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01 July 2023

Happy, Angry, Lonely

‘It’s July, and there’s snow everywhere…’ was the prompt we had to begin our session of Writing for Stage this week.

We read a section of ‘Flesh’ by Rob Drummond and discussed why the playwright has made the choices he has in the extract.

Throwing the audience in and having the audience guessing, Lydia suggested, goes a long way to helping communicate theme.

Next, we had to give our instant responses on paper to 3 of these sentence starters:

  • ‘I feel angry when’
  • ‘I feel happy when’
  • ‘I feel lonely when’
  • ‘I feel frightened when’
  • ‘I feel safe when’
  • ‘I feel nervous when’
  • ‘I feel excited when’

We were then asked to spend a few minutes going back through and making some of our responses more specific, framing it around an image in time and place.

Now, choosing one, we were tasked with thinking about how that key emotion (happy, angry, lonely) might affect how a scene is written – how short or punchy the dialogue is, how many stage directions there are etc.

With that in mind, we then had 10 minutes to write a scene based around the image we’d come up with.

After this, we rewrote the scene, now in a certain genre: romance, sci-fi, horror etc.

Writing for Stage returns with the final session of term next week, in person at MAST Mayflower Studios, then moving to Mayflower Theatre where we will watch ‘The Ocean at the End of the Lane’.

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