Different Stages: Festival officially underway

Crikey, the Different Stages Festival is finally upon us and the Theatre is teeming with writers, directors and thesps. My role in this year’s festival has been threefold and I’ve been asked to tell you a wee bit about each of those folds, so, here goes...

In October last year, I began working with a Youth Theatre group of 13-14 year olds with a view to coming up with a fifteen minute response to the themes in The Pitmen Painters. Six months down the line, we’d concocted a show called Jonathan Likes This about a teenager who unexpectedly dies and his Facebook page becomes a touchstone to his short life. Jonathan was one of ten plays, performed as part of Whose Art is it Anyway? this past weekend at Live and, honest to God, they were better than Cats!

Since January, I’ve also been part of the Live’s 2010 Writers Group, which entails a group of writers getting together once a month to have a cultural chin wag. We were each asked to write a piece for the festival and my offering is M&S, S&M which will be read on Wednesday. It’s about three sisters at an Ann Summers party, each with their own particular take on how emotionally autistic men can be, their parents divorce and the practicalities of a Diamante sex toy.

Finally, there’s to be a rehearsed reading of my new play The Chalet Lines at the end of the week. The play began as the desire to write about the tack-fest that is a Butlins Holiday Camp. I wanted to explore how dysfunctional patterns, as well as positive attributes, can drip through generations of the same family and if, at all, these can be broken. I’m as giddy as a kipper for the reading on Friday.

I’m only two drafts into the play so now’s a good time to hear it out loud and work out which bits work and which bits are just cringey and a bit rubbish. My talented pal Amy Golding will be directing and we’ve a stellar cast in the way of Val McLane, Phillippa Wilson, Chris Connel, Lisa McGrillis and Anna Bolton.

And don’t forget to go to all of the festival’s rip-roaring events, including a preview of Live’s Online Introduction to Playwriting Course this Saturday; it’s sure to be a veritable smorgasbord of literary tips.