The WritersLab this week was nothing less than revelatory. There's a grand start to a blog!
As I've mentioned in previous blogs, I first joined a WritersLab at Salford University. It was a collection of writers from the MA playwriting course, along with some of the BA Creative Writing lot and anyone else who wanted to come along. It was a weekly meeting and massively helpful. It was great to have a weekly deadline - it really makes you write. And it was great to hear your first draft read out loud because it gave you a real sense of what works and what doesn't at a really early stage of the writing process. The discussions that followed the reading were an essential element of the process - they helped to clarify a jumble of ideas into a plan for the next stages of the writing. It was brilliant - and I miss it a lot. I wrote some of my best plays through that process - indeed, The Big Things (shortlisted for BBC Alfred Bradley Bursary Award last year) went through that really thorough lab process.
So, I was hoping to bring the WritersLab back to life. And back to life it's sprung. It's all online, so it's really accessible and, most importantly, it means you can join from anywhere.
Last night we read five new pieces - The Cycle by Richard Stringer, Dear {First Name}, by Jayne Marshall, The Sleeper by me (Mike Heath), Barbara and Barry by Sarah Cassidy and Margaret by Richard Douglas. Along with us, was Stuart, who had joined in from York. He helped read the scripts and contributed to the discussions. He'd heard about the lab from the Facebook WFTS WritersLab group and decided to give it a try. He's going to bring some work next time.
The Cycle is a really exciting piece of work about domestic abuse. Richard Stringer has created some characters that are easy to get involved in. We read the first 10 pages and were introduced to the world of the characters, along with some well planted problems that are going to develop later in the script. It was great to hear this script again. Richard staged a rehearsed reading of this piece at the last Development Week and took the feedback from there and has developed it further. The post-reading discussion helped to identify some of the story threads that could be developed and explored and, perhaps, to consider holding some elements back until later. I can't wait to see what comes of it.
Dear {First Name} was a very funny start to a play written in response to something that has angered the writer, Jayne Marshall. Jayne is an established playwright in the region and has had work performed all over the place, including at The Lowry. It was really useful for Jayne to hear the work out loud and to explore where to take it next. The characters really leaped off the page and have loads of comic, dramatic potential. She felt fired up and raring to get back to it, to write more after the session.
We read the first 10 pages of a play that I've been playing around with for about a year about sleeper cells - called (imaginatively), The Sleeper. I'd previously written about 5 pages and had got a bit stuck with where to take it next, but, knowing that I had the session later on, I sat down yesterday and wrote a first draft of the next 5 pages, which is what we read last night. The post-read discussion was incredibly helpful. I got a real sense of what worked and where the energy and pace drops, and what was really gratifying is that the 5 pages I'd written really quickly that afternoon had really progressed the story. Loads of ideas came out of the discussion about the theme and what it means to us all, and I have a much clearer sense of where to take it next.
Barry & Barbara by Sarah Cassidy was a product of the deadline of knowing that she could get some work read that afternoon. This is what WritersLab is all about - using the deadline to get writing. The piece is really strong - an exploration into dementia, but told with real theatricality, warmth, pathos and humour. She'd only written 3 pages, but those pages gave an essential sense of where the play is going. Very exciting to see something in its very first incarnation. I can't wait to see where it develops.
And finally, we read Margaret by Richard Douglas. Richard recently wrote Marina and the Clone and a couple of years ago, he wrote Barbara The Zoo Keeper, published by WFTS Books. So, you could be forgiven for expecting something equally mad-cap and hilarious. But this piece is a great example of a new writer branching out and challenging himself to try new things. Whilst there's still a definite thread of very funny dark humour, this piece is drenched in true to life tragedy, posing real questions about how we treat death. The discussion following the reading demonstrated how effected the group were by the tragic nature of the piece - a really emotional discussion. Again, this is such a promising piece of new work, that it really needs to be produced. Watch this space.
And that's it for week 2. I can't believe that, in just 2 hours, we explored such wide and varied themes and explored work of such promise and exciting possibilities. For me, it's a real privilege to be part of the sharing process. I love this. I can't wait for next week.
If you'd like to join us next week, you need the Zoom video conferencing application. It's free and really easy to download and use. Check out the WFTS WritersLab page on the WriteForTheStage website for more info.
