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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

Standing ovations are a playwright’s GOLD. You know you’ve probably hit the sweet spot when a bunch of possibly jaded theatre-goers could be bothered getting up out of their chairs to give your show their appreciation and applause. And what’s especially nice is when an audience comes into a theatre completely cold —they do not know you, or your work, or the actors or not a single thing about the story about to be told—and within the space of a 115 minute performance they are warmed through with joy enough to bring them onto their feet with wild stomping and carry on. From Campfire toRead More →

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In: Plays, Reading, Writing

Recently I’ve been watching a sci-fi series Fall Out, a TV series adaptation of a video game. I’d never heard of this game but my 20-year old son says it’s an old school corker of a role-play game. General premise of the TV series: Set in a retro-futuristic world following a nuclear war, there exists a small pocket of humanity flourishing in a 1950’s moral bubble inside a bunker-like underground vault. Outside the world has gone to hell, a fact quickly realised by our hero, Lucy, a doe-eyed, goody-two-shoeing American sweetheart, when she must leave the vault to rescue her kidnapped father. She navigates theRead More →

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In: Playwriting, Theatre, Writing

A weird but inescapable fact— making theatre is to cause a huge group of artists with a huge variety of skills and creative drives to come together to produce a single, comprehensive, cohesive piece of art.  It’s a miracle that not more blood is spilt over it.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 →