THE ORIGINAL Billy Elliot – minus the miners' strikes and boxing bouts – Matt Fox was leaping into grands jetés before he had even mastered his ABC.

A child star in the making, by the age of six, he was already treading the boards of the Plymouth Theatre Royal and may have enjoyed a prosperous career in the bosom of this business we call show had the impressionable young boy not been led astray by a playwrights’ workshop.

He pledged to devote his life to writing. Cue tribulations, the miracle of life, the largest home-brewed musical in Swindon history and nearly two decades on the wordsmith is an award-winning playwright, founder of his own Fringe Festival (with much creative input from his wife and collaborator Jessie Thompson).

“As a kid I was quite outlandishly confident and fearless,” laughs the father-of-two. “My mum sent me to ballet which in the mid-80s in Cornwall was not really the regular thing to do. Being a boy and doing ballet, you will get a certain amount of stick from people but it gave me a level of independence and confidence – maybe too much.

“Everything I did and everything I’ve done since has been through fearlessness and over-confidence.”

Departing from his dance roots or rather waking up to the possibility that he may not be the next Baryshnikov, he pursued acting joining an am dram group and performing in pantomimes and musicals at Plymouth’s Theatre Royal. His supportive mother, he admits, acted as a glorified chauffeur driving him to classes, auditions and performances in the city throughout his childhood.

“I did singing, acting, I performed, the whole shebang,” he recalls. “But I became more and more interested in the process of writing theatre through acting and saying other people’s words. When I was about 11 we had a couple of teachers at school who would create completely original productions and that’s when I realised it was possible to write yourself.”

But it is not until he joined a young writers’ group at Plymouth Theatre Royal at the age of 15 that he truly dipped his toes.

“It gave me a reason to write,” adds the 31-year-old from Redhouse. “The first thing I wrote with a friend in the group was a realistic piece about a couple of guys in a pub. As far as I recall at the end, one of them gets hit in the face with a pint glass. It had this humour about it. This is my first memory of doing any proper writing.

“It’s funny, there is almost a direct link between what I write now and what I wrote then.”

He went on to read English in London, where he met music student Jessie Thompson, who would become his wife, but bafflingly shelved his writing ambitions for a time carried away by the hectic pulse of student life.

Unsure whether to pursue a career as a playwright he later enrolled in a masters degree in journalism, business and creative writing.

At 21 years old, about to become parents, he and Jessie moved to her hometown of Swindon. Matt was forced to face the daunting world of responsibility and found a job in human resources at the Royal Mail.

Prompted by his mother-in-law, singing coach Janice Thompson, he joined amateur theatre group SALOS to keep his head in the game.

There he met Adrian Davis, a member keen to see his side project, a musical, turned into a movie script. Matt, then 24, obliged and although nothing came of it, it spurred him to pursue writing once more. He went on to pen a musical based on the songs of Neil Diamond.

“It was utterly invaluable,” he booms. “It kick-started my writing again and gave me my confidence back.” This heralded the start of the juggling act that would become his writing career.

Soon he was enlisted by his mother-in-law, the woman behind the Janice Thompson Performance Trust, to produce Into the Woods. In 2010, he worked on his first collaboration with his wife, an adaptation of the musical Dear Georgette. The following year the couple penned another adaptation of The Beggar's Opera, one of the first musicals in the modern sense to emerge in the 18th century. The show toured the region and even found an audience in London.

When the Janice Thompson Performance Trust was awarded £60,000 in lottery funding, Matt created and produced Swindon The Opera, an original show following a family across three generations and complete with a 250-strong cast. It was performed at STEAM in July 2012. The score was composed ‘remotely’ by Betty Roe MBE.

“I wanted to tackle the negative image of Swindon in the media as a cultural wasteland. We had the funding and we got every penny’s worth. It took about 12 months to put together and then we had four shows – it was all over in a weekend.”

The following year, Matt, Jessie and their business partner Becci Smith found themselves in a race against the clock to launch a Fringe to rival all festivals in Swindon after Matt spilled the beans a tad ahead of schedule to Adver columnist Barrie Hudson.

“I just announced it by accident to Barrie Hudson so I thought ‘Ok we’ve been thinking about it but now we have to do it’,” he says with a chuckle. “We had no funding at all. I don’t think I have ever written so much in the space of six months. Sometimes you have to take risks.

“When I moved to Swindon, I realised there were limited opportunities for new writing. People got used to it and they travelled to Bath, Bristol or London to see new things. We wanted to say ‘No, there are people here in Swindon who are creative and doing a lot of interesting things too’.”

The fledgling Madam Renards Fringe Festival featured seven shows, four of them penned by Matt, including One Act Play which went on to win The Lace Market Theatre New Writing Award in Nottingham.

The festival celebrated its third year last Spring firmly establishing itself as a cultural staple in Swindon with 20 shows on the bill and 13 theatre troupes, including from Serbia and Italy, taking part.

Since 2013, Matt has received a string of awards at home and abroad including a prize for one of his monologues from a theatre in Ohio. To Sleep, which premiered at the first Swindon Fringe Festival, has been performed in the West End and toured Australia earlier this year.

Last month, Matt unveiled his latest work, Family Play.

“You have to be driven and resilient when things don’t go to plan or the audience is not coming. I always feel there is more to do and I want to go much further, have more shows produced. I’ve always had endless optimism that things would work out.”

History is now repeating itself in the Fox household as Matt’s work is regularly interrupted by his chauffeur duties, 'carting' his nine-year-old daughter Poppy to auditions, dance, piano - the list goes on. A supportive father, he has cast her in many of his shows; as good a way as any to save on petrol.

“She does a fair amount of auditions and all of our time seems to be spent carting her to dance, singing, piano, guitar, gymnastics and martial arts. She's completely fluent in sign language and generally has amazing skills with words and literature. Though I may just be an overly proud father."

To find out more about Matt's work go to madamrenards.wordpress.com.