Spare Room Blog

I wrote a blog for the Scottish Refugee Council about The Spare Room. You can read it here.

The Spare Room on BBC Radio 4

Ach so I've been busy and haven't had time to update this blog. Lots of exciting things to report but firstly and most excitingly is that my new play, The Spare Room, will be broadcast on Friday 22nd February on BBC Radio 4 at 2.15pm.

We have a great cast in Babou Ceesay (as Michael) and Candida Benson (as Stephanie) with my frequent partner in crime Lu Kemp directing. I wrote the play in three weeks in Scotland in January and we recorded the first weekend in February at Broadcasting House in London.

The reason for such haste is that it was a 'rapid response' commission where I was asked to write a play about a current affair or news item. It's been a lot of hard work and a lot of fun to get a piece written (and good!) in such a short space of time. Last year I wrote a 15 minute play in a week, this year a 45 minute play in three. (Yes I'm now fearing the call to write a two hour drama in a month!)

The piece of 'news' I chose as my inspiration for The Spare Room was the Stop Destitution Today campaign by the Scottish Refugee Council. I would obviously love it if you listened to the play but whether you do or not, please check out the petition here and think about signing.

With thanks to Suzi and Jamie at SRC for their time and notes.

In the country (part two)

So the first draft of The Spare Room is complete. I sent it last night to my director, Lu Kemp, and she will give me notes today.

The reason for the swift turn around is that this is a rapid response play. I was commissioned to write this a week before Christmas and we record it on February 2. That's roughly 6 weeks to research, write and redraft. It's the same length as an ordinary Afternoon Play (45m) for Radio 4 but its written in response to a current event.

As I've said before I love writing quickly. It feels the most honest and fun way to write. The tricky bit is to get it right.

I have two days left in the beautiful countryside of Dumfries and Galloway. I will have to make the most of it.

In the country

Retreat (noun) 5. A place of privacy; a place affording peace and quiet.

I have gone into the countryside to finish a play. I’ve had a manic few first weeks of the year (plus Christmas was pretty darn busy) so I decided to take myself off to a cottage on the Dumfries and Galloway coast. It’s quite an intense piece and I felt like I needed to immerse myself in it.

(I would add a picture here but it’s been raining all day so just imagine some wet, bare trees and fields and the sea. It’s pretty gloomy too).

I usually like writing in a noisy place. I write on my sofa in my living room, with a bustling Glasgow street beyond the thin, single-glazed window. I write in cafes. I write in libraries (yes libraries are noisy now. I don’t know when that changed but it has. My local library is insane). I have an office but that is shared so there are always lots of folk to talk to. Plays are about the world and people living in the world. So I like to be surrounded by it when I’m writing.

But sometimes the noise gets too much. I have something like four or five projects on the go at the moment and a very limited time in which to complete them. Above all else I need to think.

In 2006 – before I moved to Glasgow – I lived in a cottage on the Kent-Sussex border, close to where I was born. It was a converted stable that was rented out as holiday cottages. It had a tiny bedroom, a tiny living room, a kitchen and a shower. It was on a small farm and I could hear cows snoring and cocks crowing. Once I woke to find a large deer, looking in through my bedroom window. I loved it.

That was also the year when I became a ‘proper’ playwright. I had my first commission for both theatre and radio. But it wasn’t the commissions that made me ‘proper’.

What I had never realised, what no-one had ever really explained to me, was that being a writer you had to be alone. Nobody could do it for you. There wasn’t someone to sit with you and motivate you or do your research or type. Before I had always written in my spare time. After school or uni, late at night at home, while I was working in KFC or in the Futon Shop. In the cottage – all by myself – I was suddenly confronted by a blank page and nothing else.

The country is a brilliant place to think. The quiet and the landscape and the big skies allow me to actually hear your own thoughts. In the city there is so much to distract your attention – wonderful and brilliant things often but still things – that you never get to hear what you brain is telling you.

I love living in the city. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. But I feel like I learnt to be a playwright in the country. In my tiny cottage, I had nowhere else to go except my desk. The silence forced me to think and to put those thoughts down on paper. And, best of all, I learned to enjoy it.

I’m in the country for a week. I'll let you know how it goes.

What I am up to in 2013

2012 has been a bumper year for me. Next year seems to be - if possible - even more exciting. Here are some of the highlights.

PROM: 'Four friends are reunited to remember when they were seventeen and beautiful. The end of school Prom. As memories are recalled and and secrets laid bare, a terrible truth is brought to light that will effect them for the rest of their lives. A new drama for teenagers about beauty and ugliness, promise and destruction, and about getting away with something you wish you never got away with'.

I am working with director Gareth Nicholls and Imaginate at the Tron in January. We will open in Spring 2014.

THE SPARE ROOM: 'Ali lives in Stephanie's spare room. He doesn't make any noise. He helps clean the flat. He helps find things that she loses. Ali knows everything about Stephanie and listens to all her troubles. But Stephanie doesn't know anything about Ali. She doesn't know that Ali has recently had his last asylum claim refused, been evicted from his flat and lives on handout's from the local church. And she definitely doesn't know that Ali lives in her spare room. Until today'.

This is a 45 minute rapid response Afternoon Drama for BBC Radio 4. I have six weeks to write it. It will be broadcast on February 20th at 2.15pm 2013.

MIKA AND ANNA-BELL GET MARRIED: development at the National Theatre of a new romantic comedy for 5 year olds about having a heart bigger than your boots. Co-written with Lu Kemp.

MY FRIEND SELMA: 'When I was 8 years old, my dad set up a charity to help people in danger escape the war in a place called Bosnia. He brought fifty of them over here on big coaches. We moved into an old boarding school with these refugees, to help them settle in. We lived there for four months. It was brilliant – there was a playground in my front garden, we had lots of visitors, people were always feeding me and I learnt to ride a bike! But the best thing about living there was meeting my friend Selma'.

A site specific piece for children aged 9+ about friendship, hospitality and learning to ride a bike. Written with JC Marshall and Victoria Beesley for Terra Incognita. We are developing it this year and will produce it in 2014.

DRAGON: And lastly and not leastly is my new play about grief, thunderstorms and flying things in a co-production with Vox Motus, the National Theatre of Scotland and the Beijing Childrens' Art Theatre. We open in Scotland in October. I'm so excited that my head might come off.

Phew.

And that's just the stuff I'm telling you about now. Please check the website for more details later in the year.

Second Draft

I love writing the first draft. The first draft is my favourite bit. It's where you get to make everything up, imagine a world and create characters and story. You use your heart and lungs and stomach for the first draft - it's pure guts (to steal a Steve Prefontaine running metaphor). I know that a lot of playwrights don't like the first draft but to me it's the best.

The second draft is something different. You've had the notes - probably lots of them - and now you have more paper than you know what to do with. You have to engage your brain now. You have to think. You can't just feel your way through the story, you have to be logical. 'This character has to do that because in scene two, he said he wouldn't and that reveals something in scene 7'. Even in the most abstract plays, there are patterns and while in the first draft you may have sketched it all out, in the second draft you have to start marking it out more properly.

I am currently at the second draft stage with two plays. One of them is an epic, massive piece with lots of characters and themes to coral; the second is a small, chamber piece about the end of the world. But it doesn't matter what the play is, the second draft is where I correct the mistakes I made in the first, clarify what I didn't say quite clearly enough, and cut the inappropriate joke that only I find funny. The second draft is the necessary draft.

I won't lie. I don't really like the second draft phase of writing a play. But it is also the moment when you see what you have and a thought (hopefully) occurs: Yes, I can see this working. Eventually.

Everything (on iPlayer)

I was so busy writing about the end of the world last week that I forgot to post that my play Everything would be repeated on Monday 5th November on BBC Radio 4. It was and now it's on iPlayer. Click here to listen to it. You have a week.