"Beginning Anxieties"
Hello my name is Andrew Birch, I am one of the young writers
on Bunbury Banter's Young Playwrights Programme.
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One of the biggest things I hope to get out of the programme
is an improvement with my communication skills and my ability to put myself out
there more with my own work.
Over the next year I also want to start working on
more serious pieces, relating to important things to me such as mental health
and abuse. I think I want to create something based on something quite personal
to me, my anxiety.
I think something
else I wish to do is try and take some inspiration from previous productions
I’ve been involved with and try to make a piece based on something real or true
or relevant.
Over Christmas I have not had much chance to see many
productions, but I did have a chance to read an amazing play called “4.48 Psychosis”
and it is truly wonderful to read. It switches between these long, disjointed monologues
to what appears to a conversation potentially between two very different
people. It almost perfectly shows madness in its style of writing, with some of it just trailing off, or
there occasionally just being numbers for clear reason. With each and every
page, it just draws you in more to hear this person’s story about their mental
health deteriorating before their eyes and their own plans to end it all.
I think this kind of stuff is super important in not only
getting out there for people to be more aware of it but it also because seeing or reading it makes people more comfortable about
talking about it.
That’s the kind of theatre I really love, when it is entertaining but still
putting forward an incredibly powerful message, and I’ve been involved in plays
like that too and it is just as amazing, to
be a part of these beautiful and moving pieces, that really make you think.
During our first official gathering of the Young
Playwrights, I got to meet the incredible people I’ll be working with over the
next and I can say with confidence that I truly believe that we all be able to
work together with ease, as all of them are so creatively minded unique
individuals, who clearly all seem very capable of making clear well thought out
writing with their own style to it.
Over Christmas I have written both a song and the start of a
scene, both of which aren’t done, but they have the essence of what I want to
put across with them, and it also helps me to practice writing, but I suppose I’ll
be getting a lot more practice over the next year or so. As of lately I’ve also been listening to story based podcasts and
poems, and those have been circling through my head a lot too and I’m hoping to use them as inspiration for the things I’m working on, both
for personal use and also in a profession capacity.
I think, going into this, I’m quite nervous of what my
capabilities actually are, and if I’ll be able to keep up with the rest of the
group, but I’m going to do my best, this is going to be an amazing experience and hopefully I won’t struggle too much.
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