Even though theatre was where I first got properly started as a writer, and even though theatre has been where my career has focused for the last twenty years, I stopped referring to myself as a playwright long ago. Partly that’s because I came to realise that writing plays, in any kind of conventional understanding of that word, was something I didn’t do very often. It felt better, more truthful, to say that I was writing for theatre most of the time.
One great benefit of co-running a company has been having a more-or-less guaranteed outlet for the things I write. I can only think of one substantial piece of writing I have done for Little Earthquake which never made it to full production – It’s Only A Paper Moon, back in 2012. (A combination of its daunting length, its complex interweaving of four story strands over four hundred years, and its English-and-French bilingual dialogue didn’t help – nor did having some producers turn against it almost instantly during a scratch performance!)
It’s a very different story when it comes to the pieces I’ve written away from the protection of the Little Earthquake umbrella. Occasionally, I’ve been tempted to enter playwriting competitions, often half-heartedly bashing out a first draft of a vague and underdeveloped idea, often convincing myself that this unpolished and uncommercial show would be JUST what a producing organisation needed in their theatre space, and being crestfallen and a bit upset whenever I failed to even get shortlisted.
I haven’t done this for a long time now — neither the competition entering, nor the deluded belief that a hasty draft will win a big prize. The Verity Bargate Award deadline for this year has been and gone. The Bruntwood Prize deadline is looming early next year. I half-heartedly thought about bashing out another first draft of another vague and underdeveloped idea for the Bruntwood, but this time I’ve thought better of it.
There’s a clutch of old plays lurking in my hard drive somewhere, relics of these infrequent spurts of playwriting productivity. They’re not files I would rush to reopen. None of them are ideas which I seriously think are worth attempting to rework and repurpose. Although Put Your Arms Around Me, in which a man believed a giant octopus in an aquarium was a reincarnation of his dead partner, still warms my cockles whenever I think about it.
I don’t think they are particularly good pieces of work, but I am certainly not ashamed of any of them. I have learned something from the process of writing each and every one. They’ve never made me any money or opened any professional doors for me, but they’ve all helped me to become a more confident and accomplished writer in their own little ways. Their great value lies in the fact that I wanted to write something at those particular times, and so I wrote them. I didn’t talk about wanting to write them or just think about writing them – I wrote them. And they’ve all given me a much better understanding of how to write for an audience – even without ever actually having been put on stage in front of one.
