Hi Ailun, how are you doing today? Thanks so much for chatting to Stage to Page! Would you mind introducing yourself to our readers and telling us how you first got into the industry?

Hi! I’m doing very well, thank you and it’s a pleasure to be speaking with Stage to Page. My name is Ailun (Ellen) Zhou. I’m an actor and writer based in London, originally born in China, with a background in performance and theatre literature. Funny enough, I actually started out studying physics.

About eleven years ago, I saw a dancer performing onstage ,just one person, moving with this incredible freedom and something almost sacred. It completely changed me. I walked out thinking, this is what I want to do with my life.

I didn’t go straight into acting, though. I studied theatre literature first, which kept me close to the art form. After moving to the UK, I trained at drama school, and that’s when I finally stepped into acting properly.

After graduating, I spent some time working on China–UK cultural exchange events — projects that kept me connected to theatre and the wider arts community — while also auditioning and creating my own work. And together, those moments quietly carved the path that brought me to the stage.

Your play, The Last Self Tape, is opening at The Cockpit on 27th November. Can you tell us about the play?

The Last Self Tape is a 60-minute one-woman show about a woman who records what she believes will be her “final” self-tape audition but that self-tape slowly unravels into something far more personal, dangerous, and intimate than an audition.

Through the frame of a camera and the language of performance, Chloe: the only character, begins revealing fragments of her life: her childhood, her training, her memories, the expectations imposed on her, and the silent wounds she’s carried for years.

The play moves between reality and performance, memory and present, confession and ritual. It asks: Who are we when we perform for others? And who are we when the camera never stops recording? What inspired you to write a play about such a specific aspect like self-taping? Because self-taping is no longer just a technical process - it has become a psychological landscape.

Actors spend hours alone, trying to be chosen by someone who may never meet them. It’s a space full of hope, anxiety, perfectionism, self-doubt, and strangely… honesty. When you’re alone with a camera, you confront both your craft and your own reflection.

I was interested in that lonely intimacy, that fragile negotiation between “the role” and “the self.” I felt it deeply myself when I first started auditioning, often filming alone late at night and realising how easily the camera slips past your performance and into who you really are. But the play grew into something much larger: a portrait of womanhood, trauma, identity, and the cost of being visible.

How does it feel to be performing your original work onstage?

It feels both terrifying and necessary. Writing the play was like opening a locked room; performing it is like living inside that room in front of strangers.

But there’s a kind of freedom in that — the moment when the text, the body, and the audience start breathing together. Bringing something I wrote onto the stage feels like reclaiming my own narrative. It’s a rare, fragile privilege.

My blog is called Stage to Page. But if you could turn any book, from page to stage, what would it be and why?

I’d choose In Search of Lost Time. I read it a while ago, and it really stayed with me. I’m a sensitive person too. A smell, a piece of music, or even a familiar sentence can pull me straight back into a memory. When I read the madeleine scene: the little cake dipped in tea, I actually cried. It felt exactly like how my own memories work.

What touched me most is the way Proust treats memory. For me, memory feels almost like a home, a place I can return to, where I actually feel safe. Theatre usually lives in the present moment, but Proust’s world holds the present and the past at the same time.

If I ever adapted it, I’d love to explore a way of bringing that stream-of-consciousness onto the stage, letting one tiny sensation open an entire world. I think that could be a really exciting theatrical form.

And finally, why should people book tickets to see The Last Self Tape?

Because it is not just an audition. And it is not just a story.

It is an encounter.

The Last Self Tape invites the audience into a private moment: one that is usually hidden, unpolished, and vulnerable. It’s intimate, intense, poetic, and raw.

If you’ve ever questioned who you’re supposed to be, or felt the pressure of being watched, or tried to hold yourself together in a world that keeps pulling you apart : this story will speak to you.

It’s a play about breaking, and rebuilding.

About performing, and finally telling the truth.

And about finding your way back to yourself.

You can book tickets to see The Last Self Tape, here.