Fighting out of the Fringes: getting it done

'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Photograph by Manuel Harlan, made available on the Cheek by Jowl website

As I look out on the winter wonderland outside, I’m warmed by the thought of having completed the first full draft of the Rough Fiction autumn play for this year.  Hopefully by then the country will be in the grips of an Indian summer and many people will finally have experienced a play that started life over a year ago.

As I move up through the lower theatre ranks, I’m increasingly amazed by the gestation period of a professional play.  Even a standard human nine months would be shorter, but then when you write you are giving birth to many lives.

I am also a teacher and love that job very much, so I have to consider my time carefully and therefore my it’s my Christmas holiday that allows me to get the bulk of my final drafting done and now it’s complete.  It’ll undergo at least two more major re-writes at the urgings of my company co-director, of actors and of other writing friends who have useful ways of making me see differently about the worlds I create but, for now, it’s complete.  As the fat flakes have finished falling and people are running and falling and building February snowmen, it’s complete.  Having achieved something of note, like writing a play, feels good.  The doing is difficult, but it’s worth every pulled follicle.  It’s tough, it’s awkward, it makes you examine yourself and the world under far more powerful a microscope than you would care to use all the time but it feels great.  If anyone is reading this having studied plays for years and is waiting for the right time to take the plunge into writing one: don’t.  Do it now.

On Friday I’ll have the genuine pleasure of taking a whole school assembly and in this world of slick marketing, of spin, of delegation, of middle-men, of out-sourcing I’m going to call on Walt Whitman’s beautifully laconic thesis for practical exploration: When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer and opine about actually doing things, not just talking about them.  Plays have a powerful sense of agency about them.

Just the other night I was fortunate enough to see the racy, zesty and insistent Cheek by Jowl version of John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore.  The lines, spoken with clear and honest purpose, zipped along aided by the crisp physical direction and when the production goes to the Barbican between the 16^th February and the 10^th March if you’re lucky enough to be in London make sure you’re lucky enough to have tickets.  Plays are action and this one bites.  Discussing the literary merits of Ford’s text is important but plays live and that’s deeply exciting.

It seems at this point like I’m somewhat hubristically comparing myself to Ford but we do both share at least one thing: we’ve both written a play.  Next time I’m compelled to write this blog it’ll no doubt be about the injustices in the world, the unfairness for example of Out of Joint having to explain to their audience, after a razor-sharp and deeply witty production of Top Girls, that they need them to fill out questionnaires or their funding might drop again but for now it’s about achievement – it’s about doing.

Those of us involved in the scintillatingly present world of drama, be that in industry, be that at the fringes, be that at school, can do what Whitman’s figure in the poem achieves by leaving the lecture hall and looking “up in perfect silence at the stars.”  And if pessimism is still gripping you over the thought that a school student can be involved in this theatrical immediacy then think again.  Tomorrow we have Alia Bano, a National Theatre playwright, visiting ten students who will talk through their first attempts at writing for the National Theatre’s New Views programme and a chance for a staged read at The National itself.  It really is about just going ahead and doing it.  Well, maybe when the weather warms up a bit anyway.

Recent Posts on Arts - News, notes and quotes on the Arts world -

• Shonky: From maths lover to international DJ
• Lady Gaga corrupting youth, Bieber Fever and other reasons for gig cancellations
• Review of Game of Thrones ‘The Prince of Winterfell’
• Sciencing Fiction
• Review of Doctor Who ‘The Seeds of Death’ (Series 6)