Its almost time to write the play.
The play.
The outcome, not the research.
The distilled stuff that comes out of the barrel through the tap at the bottom.
Just a little longer to consider message, form, space and time before throwing the darn thing onto the wheel and shaping it into existence.
A line of dialogue arrived two days ago, while writing marketing copy.
I needed to encapsulate the central friction which will drive the drama.
A soundbite to sum up the dilema and argument at the centre of the play.
“Who cares if I’m your sister? This is the human race. And you’ve come last.”
Intolerance, injustice, inequality, skewed values, isolationism, fragmentation, prejudice, blame and misplaced pride encapsulated in the central relationship between Samantha and Clarence, a way into the ‘big/little’ of a play aiming to resonate beyond its’ plot into an analogous context.
Almost time to write the play for me means I can almost see it
I can see who is on stage and where they are and how they move. There are four characters. There is big sister Samantha and Clarence and their relationship and the charged air between them.
There is also Clarence in his room and Baby as he creates her and spends time with her and falls in love with her.
There are two Clarences, one who talks to us and one who just is.
I sketched out the dynamic between Mum (who has died) and Clarence and his sister Samantha in the cafe bar at Hampstead theatre while waiting to meet movement director Ita O’Brien and trying to find ways to explain what I have so far.
I want to see some of the objects
But I can’t quite reach them yet.
These are the objects in the suitcase which Clarence brings with him from his mums’ cottage and which identify her as a woman whose movement through adult life has taken place over the course of the last seven decades.
I know who she is, I need to know what objects she would identity through.
I’ll start in her kitchen.
And then stop thinking about it, if it’s not ready to reveal itself it’s not ready, if it’s not there it’s not there, I can wait and let the plot work its magic in the writing. I’ll trust that it’ll come.
I can feel the spaces the characters move in.
Clarence is used to space above his head and round him, in the garden and on the moors around his mothers cottage.
Moving to Samantha’s confining plastic covered apartment high above the city is a shock.
Clarence hates heights.
The balcony is terrifying but Clarence has to brave in order to grow his plants.
If both Clarence and Samantha look at the sky they’re OK but they can’t ever look down.
Next I need to write the arc of the story.
This is almost too final and everything in me is resisting it but its also very exciting.
I will either write it in synopsis or short story form.
It will change.
But it will be a start.
Of the play.
