The Midnight Oil

Hello, tis me again. I’m here to talk about all the things I’ve been up to. It’s been relatively slow and quiet as of recently, an unfortunate side effect of lockdown. It hasn’t been all negative though, it’s given me lots of time to write, although I do have to say most of that writing has pretty much been 100% at between 1 and 3 am, which would be great if I had tendency to sleep in (I don’t).

So I guess first of all, my writing. It has been short things, pretty much all monologues, and they’ve just been about writing. I often start pieces with a title and a stimuli (generally a picture) and then I go about writing, sometimes I have certain phrases in my head. For instance I wrote a piece called “Hyperion” and I knew in some way that I wanted the words “I am alone” to be in it somehow before I even thought about writing it. It’s helpful to practice these things, especially with my own methods of doing so. It feels very normal at the moment to be writing, and more importantly, to be sending to be people for their opinion. They may not like but they’ll often tell you why if that’s the case, they may also love it but there’s always notes.

Which kind of brings me to another point I want to talk about. Over the last month-ish, the young playwright’s have been working with script readers on our monologues, I mentioned them last time I believe. It was a really different experience to be having meetings with people to go over your work, but it was almost like discussing a project with a client. I come up with Ideas, we talk, I find out what more they could want from the project, I fix said things and repeat until done. 

That’s what this felt like and I really liked that, I’m used to that. But I get the feeling from what I know, that we were let off kindly with the script readers. They gave us positive feedback ad constructive notes, instead of just telling us everything we got wrong, which is sort of what I expected, so really refreshing difference there. Overall it was a really great experience, getting to talk to someone on a personal level about your own work.

I say this because we do have group workshops with professional playwrights, such as this month’s workshop with Douglas Maxwell. I’m going to start by saying very honestly, I didn’t feel as though I learned a lot this time round. We spent most of the workshop analysing photographs and the people in them. This is unfortunately nothing new to me, I do a lot of analysing different media and mediums from other work and college that I, so this probably took away from my ability to learn this time round. But another huge thing to now say is that Douglas was a great speaker, I really found myself captivated with a lot of what he had to say, he was very funny and charismatic and that’s really what made the workshop for me.

Andrew Birch

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