Playwriting course – Week 1

For many years, the idea of writing a play has been on my grand to-do list. When I first started at the BBC, we had to create a short programme as part of a training course. I decided to write a monologue and got one of the course lecturers to play the part. It was only about ten minutes long with three or four scenes but I clearly remember the bizarre and exhilarating feeling when the character I had created came to life in front of my eyes. That as they say, is the magic of writing.

So when I stumbled across a 12 week playwriting course at the Rose Theatre in Kingston, it seemed like an opportunity too good to miss.

The course tutor is Stephen Brown and there are 14 of us in the group. A wide variety of people (us men are outnumbered by quite a margin) from young students to actors, journalists and teachers.

“I am here for the sheer terror and challenge”, I jokingly proclaimed when we introduced ourselves to the group. It isn’t far off the truth. My writing skills feel decidedly rusty. I have a rough idea for a play but it is based around a set design. I don’t have a plot or even much idea about characters.

In the first week’s class, we talked about what drama really is (action/conflict/events), read the opening scene of Antigone and Art noting how they both start with immediate conflict, and dived straight in with some writing exercises. Stephen gave us the set up of a scene – the location, time of day, number of characters, how they were dressed – and gave us 20 minutes to write a scene.

That’s when two surprising things happened – that I was (almost unconsciously) able to write two and a half pages of dialogue, and how the personalities and interactions between the two characters developed without me knowingly shaping them. This should be an interesting 12 weeks.