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, 10^th 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.