Play for Today

Someone said to me last week; ‘Last time I looked it was Boxing Day and now it’s February! Where did January go?’

It was an odd month. I had a vicious cold just before Christmas which I passed on to himself, and which he passed back to me for a January present. I’ve just about come to and January’s done. Meaning it’s time for 28 Plays Later. The Literal Challenge has made it easier this year in one way – no timed route, so you can in theory take the whole month off and submit all 28 plays on the final day of the challenge. I’m still sticking to the timed route, myself. It does mean that I’m not likely to mix up the prompts. As if that could be done.

TLC asks contestants not to reveal the details of the prompts themselves, but we’re allowed to tell others the rough outline. So far, we’ve been invited to write a play about time, a play that can be performed only once, a play relying on riddles and a traditional farce. The top puzzler so far is to take inspiration from the life and work of a singer who was so famous in her own country that the national radio station devoted one hour a week to broadcasting recordings of her singing – every week, for almost forty years after her death. None of the playwrights responding to that one had even heard of her. Well, we certainly know about her now.

TLC are kind enough to let us go off-brief if it stumps us too much, though in the final reading session they will only consider plays that fit the brief exactly. The whole point of 28 Plays for me is to push myself to write something that I would never have thought of before, and the first six days have done that. Every evening at 8pm, the email pops up on my inbox with the next brief and the process is always the same. First; “I can’t think of anything around that!” followed by research on the subject. Sometimes immediately and sometimes hours later I have a weak idea that turns into a wicked idea that ends up as a play. With 24 hours to write and submit before the next brief arrives, none of them are long enough or polished enough to believe that any theatre company might be interested. That’s not the point. The point is to train you to drop the time wasting and write a first draft, something you might pick up later and turn into a full idea. It’s working so far. One of last year’s daft drafts got edited and sent off to a competition, and probably going on the ‘No’ pile right now but it’s a start.

The bird in the picture at the top of the page is a Twenty Eight bird. A kind of parrot whose call is ‘Twenny Eight… twenny eight…’ Probably all I’ll be able to say by the end of February.