So… I got that pesky play written and I submitted it at the middle of last week, a few days ahead of the deadline. I’d reached a point — or hit a wall — where I could fiddle with it no more. It was better that it just went off into the ether and allowed me to regain my composure and get stuck into something else. But more of that in a minute.
In the final days before submission, I was doing the equivalent of a child smooshing separate-coloured balls of PlayDoh together into one uniform brown ball. Eventually, the ball has taken all the smooshing it can take. The streaks of bright, bold colour the individual fragments once possessed finally lose their lustre. In its new amalgamated form, the ball has become the brownest brown it is currently capable of becoming, given the exact amounts of the other colours that have been smooshed into it. It will not get any browner, no matter how much more pummelling it receives. Better to stuff it back into an empty pot and leave it there, perhaps for good.
This play was the first one I’d written since The Dog With Two Dads back in 2022. I’ve been in prose mode since then, and really enjoying the fun and freedoms of that new medium. I had hoped writing a play was like riding a bike, and I’d just fall straight back into the saddle and start pedalling, but now I’m not so sure. On the evidence of this experience, I don’t know if I’m quite as capable as I believed I was.
The form of the play didn’t help. The competition I was writing it for had a theme: horror. So I reframed an old idea I’d had, one of those ideas that come to me as flashes of (presumed) genius, but which don’t always stand up to development or scrutiny. I’ve got enough of those to fill years of blog posts all by themselves.
The starting point for this genius idea was Lucille Fletcher’s 1943 radio play Sorry, Wrong Number, in which a crossed telephone line results in the bedridden Leona hearing two men plotting to murder someone. Spoiler alert: the intended victim turns out to be her. I won’t reveal how things end. See it on stage if you ever get the chance; I’ve never had that chance. I know it from the 1948 film version starring Barbara Stanwyck. It’s a lot of fun. (I’ve also got the original radio version starring Agnes Moorehead on a set of LP records.)
I wondered what would happen if an actress in a production of Sorry, Wrong Number came to suspect that she was being stalked by a crazed killer in real life. But that wasn’t enough for my fervid little mind. My genius idea was to write something with an extra layer of complication: an actress suspects she’s being stalked by a crazed killer, whilst playing the role of an actress who suspects she’s being stalked a crazed killer, whilst playing the role of Leona in Sorry, Wrong Number, who suspects she’s about to be murdered by persons unknown.
I never did anything with this. But then again, I never do anything with 95% of my genius ideas. Usually because I have a brand new genius idea which supersedes it, crowds it out, and ends up preoccupying my brain until the next genius idea comes along, and so on, and so forth…
I didn’t have anything in my back pocket that fitted the competition theme. I was going to have to come up with something from scratch. I really liked the idea of doing something inspired by giallo films, those magnificent lurid Italian shockers from the 60s, 70s and 80s, where black-gloved killers fraught with complex psychosexual motives pick off their victims in outrageous, operatically violent murder sprees. At the same time, the nested structure of the Sorry, Wrong Number project came back to mind. Maybe here was a marriage made in heaven, or hell.
Rather than the usual bevy of beautiful women getting sliced and diced, I decided to focus on gay/bisexual/queer male characters instead, to give the giallo’s gender politics a bit of a contemporary makeover. To avoid issues with copyrighted material, I figured I needed to pick a different core play, so it was out with Sorry, Wrong Number and in with Marlowe’s Edward II.
And then it got more complicated from there. I added a fourth narrative layer.
So now, a queer actor in a 2027 stage production plays a closeted actor in a 1977 horror film in which he plays a gay actor in a 1937 stage production of Edward II. In each timeframe, a sadistic masked killer carries out a campaign of terror and violence. As the horrors escalate on and offstage, each actor slowly loses his grip on what’s real and what is pretend.
I’m not convinced I’ve wrestled all of these shifting layers and timeframes into something that’s easy enough for readers or audiences to follow. I think I needed time to step away from the first draft for a few weeks before revisiting it and encountering it on its own terms, but I didn’t have that time. Hence the PlayDoh smooshing.
To make things even harder for myself, I tried my best to capture the distinctive language style of giallo films, which were often shot with Italian dialogue for the home market and then over-dubbed with English for international markets. The English used in these films was often rendered by writers who did not speak English as a first language. To honour that, I deliberately wrote the dialogue in my play to capture that slight off-note of translated English.
The difficulty is, there’s a thin and not-so-easy-to-distinguish line between dialogue that’s deliberately off-kilter, and dialogue which looks like the writer is a really bad writer.
I’m not convinced what I’ve written is strong enough at present to assure any reader or audience member that I’m in full control of this curious little linguistic nuance. There’s a real danger the competition’s assessment readers will think I’m a terrible writer. But that’s a risk I’m going to have to accept.
I could write at great length about all of the issues I think the play is burdened with in its current form. But there just wasn’t time to resolve most of them. No time to set Draft 1 aside and re-imagine the story and the characters in a radical new form for Draft 2. All I could do was get what I’d got into the best, or the least worst, shape I could manage in the days I had left.
So off it went — and off I went, into a spiral of sadness, of self-reproach, of despondency and a touch of can’t-write-anything paralysis. Fortunately, I shrugged it off quite quickly. A long walk in hot weather with my Spotify mega-playlist on shuffle can do wonders for dispelling the creative demons and drowning out their negative voices.
I spent the tail-end of last week scribbling some notes for another of those genius ideas — a multi-part TV series no less! — the first time I’ve ever seriously entertained such a notion. If nothing else, it snapped me out of my doldrums and refocused my brain and stopped me feeling sorry for myself.
Today (if you see this on the Tuesday when I send it) I’ll be doing some planning for one of 2027’s big exciting projects… But I’ll tell you more about that another time…
Whatever creative things are occupying you this week, I hope you’re having a wonderful time.
