First Person
Deborah McAndrew
Shall I let you into a secret? Barrie Rutter isn’t always right. I’ve enjoyed a creative and rewarding professional relationship and personal friendship with Barrie for almost 20 years now, and I think I can say that without fear of him falling out with me. He isn’t always right – but he often is, and one of the things he’s right about is that a tragedy isn’t a tragedy until it’s a tragedy.What does he mean? Well - notwithstanding the fact that outside the theatre in the mid-1590s Romeo and Juliet was advertised as a "Tragedy" and the Prologue tells us that the play will end with the deaths Read more ...
David Goodale
“She paused and heaved a sigh of relief that seemed to come straight from the cami-knickers.” Recounted our brother Andy, many years ago……. "A silence ensued." This was not his own observation, but a quote from P.G. Wodehouse, whom neither Bobby nor I had ever read. “I call her a ghastly girl because she was a ghastly girl.” He continued. “A droopy, soupy, sentimental exhibit, with melting eyes and a cooing voice and the most extraordinary views on such things as stars and rabbits.” We were hooked.As an actor, Bobby, Andy’s twin brother, was looking at the possibility of adapting a Read more ...
Geoffrey Beevers
Adapting of 19th-century novels is sometimes looked down on as a kind of “heritage drama”. The assumption is that it is all about the externals, about the costumes and the coach wheels turning. It is certainly not what drew me to George Eliot. It is the quality of her mind: her wit, her intelligence and her compassionate insight. Middlemarch is a “classic” because it still has resonance today, and a classic should survive all kinds of different interpretations and still remains relevant.But only conscious interpretation here is in the translation from the novel form into the dramatic. Drama Read more ...
Hadley Fraser
The Machine by Matt Charman is about the famous chess match between the then world champion Garry Kasparov and the chess computer, Deep Blue, which took place in New York City in 1997. The match captured the imagination of the general public at the time as perhaps no other chess match has before or since. Kasparov's face was hanging in Times Square and the New York Stock Exchange had the match on its screens.Our play uses this iconic moment to look at the stories of the main protagonists of the match, Kasparov and Deep Blue's inventor Feng-Hsiung Hsu. Both, it would be fair to say, are Read more ...
Ross Ericson
A few days ago I found myself sat in a Finsbury Park pub talking to a man who dismantled bombs for a living, who had completed two tours in Afghanistan fighting the unending war against Improvised Explosive Devices, and I will admit to being more than just a little nervous. You see, he had just read the script of my play Casualties.Casualties deals with the effect the pressures of fighting in Afghanistan have on the relationship between two members of a Counter IED team and the woman one of them has left behind. It is of course a dramatic fiction but I felt it was important for it to be based Read more ...
Johnny Tudor
Very few young people know her name today, but Dorothy Squires was the singing sensation of the Fifties and Sixties, and even 30 years ago this talented but difficult star was a regular feature of the headlines thanks to offstage dramas and scandals. But who was the real Dorothy Squires? I first remember meeting Dorothy Squires, as she renamed herself, when I was only three years old. My father, Bert Cecil, a pianist, had befriended her when, aged 15, she had gone to London armed with nothing more than hope and a train ticket.Edna May (her real name) was born in Llanelli in 1915 into a poor Read more ...
Peter Michael Marino
If this native New Yorker were in a relationship with the city of London, our Facebook status would read: “It’s complicated.” We’ve been through hell together. London is one of my favourite cities. I blissfully cross the pond several times a year to teach and to see my mates. But, this fabulous city also bestowed on me the worst reviews I’ve ever gotten in my life. So, why the heck am I coming back to do yet a show about the very show that shattered my dreams? Insane!In 2007, I conceived and wrote the musical version of the Madonna movie Desperately Seeking Susan - which featured the hit Read more ...
Amanda Whittington
"Why write about Ruth Ellis?" It’s a question I’ve been asked many times in the run-up to The Thrill of Love and it’s a good one. I’d like to know the answer, too. Three years ago, I was commissioned by the New Vic Theatre in Newcastle-under-Lyme to write a play which I suspect is some 30 years in the making. I can trace its beginnings to the mid-Eighties, when I was 17 years old and on high-alert for the kind of gritty icons who graced the singles covers of The Smiths. I discovered Ruth Ellis at the cinema, played so vividly by Miranda Richardson in Dance with a Stranger. Read more ...
Peter Nichols
It was in Singapore in 1947 that my real education began. For the first time I read Lawrence, Forster, Virginia Woolf, Melville, Graham Greene and Bernard Shaw’s political works, becoming a lifelong Leftie. When Stanley Baxter explained Existentialism in our billet block, we nodded intelligently. When Kenneth Williams spoke Parlyaree, we were in advance of the rest of the nation who wouldn’t hear of it till Beyond Our Ken.Our post-war National Service was spent defending our far-flung (and about to be abandoned) empire. Twelve of us were in a revue called At Your Service. In the opening Read more ...
Tamsin Oglesby
I read and loved The Mouse and His Child as a child. Apparently. I was reminded of this by the inscription in the copy I gave to my god-daughter 15 years ago. And again, when I read it to my own daughter 10 years later. It’s such an extraordinarily original, moving, funny, story, I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten it.But I think it’s less a case of senility and more to do with the fact that the things you absorb at an early age enter your bones, and like bones, you take for granted the fact that they’re there, even though they shape you. I grew up with a foreign mother who constantly referred Read more ...
Gwyneth Lewis
Like many students, I read the Oresteia by Aeschylus as an undergraduate as part of a compulsory Tragedy paper. A while ago I was asked would I do a new version of the Oresteia. I’m not a Greek scholar so I feel I have no authority to offer a "translation". However, I was up for writing a completely new play.Aeschylus’s Oresteia tells of Agamemnon returning from the Trojan war and being murdered by his wife Clytmnestra because he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia as part of the campaign. In Aeschylus, Clytemnestra is a wicked man-woman who upstages her husband, takes a lover and is later Read more ...
David Seidler
George VI had been my hero since childhood because I was such a terrible stutterer. We had been evacuated from England to the US and during the war, particularly the latter stages, my parents would encourage me to listen to the King’s speeches on the wireless. “Listen, David,” they’d say, “he was a far worse stutterer than you, and listen to him now. He’s not perfect but he can give these magnificent stirring speeches that really work. So there’s hope for you.” It didn’t help me at the time but I thought, wow, he’s brave. When I grew up to be a writer I thought I would like to write something Read more ...