28 Plays rolls on. Two weeks in and still keeping up – the fourteenth brief arrives at 8pm tonight, so by this time tomorrow I could well be halfway through. Which is no comfort, as they save the toughest assignments for the second half of the ordeal. Challenge, I should have said.
Last week’s joys included a command to write freeform (improvisation set in a supermarket), a traditional Noh play, a jukebox musical, based on a news story and an invitation to write the most extreme play we could think of. I had some help on the last one, as I’m not a fan of violence (apart from Quentin Tarantino) and said so on the 28 Plays FB page. Someone immediately suggested that I start by writing the sweetest, most innocent play ever and see where that took me… remember the two nuns who removed the starter motors from the Nazis’ cars to stop them from following the Von Trapp family? You wouldn’t believe where I took them.
The week also included the dreaded first line brief. The first lines we’re given are words picked at random from a weird magnetic poetry box, they must be, and they never suggest a logical story. Having said which, one person wrote a play with the suggested first line and the suggested last line, connecting the two with a hilarious story that she claims actually happened to her during her nursing career. One person’s stumper is another writer’s inspiration.
My two favourites last week were to write a play that could only be produced as a sound play – resulting in a radio script that will get a serious re-write in March and will definitely be sent elsewhere – and an alternative ending play. Take a play you know and love well and rewrite the ending. Someone re-wrote ‘The Merchant of Venice’ into a chilling tragedy, using largely the words from Shakespeare’s version, and I re-wrote Hamlet as a cold and decisive man who took revenge for his murdered father within an hour and landed himself in so much trouble for it. The man was tragic but the play was a comedy. We got the suggestion posted of an alternative Shakespeare company and I’d pay to see the new Merchant of Venice – maybe back-to-back with the original version.
The next brief arrives in my inbox at eight o’ clock tonight, and I’m ready to go. Just hoping it’s not the even more dreaded Rules play. It’s out there in the next fortnight. This year it might stop me flat.
Julia Chalkley 