Case study sessions of the year with playwright and screenwriter Stef Smith.

You’re probably wondering why I’d want to be part of the audience in a case-study session with playwright and screenwriter, Stef Smith, since I’m neither playwright nor do I know who Stef Smith is or was. Yeh, well, writing is writing is my answer.

I might learn something. I’m a Catholic. So it would be no great surprise to me if Jesus was sleeping off another resurrection in bed upstairs. While the Virgin Mary was poking around in the kitchen and making meals to feed starving children in Africa, which the Holy Ghost can Deliveroo later in a carbon free give away.

My stories are like that. They don’t need to be true. Being true is the kind of mistake that any old idiot can make and is not marketable.

Stageplays are right up there with poetry readings. The most unmarketable of all. The last stage play I seen was at Jim McLaren’s Golden Friendship. I can’t remember what it was called. But it was for kids and really good.

Jim’s son Bobby runs a drama group on a Tuesday morning. They do that usual thing about gearing up for a performance. Usually at Christmas, if it’s far enough away—and next Christmas if it’s not.

I sensed glory here. I offered to write a stage play for actors with cognitive impairments that would never be performed and I’d never be thanked for. Jim thanked me with a no thanks.

Jim knows me too well. I wrote it any way. It had to be local and quite funny. As the old Meatloaf song goes one out of two ain’t bad or fifty-fifty is nifty.

Jim, like me, knew about ‘The Rise and Fall of Ernie Platt’. Some say since Jim continues to be a member of Gambler’s Anon *(blew the anon bit here) and AA, he knows Ernie better than me because he did, anyway.

The Rise of Ernie Platt is easy to write and mostly writes itself. He took hundreds of thousands from the bookies in six bets. Unlike most of us, he wasn’t just lucky. He took a chance the majority of us would think idiotic. The bookies were willing to pay out early and in full over 75% of his wager, if he cashed in then and didn’t take it to the last race. What would you do?

There’s lots of drama there to tap into.      

Likewise his fall.

The doughnut shaped middle is hard to fill. Ernie going to the pub seven days a week with a lot of hangers on. His house in Parkhall a shack were drunks roam. 20 years pass. No drama.

We can fill the hole with two Ernies. One not winning and the other winning. Watch their sliding-door trajectory. Hmmm? I was never a fan of Morecambe and Wise.

Ernie did wise up. He moved abroad to Paisley. Far enough away and with no cash the drunks no longer wanted to stay. And as Ernie explained with some justifiable pride about his one-bedroom, ‘It’s too wee for the internet’.  

Notes.

Human  Animals 2016. Play came to be on stage through process. Assumptions made about it. I lived in Glasgow. I had a few plays on. None in London. Writers group. Royal Court. Writers outside London. Developing from ground up. No connection to London.

Plays going up and down as much part of developing play. Existing beyond who I was as a writer. Maybe just left my job in retail. Paying my bills through writing was…Went to writers group. Every Saturday for 8 weeks. Stayed overnight.

Born out of process. All of my work. Nature plays a big role. How we could dramatise ‘specism’ Rights to different animals in different ways. Perceived.  Apes are better than worms. Animal rights. River dolphin, legal protection, humans had

6^th great extinction. Having a conversation about it. Bring it into our front room. Implications, dramatise. Boil it down to something dramatic.

Some part of our brain switches off. Eg global warming, I can’t rationalise that concept. Stop our brain switching off.

Getting space 4-5 hours. Think and write. Ways in which we busy our lives in those spaces. Transience in space. Sense of being a writer. Suddenly felt expansive.

Group structure? Mick Paige? Ran sessions. Still in touch, with some.

Multiple people knew your name and work. Must have sent work to… Something like these things going from nowhere. On the group. Part of the offer, read the play.

Write a first draft. I’ve ran that group.

You can tell when people tell it’s the first draft. Don’t do that. You can smell it. That first draft, weird and wild. 120 scenes. Big sprawling thing. Pure instinct. Rage and sadness. Mess.

Final draft. Pure instinct. More about possibliiy. Energy exciting. Bring that energy really well.

Difference between a more practiced offering, exploration.

Everybody knows how hard it is when reading professionally.

Energy has to come

Being in the world. Paying attention.

Vicky Featherstone. Writers missing a layer of skin. Being alive to your own awakeness.

Debbie Tucker Green (highlight) is and was my writing idol.

Debbie Tucker Green wrote on my script.

Because that play was wrote from instinct, I did it because I felt like. She validated that. Which was…not a failing but strength.

Ok, not to know.

So the play went on.

Something happens in production, can influence what happens. Performance script.  

Editing job. You guys (actors) are so great. Need less works.

Whole audience sat in hamster cage.

Play itself about a pandemic. Animals walking past, increasingly a worry. Cage within a cage.

Designs. Biggest interventons in my work.

How did that affect text ?

Hate writing stage direction. Don’t feel it’s my job. People with better ideas.

Writing > no stage directions. Stated at start of script.

Central couple. Two women or heterosexual?

What it should be?

I’m a gay woman. Thoughts I should write gay characters. Looking to me to…2 women in a same sex relationship. Conversation around.

Interesting afterthrought. Responsibility of people who are marginalised to write about their people, but too much responsibility on writers already marginalised anyway.

Robust conversations.

Human animals. Tragic ending. No more tragic ending. Gay couple always end up dead. Representations. Eg Nurses.

It was your choice that was validated. Male character, journey towards tenderness. One not usually associated with young men in London. Already a subversion. Gender roles.

2 other plays.

Memoir. Interesting process. Living person, coming to see the show. Outrun. Amy? Story of recovery from alcoholism and recovery> London and Orkney.

Known for a category of certain things.

I could write about nature forever.

Maybe because I feel more responsibility for that.

You knew Amy. How involved was the original writer? Bizarre. To see her own life being dramatized. I was nervous, writing about a real person.

Hagiography.

Memoir. Messy. Alcoholic. Puts me in a tricky space. Darkest parts. Sexual assault. Dramatise. Scared me. We navigated that. Amy was so open. She didn’t want to co-write. She was doing film adaptation. Own output. I got a treatment of the things I was interested in. If you do read memoir it’s a very internal things. Dramitise dad and people to talk to eg in healing.

I wrote on this document people I would invent.

She was so hands off, she didn’t come to dress rehearsal.

Worries about rift. Worried misunderstood. Real credit to her generosity.

Not naturalistic?

No one ever says ‘Amy’. Even in text she’s referred to as ‘Girl’. Helped me as writer. Actor who played her didn’t read memoir. She’s playing the play. That helped. She looked very different. That helped. Didn’t affect soul of piece.

Timing. Film and stage play around the same time. Weird way it worked.

Nora.

Use of music . Orkney and creative team. ‘Luke’ Orkney in DNA and sense of self. He created beautiful soundscapes.

I think we need some music hear and he created the storm. I don’t believe in genius. It was extraordianary. Conjured it from the air.

Experiences. Some parts of lines. Moments. Sung. I feel very proud. Not because of my work. Our work.

Nora.

Play done the most. Adaptation. Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.

Move towards, repurposing. Redoing. Say about process.

Rapid response. I went to Queen  Margaret Uni. Nearest theatre 40 minute drive. Every Saturday parents. First experience making it. Studied Drama and Art.

1^st to text Maeda and A Doll’s House. I knew what it meant for that play 1890s. I understood what an extraordinary event it was to leave her children.

I wrote my dissertation on A Doll’s House. Public and Private Space.

Resident Cove Park 2017. Hodgepodge. NTS said to us, part of a theme. Never met Dominic Hill. I’d never met him before. I had. Directing. Applying for a show that never got made. Applying for assistant director- printed out CV and so nervous of meeting him and passed my lights through tea light and it caught fire. Somethings caught fire. I said my career.

Important to know. Just me and Dominic. Awkward thing. Let’s all sit in a room. Power. I said to Dominic, and I said I’d love to do the Doll’s house with multiple Nora’s all through the house and through the years.

3 years later. I got email. Want to go for coffee? Sure. He said I’ve never forgot your idea.

What’s interesting. I know what I want the audience to feel. We had this big conversations.

We were talking about it. He said just write it. and I did. And it is luck. Hold on there’s something there.

That’s how Nora came to be.

This time I went to Philadelphia to watch a production. Turkish. Spanish. Japanese.

I’d love to see it in another language.

I’ve seen my play ‘Swallow’ in Turkish and German.

 Write and print and see pages on floor. Moving bits about and saying what if?

Conversation around plays.

Very sparse. Some scenes, a few lines.

When did we have too much and too little.

Also hearing it. Editing. 2 things I do. If I love a line I usually have to cut it. because it has to work double hard. Kill your darlings.

Know a play an edit and don’t know where. Set myself a task. Cut 2 lines from every page.

Get to motions of editing. 50% usually good.

Never get how people get so attatched to words and doc.

I try not to be didactic. Unanswerable question at the centre. Applications.

Eg Is having faith fundamental to being human?

Drama is different. Eg exploration of racism. Then we’re going to explain how it’s really bad.

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