"Curtains"

A young actor friend was on a national tour and, in an e-mail, made some disparaging remark about the quality of the digs she was in that week.

Lightbulb moment!

First line of a new show—a one-(young) woman show this time: “Those curtains and the carpet don’t go together.”

Somehow it just grew—almost organically—from there. At no point did I stop to think, “now, this is what I want to include” or “what should happen next?” Like the Lambton Worm in our local folk song, “It growed and growed and growed” but not to an “aaful size” like the Worm but to just the size it should be!

The character was a young woman living in a halfway house who had just been released from a young offenders’ institution. And that is as much as I will say because, you never know, the trilogy might be completed and performed and I don’t want to give anything away!

I sent it to Alphabetti Theatre in Newcastle to see if they would do it at one of their new writing nights when they selected a number of short plays which they offered to a number of early career / emerging directors for them to direct with actors of their own choice. They took it, even though plays had to be no longer than 20 minutes (but mine was) and they normally didn’t accept monologues (but this time they did).

There was one young (early twenties) director, Jacob Ward, who was very keen to do the piece, so Alphabetti gave it to him, with the proviso that he shorten it to the regulation 20 minutes.

He asked a friend, actor Charlotte Raimes, who was in her very early twenties, if she’d like to do it and she would, so she came up from London where she was living (she is actually from the NE). And so I handed over my play to two comparatively inexperienced youngsters, one of whom I had never met and the other I’d only met once.

Trepidation is, I think, a very mild word for how I felt!

But they were brilliant! The shortening was done so sensitively that nothing was lost—now their shortened script is the official version!—and the performance was first class. Jacob said later that he’d been really worried about tackling a play by someone with more than twice his lifetime’s worth of experience but there was no need for him to worry—just as there had been no reason for me to worry. They really got inside the character and brought her to full life.

I was delighted to see this play, the like of which I had never written (or even thought about writing) before, so compellingly presented by two very talented young theatre-makers!