Lucy Watson on Tokens, Algorithms and Creating Level Up! The Musical
- London Theatre Doc
- Aug 4
- 4 min read
There’s something instantly intriguing about a musical that blends gaming culture, loyalty points and algorithms with songs and storytelling. Level Up! is heading to Edinburgh this summer, and I spoke to writer Lucy Watson about how the idea took shape and what surprised her most about writing a musical for the first time,.
Level Up! blends sci-fi comedy, gaming culture and live musical theatre. What first planted the idea in your head, and when did it start to feel like a show?
About three years ago, I was in the supermarket clutching my ten plastic tokens. I’d got a bonus for bringing my own bags and buying the right kind of yoghurt. My fitness app told me I’d crushed it for walking instead of taking the bus. I dropped my tokens into the “local scout hut” slot and felt a ping of dopamine, like I’d levelled up the world somehow. Life often feels like a rinse cycle of laundry, lunchboxes and “where are your school shoes.” Because honestly, life is a bit of a slog. A lot of invisible effort. Maybe the game vibes help us feel like we’re moving forward. But how real is any of it?I rang Julian Kirk, my friend and composer. Happily, he didn’t put the phone down. We started throwing ideas around. But it didn’t feel real until we had our first song, and that took over a year.
The musical explores digital systems like social scores, loyalty points and crypto, but it also feels very human. How did you find a way to write about those big ideas without losing the emotional heart of the story?
We looked at all the ways we’re nudged and rewarded in a world that feels more and more like a game. No one really knows the rules. Or who’s winning. Or if the points mean anything.But we don’t interact with systems in the abstract. We try to do the right thing, keep up, get ahead or survive the week.The heart of the show came from asking what it feels like to live that way.The characters grew out of that. Friends who fall out because they’re competing instead of connecting. Our main character Jo builds a token-generating machine because it’s the only way he knows to prove his worth. It’s funny, surreal and also heartbreaking.
This is your first musical. What did you find most unexpectedly difficult, and what moment brought you the most joy?
I’m a mum of four, so juggling that with developing a musical has been a challenge. Having a mum suddenly subscribing to gaming magazines is its own kind of chaos.The hardest part has been dealing with doubt and not being taken seriously.Never having done it before became its own superpower.We’re a team of ten who’ve built this together and made it better than I imagined. That’s been the greatest joy. The show has a life of its own now.From Julian’s side, the biggest challenge was overcoming the voice in his head saying the songs weren’t good enough. The most joy came hearing the cast sing them. If we’d known how hard it would be, we might never have started.
You worked with a creative team all trying something new, from the score to the video wall. What did that sense of shared risk and discovery bring to the project?
Julian and I focused on the characters and their emotional journeys. He turned those moments into songs, and Stamatis Seraphim gave them dynamics and harmonies.But our designer Jess Brown and director Patrick Wilson set the show’s visual tone. They had a clear vision. We worked with an AV studio in Sheffield called Steel Magpie who helped translate that into visuals.Running a tech-heavy show comes with risks. There’s more for the actors to manage, and plenty that can go wrong. But I hope it’s worth it.
Level Up! had its first outing at the Bristol Old Vic New Writing Festival and has since been developed further ahead of its Edinburgh debut. How has the piece evolved along the way?
We’re on script number eighteen. The show has morphed, developed, grown and shed its skin many times since those first fifteen minutes in 2023. We’ve written almost twice as many songs as we’re using. It’s still changing. We keep tweaking. The biggest shift has been balancing the sincere with the satirical. I think we’ve found the heart of it in leaning towards the playful. We’d rather make people laugh and think than cry.
Is there a moment in the show that still gives you a jolt when you see it land on stage, something that captures what Level Up! is really about?
There’s a moment when Jo realises he’s more focused on winning the game than staying close to his friends. That always gets me. It’s not about losing, it’s about losing track.Getting caught up in proving your worth and forgetting what matters.We all do it. Work, parenting, online life — we get sucked into these invisible point systems and don’t notice how much we’re performing until something cracks.Julian’s melodies and Stam’s harmonies carry those moments. But the real magic is in the quiet ones. The unexpected looks, the slightly altered line. That’s where the emotion sneaks in.
What do you wish someone had told you before you started writing a musical?
Cutting a 90-minute show down to 60 has been the hardest part. It’s like giving someone a haircut and realising halfway through you’ve lopped off an ear.We keep asking, does this move the story forward? Can we afford this emotional beat? Have we cut out the heart without realising? I still don’t know if we’ve got it right.
If Level Up! were a real video game, what would be your ultimate power-up and who or what would be the final boss?
The ultimate power-up would be perspective. That moment when you zoom out and remember who you are and what matters. That you don’t need to collect every token to be okay.The final boss? Probably the algorithm. That shapeshifting force that keeps changing the rules, nudging our behaviour and whispering that we’re falling behind.Defeating it wouldn’t look like winning. It would look like turning to your friends and saying, want to play something else instead?
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