My name is Samad Madkouri, and at my age, acting fascinates me. The body, the voice, the ritual of embodying what I am not—or perhaps what I once was in another life. But writing… writing is something else. It’s rawer, slower, more solitary. And yet, there’s something about it that pulls me in. Maybe because it doesn’t require masks. Or because it forces me to listen to what I don’t say when I perform.I don’t write easily. I have no formulas, no clear technique. But every time I sit down in front of a blank page, something seems to fall into place. As if theatre—the space I’ve always experienced from the outside: the stage, the audience, the words of others—could now also be lived from within. It all began in a dressing room. It was late, after a performance. I had already taken off my costume, my makeup was half gone, and the theatre had fallen silent. I sat there for a moment, not knowing exactly why, looking at my reflection in the lit mirror. I was tired, but not just physically. I felt something else, as if the character I had just portrayed had left me with an unresolved question. So I grabbed a notebook I had lying around and wrote a sentence. Something that had been lingering since the performance. I didn’t mean to write anything important, I just needed to let it out. And in doing so, I discovered a different space. One that wasn’t about acting, or showing anything to anyone. It was something else. More private. More honest, perhaps. From that moment on, I began to write without seeking anything in particular. Just to make sense of what I was feeling. Over time, I realized I didn’t only want to perform stories—I wanted to build them. Or at least try to write what I didn’t yet know how to say. That’s how I discovered the fascinating world of playwriting. It wasn’t a conscious decision, nor a planned shift. It was more of a need. At first, I wrote without shape or structure—scattered thoughts, scenes that didn’t exist, fragments of dialogue I didn’t know the origin of. But little by little, I began to understand that what I was writing could take form, could become something more than just a personal release. Playwriting offered me a new way of inhabiting theatre. Not only as an actor who receives someone else’s words, but as someone who can also provoke them, shape them from within. I discovered there is something powerful in writing not only to be spoken, but to be felt in another’s body. Something between the intimacy of writing and the exposure of performing. That’s where I find myself now: at the frontier between the actor I am and the playwright who is just beginning to emerge.