay, which was published under the Scirocco Drama imprint earlier this year. Could you tell us a bit about the play and about how you came to write it?

Horseplay follows two best friends, a horse named Horse E. and a jockey named Jacques E, as they try to become professional horse racers.

I wrote Horseplay for the Toronto Fringe’s 24-Hour Playwriting Contest. At the time I was pretty artistically burnt out, and I wanted to use the playwriting contest to do a low-stakes creative project and write something lighthearted. 

As the day continued on, however, Horseplay became more and more about my creative burnout and the difficulties of pursuing an artistic career — told through Horse and Jacques’ attempt to become horse racers. The play ended up being almost a vow to myself to get back on my feet and keep running.

Why do you think the story of this unusual friendship strikes such a chord with audiences?

I think the main reason people connect with Horseplay is due to Horse’s innocence. Horse doesn’t really understand many aspects of the human world, like what money is, or what it means to have a crush on someone else. All he really knows is that he wants to do what he loves, horseracing, with his best friend Jacques. Because his heart is so pure, it breaks our hearts to see him grapple with some of the harder truths of life throughout the story.

I think humour is another part of why people connect with Horseplay. Even in the darkest moments of the story, I wanted to find a sense of levity and joy — I mean it’s a play about a talking horse! In a sense, I wanted to do right by the character of Horse, who I really came to love after months of writing, by embracing an imaginative, expansive view of the world through the way I wrote the story.

Kole, you were part of the cohort of young artists that experienced pandemic lockdown during their university years. How do you think that event affected your career path?

For me, I kind of look at the pandemic as a blessing in disguise. I was going to acting school when the lockdown happened, and because I didn’t want to pretend to act over Zoom for a whole year, I was forced me to look at other ways to be an artist — namely writing.

That year I finished my first full-length play, which was admittedly not very good, but in the long run was a big step for me as a playwright. I don’t think I would’ve continued forward as a writer without getting my truly worst writing out of the way while I was still young.

Do you have any advice for aspiring playwrights? 

I think it’s important to know that it takes a while to learn what your voice is, to learn what style you like to write, and to just get comfortable hearing your work out loud. I think it’s important to not measure your artistic ability with one single project, especially when you’re starting out as a writer. If I had taken my first play as an indicator of if I should be a playwright or not, I probably would have quit after the first reading.

Someone once gave me the advice to think of my creative projects as not individual, isolated pieces, but as one part of the overall tapestry of who you are as an artist. With that in mind, I think the best thing you can do starting out is just get to the end of a play, hear it out loud, share it with friends or a mentor who will encourage you, and keep moving forward.