Young Playwrights - Showing and Learning

This day next week, the final beat of the busiest two months of my year will be struck and I will return to my burrow in the deep dark forest and sleep until Spring arrives. (Some hope).

For the past number of years, at this time of year, I’ve been part of a wonderful mentoring programme for young playwrights at my beloved Linenhall Arts Centre, run under the auspices of Fighting Words by the inestimable Paul Soye and aided and abetted by the wonderful Ernestine Duffy and, um, me.

Yesterday, we had our final three-hour session, poring over the scripts, reading them, assessing them, offering sincere reactions and advice, encouraging each other. If it sounds boring to you then you may not be a writer. It has been a complete buzz from start to finish. We have our plays now. Final polishes are being applied today and they will be dispatched to poor Paul tomorrow, who will collate them and get them off to the directorial and actorial (that’s not a word, is it?) talent.

In these sessions, I tell the young writers what I think, and I don’t really pull very many punches. I’m the Craig at the end of the Strictly judging panel. Slightly pernickety, picky, wanting everything to be ‘just so’ but always on your side, really.  But for all my mouthing-off and nit-picking, one thing is always true of these valued interactions and it’s this: I always learn far more than I teach. Always.

Young people know stuff. They always have and they always will. They know what counts with them and they know to exclude what doesn’t count for them. They have incredibly busy lives, and they are accosted from all sides by input, input, input. Yet they parse it all, get it all into its correct compartment and move on. I think that’s the main reason why I do okay at these playwriting sessions, I have such respect for young people. How much they carry; how much they know.

The joy of the last few months in these writing and learning sessions is how nobody has ever seemed to act like they didn’t want to be there. Hard work has been put in and the writers have all shown the necessary willingness to not settle for the first words on the page but to work them and work them and work them again, until they are right.

And what do I learn from all this? What do I get? It’s hard to pin down. It’s a myriad of things. Perhaps it can be summarised that all of us people who aspire to write are on a journey to a place where we will never arrive. You can be sixteen or sixty-two, the journey is the same. The truths we know are the same and the vast number of things we have all yet to learn are the same. It sounds hopeless but it is the opposite of that because, along the way, there are glorious oases (yes, that is a word) to stop at. These oases (yes, it is) are formed when we complete a piece of writing. We linger there before we strike out again, across the desert, to try to form our next resting place.

Next Sunday, 10th November, will be the first oasis for many of these young writers. They will have written a brand new play, which never existed before and which will always be theirs. They conjured it from nothing more than imagination and passion and a question to be answered. I’m proud of them. I’m proud of myself for helping a little but also proud for the things I’ve learned while watching them do it.

The Young Playwrights are Jack Joyce, N.J. McDonnell, Ruby Moran, Yvonne Heneghan, Lily-Marie Buddy McBride, Hannah Thornton, Diana Tipane, and Billy Hutchinson.

The Directors are Bob Kelly and Joy Nesbitt and the Actors are Ian O'Reilly, Aoife Fitzpatrick, Seán Landau and Meadhbh Maxwell.

And me? I’m Ken. My part is done now. It’s over to the writers and the pros to do theirs.

I can’t wait to see how it all turns out.

I Need a Small Favour…

Writing related moments, for me, are often a bit like buses. There may not be one for quite a while and then a bunch of them will come along all at once.

As the dust settles on what was, for me, an extraordinary 6 weeks of theatre creativity and fun, something new arises.

But, before that, one final word of gratitude and joy to all the cast and production team on ‘Dance Night’, ‘Conception, Pregnancy and Bert’, and ‘Two for a Tenor’. An endeavour that culminated in packed houses, standing ovations, champagne corks off-stage, shots in Coady’s, and Jim Finan singing ‘One More for the Road’ down the back bar. I mean, what more could anyone possibly want?

Thank you all.

x

And now, I need a little something from you, Dear Reader, if I can possibly get it. There’s no money involved, so breathe easy on that front.

My friend, and creative conspirator, Richard Keaney, has made a short film from one of my short stories and, this weekend, for the first time, in the middle of its festival run, it is available for free public viewing at the TMFF Film Festival website. 

It’s only twelve minutes long but it doesn’t waste much of its run time and I would love you to see it. The link to it is just below but before you race to it, there’s one important thing. Even if you don’t have time right now to watch the whole film, if you had a moment to click over there and give the film 5 stars at the top of the webpage, that would be great. 

Extra Note - One or two kind people have accidentally given us 1 star by thinking you just click on any star to get into the voting. But the star you click on first is the vote you give. I think it's necessary to click straight onto the fifth star, if voting. It all registers alarmingly quickly. Thanks. 

This may seem underhand and, yes, by golly, it’s kind of is. But all it will do is allow Richard’s film to progress to the next stage of viewership in the festival and, at this point in the life of this little film, getting eyes on it is one of the great challenges. I would very much appreciate your help with this. Thanks.

Here’s the link to the film. Click Here. The image at the top will get you there too. It’s all high-tech stuff, this.

Then, having done that, and if you have time to view it (pump it up to full screen and turn the sound up) I would genuinely like to hear what you think of it. It’s rather a tricky little narrative structure. Does it engage? Does it get its story across clearly and in a diverting way? These are script questions and I’m a script guy. I thrive on feedback, and I definitely don’t need 5 stars for this part of the exercise. Hit me with it. Right between the eyes. I can take it.

I am really very proud of the film. Richard is a talented director, with an array of successful shorts and documentaries under his belt and an encyclopedic knowledge of the medium inside of his beardy head. For this project, he shanghaied the wonderfully visionary cinematographer Rafael de Almeida, who I think has done a splendid job. Actors Liam Gaffney, Patrick Austin and Claire Blennerhassett are all brilliant, the location work is spot-on, and my little story is served very well by the entire team. Go and have a look (and give it five stars, no matter what you think.)

As a story, Joey had a rather interesting genesis. I was on a bus to Dublin, in 2014, with an orchestra of teens who were heading to play National Concert Hall in front of the President of Ireland. I was hauling Sam’s drums, a very very important role. We stopped at the Applegreen Motorway Services Station, a place I had never stopped at before. I stepped off the bus (much as Joey does in the film) and stopped in amazement. Two simultaneous thoughts arrived. The first, I’ve just said it, was ‘This is amazing’ and, hot on its heels, that old familiar tingly feeling in the back of your head that signals there’s a story around here somewhere. I worked out that story in my head on the last hour into Dublin and wrote it the next day and posted it on this blog. It’s back there somewhere still. But watch the film instead. It tells it better.

I’m thanking people again but I have to express my gratitude to my good friend, Richard Keaney, for always reading my stupid scripts and, on two occasions now, actually assembling a team and pushing an amazing project right through to fruition. He deserves to sail past me into superstardom and I can’t wait for that day to come.

What’s next, Richard?

See, I had this idea…

This is It

People of a certain vintage, like me, will not have forgotten the Bugs Bunny Show which was a feature of our undersized televisions back in the day.

It always started with an opening theme song. Bugs and Daffy marched onstage with their canes and straw boater hats (Bugs’ hat had holes in it for his ears to stick through). Immediately they would launch into their well-known vaudeville-like song-and-dance routine.

The lyrics were pretty memorable:

Overture, curtains, lights
This is it, the night of nights
No more rehearsing and nursing a part
We know every part by heart

Overture, curtains, lights
This is it, you'll hit the heights
And oh what heights we’ll hit
On with the show this is it

In more recent years, the song tends to remind me of Ethel Merman belting out ‘You’ll be Swell, You’ll be Great’ as she performs ‘Everything’s Coming up Roses’ from ‘Gypsy’. On a less informed note, I have never-once been able to look at Michael Flatley dancing without thinking of Bugs Bunny.

I saw somebody on Twitter this week referring to Bugs’ and Daffy’s routine. He said that there is hardly a better description available of the feeling one gets when you are involved in a show and the rehearsals are largely all done, and it is finally time for the show to go on.

That’s where we’re at this week. On Thursday and Friday, at The Linenhall Arts Centre, our three plays will go on.

Our time in the lovely Scouts Den is all done. Our invaluable borrowed moments in the theatre are just about over too, though we still have Tech and Dress to complete.

All that will be left, by Thursday at teatime, will be to light it up, get into the glad rags, and get it done.

It’s a bit nerve-racking, for sure, but the upcoming evenings of Thursday and Friday of this week is why we do it. It’s why we turn up in twilight rooms, when we could be at home watching Eastenders or out having a nice stroll. It's why we scour the town for props and learn silly lines untl they are coming out of our ears.

We get to put on a show.

All through this weekend, people have been coming up to me and saying, “We’ll see you Thursday”, or “We’ll see you Friday night.” They may not see me. I’ll be in a darkened control room sweating over music and lighting cues. But that’s not what they mean. They may not entirely know it, but they mean they will see the show, and, in that way, they will see me. I appreciate that people will come out and pay good money to see what we might do. I appreciate very much the people who have come out over the past weeks and months to do it with me. You guys rock my world.

I keep saying it but, dammit, it’s true.

I’m a lucky duck…

…or perhaps a lucky bunny.

Take your pick.

 

There are still some tickets available at www.the linenhall.com or on 094 90 23733 but please don’t leave it too late to grab 'em.