On Thursday, 20 October, we’re presenting Living Local in association with Papercut Productions at Kingswood Heritage Museum in Warmley. We’re then breaking for a week ahead of three more meetings at Watershed in November. You can find our upcoming events listed on the Diary page of our website — please check this carefully to be clear about when everything’s happening.
The following three events are coming up this week:
Monday, 17 October at 6pm, Brewery Theatre, Southville: Aficionados by Peter Kesterton
Writers’ Forum @ Tobacco Factory Theatre is presenting Aficionados as its first Script Session rehearsed reading at The Brewery, 291 North Street, Southville, BS3 1JP this evening. Pete’s made some adjustments and tightened the play following its reading at our meeting on 21 June.
Thursday, 20 October at 7.30pm, Kingswood Heritage Museum, Warmley: Living Local
Come to Kingswood Heritage Museum, Tower Lane, Warmley, BS30 8XT to see script-in-hand performances of short monologues and duologues by Southwest Scriptwriters alongside the exhibits that inspired them. Five of you took up the challenge of finding muses in the Heritage Museum’s collection, and tonight’s line-up is as follows:
Bobby Shafto by Bruce Fellows
John and George by Brian Weaving
Kleeneze by Lissa Carter
The King’s Christmas Speech by Brian Weaving
Amelia and Agnes by Stephanie Weston
Forest by Carole Boyer
Friday, 21 October from 10.30am to 5.30pm, Everyman Studio, Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham: South West New Writing Network meeting
South West New Writing Network (SWNWN) meetings are a chance to get together with theatre writers, producers and people who work with writers throughout the region. Today’s meeting in the Everyman Studio, 7-10 Regent Street, Cheltenham, GL50 1HQ includes a workshop on refurbishing your play scripts and a tour of the Everyman Theatre’s auditorium, which has been refurbished itself recently, as well as a session on self-funding for writers and a panel debate, ‘The Writer is Dead: Long Live the Theatre-Maker’.
South West New Writing Network
Also on stage this week…
Monday, 17 to Saturday, 22 October, Nailsea Little Theatre: Hindoo Man by Tom Henry
Group member Tom Henry — who scored a hit with his Museum Piece, Primate Scream, inspired by Alfred the gorilla, at our event at Bristol City Museum in March — has a double outing this week for his play Hindoo Man, based on events leading up to the visit of Mahatma Gandhi to Lancashire in 1931. Nailsea Theatre Company is presenting the local production — in which Tom is also appearing — at the Nailsea Little Theatre, 6 Union Street, Nailsea, BS48 4BB, until next Saturday, 22 October. Meanwhile, A+E Productions stages its showing of the play at the Darwen Library Theatre in Lancashire from this Thursday, 20, until Sunday, 23 October.
Following this week’s frenetic activity, we’re back to normal in November. All the following events, except the show in the Alma Tavern Theatre, are happening in Waterside 1 at Watershed, 1 Canon’s Road, Harbourside, Bristol, BS1 5TX. Ask at the box office if you need directions to the meeting. Everyone attending meetings pays £1.
Tuesday, 1 November at 7.30pm: Open Workshop
Tuesday, 8 November at 7.30pm: Open Workshop
Tuesday, 15 November at 8.30pm *** Alma Tavern Theatre ***: I Remember Green by Heather Lister
It’s the opening night of the second of two plays by group members in Theatre West’s Picture This season, presenting a quintet of new scripts at the Alma Tavern Theatre this autumn. Following the success of the season’s curtain raiser, Steve Lambert’s The Darkroom (‘You’re never in for a dull moment with Steve Lambert…’ — Venue), it’s the turn of I Remember Green by Heather Lister to take the stage:
‘Deep in a green forest, a father urges his young, blind son across a raging river. A mother watches in horror from the bank.
‘Over the years, Jim and Ellie’s relationship splinters. Accusations fly, along with the mockery. Their son Sam, who cannot see, sees it all.
‘Offering you poetry, humour, and some serious quarrelling, I Remember Green is all about seeing things differently.’
I Remember Green is at 8.30pm on Tuesday to Saturday from tonight until 26 November, so you can catch the show in the next two weeks if you can’t join us for our ‘group outing’ this evening.
Tuesday, 22 November at 7.30pm: After the Wall by Gary Sugden
We’re back at Watershed this evening for our final meeting of 2011, reading Gary’s new play:
‘At an art gallery in Israel, an exhibition is being planned to celebrate “Peace in the Middle East”. Old frenemies — Florence, a sassy curator, and Dahlia, a self-important artist, struggle over an exhibition room and the affections of Florence’s husband, and Dahlia’s ex-lover, Otto.’
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Looking Back, Writing Forward
In our latest members-exclusive mini competition we’re asking you to look back to spark your imagination for a new script for 2012, and giving you the chance to win a £25 Amazon gift certificate.
Members at our workshop meeting on 4 October did a ten-minute writing exercise, ‘Mining Your Experience’, taken from The Playwright’s Process: Learning the Craft from Today’s Leading Dramatists
For our Looking Back, Writing Forward contest, we’re asking you to either do or repeat Buzz McLaughlin’s exercise, and write the first ten pages of a new stage, screen, radio or television script (although McLaughlin’s book is about playwriting, the exercise applies equally to other mediums) to workshop at our meetings in November and January.
Because the exercise is a little personal, we don’t need to know directly about the experiences on which you’re drawing to write your script extract, we just want you to bring your work to be read at an upcoming meeting and submit it at the end of January — I’ll include details of how to submit in our first newsletter of 2012.
Please remember that although we’re only asking for the first ten pages of your new project for this contest, this doesn’t mean that we want you to write ten-page scripts. Ideally, you’ll enter the beginning of a project that you’ll go on to write to length and bring the full version to a meeting later in 2012.
Looking Back, Writing Forwards works in the same way as similar mini competitions of ours in the past: Members who workshop their script extracts with us before the end of January 2012 can submit them for judging. An independent judge (to be confirmed) will read the entries, and the one s/he finds most appealing will receive the prize.
Good luck!