By the time he was singing Hurt, Johnny Cash was an old man, bloated and in physical pain, still a rich man, still a legend, about as famous and iconic as a country singer can be, and here he was singing about the futility of all of it. And you can have it all. My empire of dirt…” he sings as he shakily pours a glass of red wine out over the table he sits at.  Nine months later he was dead. —————————————— I’ve been taking both my dogs for a walk in the mornings, down our steep hill and into the floodplain parklands, along theRead More →

There’s revenge. Served hot from anger. There’s revenge served in cold measure. Then there’s revenge served neither hot nor especially cold. We call it justice. I’ve heard this play being described in various places as a dark comedy, a murder ballad, a riff on ancient myths, and a performance poem. It’s all those things. Bleeding clever clogs Cerini.Read More →

“One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.” —Anton Chekhov, 1860-1904 Good Old Chekhov’s Gun Theory. It mostly works on the principle that everything within a story should be necessary to the telling of it.  Gun on stage?—someone gets shot for sure.Read More →

“Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty” —UK dramatist, William Archer. (Don’t worry, I’d not heard of him either. A largely unsung Scottish drama critic, playwright and dramaturge of the late 19th/early 20th century. His big claim to fame is his English translations of Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen.  But with this statement, he gets promoted to first-class genius. )Read More →

Watching movies should count as study time for writers. Along with reading novels, going to see plays and listening to radio drama. That is if you take the time to deconstruct your experience of them. And, good news,  you don’t have to be a lit major or a dramaturg to gain insights.Read More →

I’m a Scandi TV addict.  Ok?  I am. Everything Nordic, no matter what the topic—and let’s face it, it’s usually the topic of crime—I’m on it. I watched Midnight Sun, smorgasbord-style, all I could eat, back-to-back episodes, could not help myself, in one sitting.  I will gorge myself, without a shred of guilt, and also without a shred of regard for how badly written some of this stuff is.Read More →

I love the number three. Dramatically speaking, it’s a miracle worker. Three is the smallest number of elements you need to create (or break) a pattern.  And your audience likes patterns, almost as much as they like it when a pattern they learn is broken. Three is a destabilising number, too. Three is a provocation and a conflict all by itself. Three is born to tell stories. Count on it.Read More →