Although her acting career included 7 years of television work, she eventually left it, due in large part to stage fright.
[4] While working as an actress, Macdonald wrote her first play, When I Was a Girl, I Used to Scream and Shout; it was first performed at the Bush Theatre in 1984, and won her the Evening Standard Award for most promising playwright.
[5] Actor Alan Rickman, then a reader, found it in the unsolicited script pile and told the Bush they should put it on.
She has written two plays for the National Theatre's Shell Connections programme; After Juliet (in which Macdonald's daughter Keira starred as a young girl), and 2006's Broken Hallelujah.
Macdonald's resume also includes the novels The Beast (1986) and Night Night (1988), the radio plays (for the BBC) such as Sea Urchins and Gladly My Cross Eyed Bear (1999), the libretto to Hey Persephone!, performed at Aldeburgh with music by Deirdre Gribbin, and Lu Lah, Lu Lah (2010) commissioned for a young all-female cast and performed at the Cheltenham Ladies' College in Cheltenham.