Development Week is shaping up nicely. It's a real hive of activity in the background. Writers are sharpening up scripts, producers are hiring actors and directors and the line-up for Embryo (our eclectic cabaret of all things new, running on Sun 2nd Oct) is filling up nicely.
So, there are two Development Week Challenges taking place this time. Ian Winterton, one of Greater Manchester's most well-known and best playwrights has accepted the challenge to write a play especially for Development Week. Ian has been writing a screenplay for some time and accepted the challenge as he hasn't written anything for the theatre for a couple of years. So he decided that it was a good way of getting back into the seat.
Previous Development Week Challenges include Laura Lindsay's piece Parallel. She wrote it and rehearsed it just in time for the performance at Development Week 6 and I have to say that I don't think I've ever come across such a brilliant first draft of anything! It was really engaging and had LOADS of promise. And, sure enough, she went on develop it further with the support of Arts Council England and it's currently running a North West tour! Click here for more details of that great show and for dates and venues.
I decided to take the challenge myself this time as well. I had a play that I was going to add to the timetable, Playing God. I'd been writing Playing God for well over 3 years and it ended up being my dissertation piece. We read it at Development Week 5, but it wasn't finished at the time. So, I thought that, perhaps, it would be a good idea to read the completed script for DevWk8. I was about to programme it when inspiration struck.
I was watching a video on Facebook about a guy who's been going around cities and asking homeless people if they have a message for loved ones; he films the video and has been using social media to get the message to the intended people. It's resulted in a 40% reunion rate. I suddenly got the spark of an idea and had to rush up to my loft office and I wrote the first 14 pages in an hour. So, it's safe to say that I had an idea that I would be able to run with - and I programmed myself in for the Challenge to write a play of up to 60mins especially for Development Week.
A deadline is always good for a writer, I think. Indeed, I should be writing it now, rather than writing this blog, but I just thought I'd share my progress.
I got a little stuck - after that opening action, I decided that I really needed to explore the characters a little more out of the context of the play; to discover who they are, why they're there and why "today" is a special day. I did a load of the exercises we do in the WriteForTheStage courses and managed to find out some secrets that the characters were harbouring and a number of intentions that meant that they were going to clash in order to get what they all want. I realised that I was exploring what it means to be a family and what we mean by "home". I'm from a largely fractured family myself - at least half of my family live in Spain and for a lot of reasons I don't see them nearly as much as I should or would like to. So in many respects, some of my blood relatives are largely strangers, some don't speak English and some I haven't even met. The premise of the play is that Tom has returned after 15 years; the family think that he is dead. In the meantime, Jess (Tom's sister) nursed their sick mother until her final demise, at which stage she gets left the house in the will. She meets and moves in with her partner, Damian and they live in the family home. Tom's return is welcomed by Jess, but Damian isn't so sure - the house was left to both Jess and Tom. Will they lose the house and why has Tom returned after all these years?
So, I've got my ideas - I just have to sit down and write it now! The deadline is looming - it's quite intimidating, but I'm excited about it. It's quite a risk to air a first draft, so I'll have to make sure that it's good! Watch this space!
Studio Salford Development Week 8 is a great week of brand new work, featuring at least 25 world premieres of new work by new, emerging and established playwrights and companies. Click here for the full line-up of events - most events are FREE, including the reading of my Challenge piece on Thurs 29th Sept @8pm.
