We’re carrying straight on from our last season with five more meetings before our summer break. All these meetings, except the last, will take place in the Macready Room because of rehearsals in the Cooper’s Loft. Ask at the bar on the first floor for directions. Everyone attending pays £1.
Tuesday, 5 June at 7.30pm: Open Workshop
Tuesday, 12 June at 7.30pm: Meet ACH Smith
Anthony Smith, writer of Up the Feeder, Down the ’Mouth and Back Again, will be here to answer your questions about his play, his writing career, his friendship with Tom Stoppard and anything else you can think of. We’ve arranged a group visit to see Up the Feeder, Down the ’Mouth and Back Again at Princes Wharf Docks on 3 July.
Tuesday, 19 June at 7.30pm: Open Workshop
Tuesday, 26 June at 7.30pm: Counselling of Course by Will Grealish
A reading of Will Grealish’s contemporary comedy which explores the unregulated world of counselling through the experiences of five unemployed misfits who are coerced into the process by the authorities.
Tuesday, 3 July at 7.30pm: Up the Feeder, Down the ’Mouth and Back Again
A group visit to see ACH Smith’s play which is being staged in the dramatic setting of Princes Wharf Docks. Hope to see you there!
Derek Graham (1942-2001)
We’re sad to report the death from lung cancer of Derek Graham who had been a member of the group for the last couple of years. Derek faced his death with amazing equanimity and held a party at the Marriott Royal Hotel a few days before to say goodbye to some 150 friends and relatives. At this, he was full of enthusiasm, humour and fascinating conversation. Derek was always a social animal and the night before he died his daughters at his bedside found him writing a list of people he knew who had already died. ‘What on earth are you writing that for?’ they asked. Unable to speak at this point, Derek wrote on his piece of paper: ‘My next party’. We hope to read one of the last pieces of dialogue Derek wrote at our next Open Workshop.
Ray’s Wooden Cross at the Hope Centre
Ray Evans’ dramatic wartime play The Wooden Cross is to be given a rehearsed reading by Crumbling Walls Theatre Company at the Hope Centre, Hope Chapel Hill, Hotwells, Bristol on Saturday, 30 June at 8.00pm. On the same evening, the company will also give a rehearsed reading of Dead for a Day by Rebecca Charikar, a play still in development which deals with an attempt by a member of a close Jewish family to obtain a divorce under Jewish law.
Steve’s Still Life at the Tobacco Factory
Steve Hennessy’s play, Still Life which was the runner-up in our most recent competition, is being given a full production by Partisan Theatre at the Tobacco Factory from 4 to 9 June at 8pm each evening (matinées Wednesday and Saturday at 2.30pm).
Start writing now for our fifth New Writing season competition
Another reminder that following the success of our fourth season of New Writing in the New Vic, and thanks to last-minute funding from South West Arts which made it all possible, we can now announce our fifth season — the competition for which has a deadline of November 30th this year. If all goes well, we hope for the first time to give the winning script a full production for one week at the Alma Tavern. The runners-up will all be given rehearsed readings in the New Vic, as this year (subject to confirmation that we can book these spaces). So start writing now. Your script can be for screen, stage, TV or radio and be either one-act or full-length.
Watch the View
Be sure to set your video recorder for HTV’s West Eye View at 7.30pm next Tuesday, 5 June (you can’t watch it live because you’ll be at our Open Workshop). When you do get to see the programme, there are one or two things about the presenter that might make you exclaim ‘I’ve had a drink in the pub with her!’…
Home movies for Takeover TV
Channel 4 is calling for creative geniuses, and wants to give them a chance to see their work broadcast on national TV.
‘Adam and Joe are presenting a new series to be broadcast later this year showing the best of people’s home movies. But we’re not talking You’ve Been Framed here. We want spoofs, rants, the funny, angry, sideways slices of life that you create yourself. Preferably quirky and innovative but the subjects can be serious, sad, silly — whatever.
‘Five minutes is the maximum length of each clip — the shortest is up to you. We can also show extracts of longer work.
‘Adam and Joe’s Takeover TV is the show where you don’t just control the content — you create it! The filmmakers of tomorrow are what we’re looking for. This is the series on which Adam and Joe were originally discovered. We can’t offer a Hollywood budget — only a maximum of £90 for clips we do show — but do offer the perfect showcase on national TV. Graham Norton, Armstrong anc Miller, the director of sitcom Spaced and numerous others had their first TV exposure on past series of Takeover TV.’