Here Be Monsters

A review of Annie Baker’s ‘The Antipodes’, Dorfman, National Theatre I don’t understand.  I came out of The Antipodes yesterday with similar feelings to those I’d had coming out of Ella Hickson’s The Writer: slightly shell-shocked and in need of time to process what I knew was something important. Desperate to talk about it, I’d…

Big Wide World

So that’s it, I’ve finished my MA.  Last week was showcase week where we welcomed industry guests, agents, producers, theatre and tv development people to see extracts of our work from the course.  It was hot, we were stressed, things got messed up and sorted out (who doesn’t love a booze run with the added…

If I Had A Boat

Wrote this short film as part of my MA in Dramatic Writing at Central Saint Martins, UAL, London.  Next step is to get it made…   EXT. RIVERSIDE – NIGHT Water laps at the bank. In the distance, a buzzing riverside restaurant. DANNY (V/O) Come on, come on.. EXT. RESTAURANT – CONTINUOUS DANNY and BETH…

How Not To Do A Showcase

The weather’s supposed to have broken, but it hasn’t.  What has broken is the air con and the signalling on my train, and I arrive in central London sweating and hassled.  This time next year, all being well, I’ll have graduated with my MA Dramatic Writing from Central Saint Martins, and will be up to…

A Writer’s Response to Grenfell

As part of London Writers Week, the profits from which are going to help victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, I and other students on the MA Dramatic Writing course at Central St Martins were asked to write a rapid response, either to the fire or to other recent events in London.  I wrote this.…

Beckett, Bop It and why the Tube Strike helped me as a writer

Last October I began studying for an MA in Dramatic Writing at Central St Martin’s in London.  Today was our first day back after the holidays, and there was a tube strike.  Some of our cohort gave themselves a day off, and I have to say it was tempting.  I had plenty of excuses: I…

Can’t even….

And breathe.  So.  Yesterday I had an interview.  For a job I really want.  Teaching English, in a really lovely school with lovely kids and lovely staff and a really lovely head who didn’t just laugh me out of the room as has happened to me oh so many times before because of my utterly shambolic…

7000 Permutations…

… and still nothing but a seething mass of words.  Actually a lot of them aren’t even seething, they’re just lying about, lumpen and inert and pointless, and taking up all of my desk, all of the kitchen table, three whole notebooks and three more half ones.  They are everywhere – I’ve even got them…

Blogging 101/Er, what?

So, fashionably late, I’m just getting started with Blogging 101, a course which I hope will get me feeling comfortable about blogging, rather than wildly scrabbling for the space where I can type stuff and then randomly pressing things until it says published, only to find weeks (months) later that, bizarrely, no-one has read my…

Hunting Bears

That’s what my New Year’s Resolution is.  Not literally, obviously: I’m not really the hunting sort, and anyway as far as I know there aren’t any round here.  But I was thinking, randomly, about Michael Rosen’s fabulous book ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’.  My kids loved it, and so did I, despite its odd…