Many thanks to all of you who supported our Museum Pieces event at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery on 9 March as writers, performers and in the audience. The evening was a huge success, attracting an audience of about 100. We hope to bring you similar events in future!

We have two meetings left in our current programme and five more lined up on every Tuesday in May. All of them are happening in Waterside 1 at Watershed, 1 Canon’s Road, Harbourside, Bristol, BS1 5TX — please ask at the box office if you need directions to a meeting. Everyone attending meetings pays £1.

Don’t forget that you can find the date, time and location of the next meeting in the panel on the right below the slideshow on our website’s home page, and there’s a full list of upcoming events on the site’s Diary page.

The schedule for the next two Tuesdays is as follows:

Tuesday, 29 March at 7.30pm: Making a Killing by Brian Weaving

A reading of Brian’s radio play, which he’s rewritten using feedback he received at a meeting last September: It is 1685. With the Monmouth rebellion crushed, Judge Jeffreys is sent by the King to try the participants. ‘The Bloody Assizes’ create unexpected problems for the Mayor of Dorchester.

Tuesday, 5 April at 7.30pm: Keeping Dad by Gary Sugden

In Gary’s one-act play in progress, a recent graduate living at home finds the consequences of concealing the inconvenient death of his father far-reaching.

 

We’ll also be in Waterside 1 on the following Tuesday evenings in May:

Tuesday, 3 May
Tuesday, 10 May
Tuesday, 17 May
Tuesday, 24 May
Tuesday, 31 May

 

Peter’s Painting Snails in the International Playwriting Festival

Congratulations to Peter Kesterton whose play Painting Snails featured in this year’s International Playwriting Festival at Croydon Warehouse Theatre. A 30-minute extract from Peter’s play, which was presented previously in Script in Hand at the Bristol Old Vic Studio in February 2009, was staged at the Warehouse on 6 March.

 

Dialogue — Call for Submissions

TheatreWorks has issued its annual call for writers based in the South West to submit a 10-20 minute extract of new writing for performance.

A panel will select the most promising and interesting submissions for a script-in-hand evening performance on Wednesday, 11 May in the Salberg Studio at Salisbury Playhouse.

Group members Steve Lambert and Katherine Mitchell had script extracts performed in previous Dialogue events, and last year the audience at Salisbury voted for Katherine’s play, Respite, to receive further development and subsequent presentation at a Ustinov Theatre Script Factory event in Bath during January.

 

London Comedy Writers’ Festival 2011

The people behind the London Screenwriters’ Festival are hosting a spring genre festival, this year focusing on comedy.

The London Comedy Writers’ Festival will be at The London College of Film, Media and Performance at Regents College on Saturday, 9 and Sunday, 10 April. It features 50 high-profile speakers including Griff Rhys Jones (Not the Nine O’clock News, Smith and Jones), Paul Jackson (The Young Ones, Saturday Live) and Doug Naylor (Red Dwarf, Spitting Image).

 

Pilot’s Thumb seeks writers

New Plymouth-based theatre company Pilot’s Thumb is seeking writers to work alongside on new ideas.

The company is interested in exploring contemporary issues through comedy and is looking ideally to develop scripts featuring two women in their early thirties or with two women and a man of that age. It would like to work on devising projects with writers through rehearsal, but is also willing to look at completed scripts. The next project will be themed loosely around Christmas.

Pilot’s Thumb presented a successful double bill of one-act plays at Plymouth’s Barbican and Exeter’s Bike Shed theatres last year. It is unable to pay a writing fee, but will cover travelling expenses for developmental work and offer a share of the box office of an eventual production.

Pilot’s Thumb Theatre