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In: Plays, Playwriting, Theatre, Writing

The average play these days runs about seventy to eighty minutes. I saw a show this week, Crossing the Divide by Shock Therapy Productions, and it clocked in at just 60 minutes. The old two-act with interval malarkey is fading fast (except maybe big musical productions). “A Night at the Theatre” is no longer the grand social outing it once was as far as contemporary theatre goers are concerned. Audiences want to arrive, experience the story, and then bugger off home to contemplate the aftermath. Shorter plays suit producers too. The shorter the play, the fewer the rehearsal weeks. Fewer hours for technical crew. ShorterRead More →

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In #2 in my Bite the Rewrite series, I’m asking for some dogged forensic work. So are your scenes working hard enough? First draft, probably not. Sometimes you’re so deep in the playwriting forrest you are unable to identify anything specific about the trees. That’s when the old PPP can help. Plot. Psychology. Premise. This triumphant roughly aligns to ‘outer journey’, ‘inner journey’ and ‘meta journey’. Look at your first draft scenes. Without any doubt, there will be scenes there that are flabby. There may be scenes that are missing. There may be scenes that are too short, too long, too rambling, too tight-lipped. ThereRead More →

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In: Writing

You’ve written your play, first draft, wowie, and you reckon you have some cracker scenes and you think the whole thing is hanging together they way you thought it might….or that is until you read it out to yourself ( or worse, hear a group of actors reading it). The disappointment can be real. Suddenly those beloved characters are limp as lizards, flatter than the paper they are written on; the plot feels clunky like some old bike trundling along a pot-holed road to nowhere; the emotional life of the work is either desperately overworked or hopelessly bereft; and the whole thing is thematically soRead More →

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In: Writing

Main Character Syndrome (MCS) has recently entered the lexicon. Like this year basically is when I first began hearing it regularly, and that means not much because memes circulate in small eddies for a long time before joining the main stream conversation. MCS describes a person who thinks they are the protagonist of any situation they are in. Its a way of saying a person always thinks they are the most important person in the space. Accusing someone of being a Main Character is a version of saying “Everything’s about you, isn’t it?” It’s the opposite of NPC (non Player Character) I guess. Which is ofRead More →

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In: Uncategorized, Writing

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 →

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In: Dramaturgy, Plays, Playwriting, Writing

“Where do you get all your ideas?” some people ask of writers as if there is some secret trick of the trade. That’s like saying to an actor, “I don’t know how you remember all those lines!” There is no trick. It’s just what happens. Writers get ideas. But that’s not to say anything after the getting of an idea is easy.Read More →

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In: Dramaturgy, Family, Plays, Writing

So much of our life and language is tied up in our understanding of time. Work deadlines, milestones, catching planes, gym timetables, shop opening hours, making time, wasting time, time on our hands, killing time. We glance at our smartphone or our fitbit or the clock on the wall to check the time because we know time means something. Hey, but do we really know what time it is?  Apparently not.Read More →

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In: Dramaturgy, Family, Plays, Playwriting, Writing

Ever watch that trainwreck of a reality TV show Intervention? Compelling viewing, wasn’t it, watching the details of a human tragedy unfold with the promise of redemption and release always hanging the air? See now, I’m living in my own private script intervention, complete with a rehab program, and turns out, it’s far from entertaining. Damn right unpleasant.Read More →

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In: Dramaturgy, Family, Plays, Playwriting, Politics, Theatre, Writing

It’s Modern Family’s Jay Pritchett.  It’s Star Trek’s Doctor McCoy.  It’s Orange Is The New Black’s Galina “Red” Reznikov.  It’s a Hollywood (and small screen) staple, and some might conclude a complete cliche. Yet the ‘crusty but benign’ character, forever firing off conflicting messages of love and disdain, has something to tell us writers.Read More →