A New Love

Hello all who read these blogs, before I get into the blog, thank you for reading.

I want to talk about a play I read called The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh. I would say like Pornography from my last blog, it was also a piece of shock theatre, but unlike Pornography I really enjoyed The Pillowman. It had gruesome parts to it, but it also wit and a weird sense of dark humour that helped pull it all together into a very entertaining play to read. I don’t think I fully understood it in the couple of reads I had of it, but after some research it made more sense to me with what it was saying, It had huge themes of child abuse and how that’s shown to affect two different people in how they develop and grow up. I would definitely go and have a read of it as it a truly interesting piece.

Next in things that have happened was that we had another workshop, this time with playwright Nicola McCartney. This was a very interesting workshop, because it did change how I see playwriting from a certain point. I knew plays had structure to them but what I didn’t fully get was how alike different plays are when you compare them by their base structure, and that’s not to say all plays are the same, cause they most certainly aren’t, but when you look at plays, they’re all about a character getting confronted by a conflict, then dealing with it, and ending up at an outcome which isn’t always necessarily the ending that the character originally wanted, and I can’t stop seeing that in a lot of things I’ve seen and read recently. But that isn’t a bad thing, I think it shows to someone like me that playwriting takes a lot of effort to be unique but there is a strategy and formula to make it a bit easier.

Finally, since my last blog I have seen (what is now my favourite musical), Priscilla Queen of the Desert. It was just such a fun, loud and bright show. It’s about three drag queens as they travel across Australia to preform in a casino, and along the way they discover that the world isn’t always as kind as it may first appear and that they’ve got to keeping doing what they love anyway. I was just so taken by it, it was just something I felt very comfortable watching and could just enjoy myself. It was full of so many classic fun songs and it was just so well put on, the acting was perfect and I would happily see it again, I’ve only seen the musical live  once and I’ve watched the film multiple time on DVD but it just feels so iconic, it was a musical of the ages and I would highly recommend that anyone who just wants to have fun and is comfortable with themselves, should definitely go and either watch the musical or see the film.

I think something I can really take from all these experiences, is to write what I know or at least be prepared to learn about things until I know them. Writing is no easy task, it takes time and effort to write something well. I’m going to learn from all this, that I can take time to plan and work out what I want to write about and how I should write it out before I actually do. I think something else that I’ve learned about, is that it can be perfectly alright to write about stories well within your comfort zone and that you don’t always need to push yourself to write something people can enjoy and talk about.

Andrew Birch

Andrew is part of the Bunbury Banter Young Playwrights Programme 2019-2020