For current scriptlab information, please see this page
Sunday 25th January - workshop/rehearsal 1-5pm; performance 6-8pm
Director Tony Bell led the first scriptlab session of 2004. He is currently
preparing to tour the US next month as Bottom the Weaver in Edward Hall's
production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. He is also directing a production
of The Forth Fold by Gavin Rogers, to open in April.
Sunday 22nd Feb performance 6-8pm
Currently working as a Globe practitioner and director at the Gate Theatre
in London, actor and director Tom Cornford lead this week's Scriptlab. A Cambridge
graduate, he played the title role in the ETG
production of Hamlet, among other productions, before continuing his studies
at LAMDA. He has just finished filming The Postcard (Zagreus Films).
During autumn 2003 we welcomed back Paul Sirett, currently Dramaturg
at the RSC, who gave two talks on New Writing for Theatre.
The talks, which incorporated questions and answer sessions, focussed on writing
for the stage with specific emphasis on structure, character and language.
The series was extremely interesting and useful for anyone interested in dramatic
writing, no matter how much they had done before.
In January 2004, Paul ran a 'script surgery' for Cambridge student scripts.
The Wasps, a new play by Churchill College Fellow and internationally
acclaimed poet, novelist and playwright, John Kinsella, was given a rehearsed
reading in the Frazer Room, Trinity College on Sunday March 2nd at 8pm.
The play is set in modern-day London, in a rejuvenated ‘old house’
inhabited by two Australian émigrés – SHIRLEY, a librarian
and fan of new-age paraphernalia, and BILL, an embassy worker – and a
hypochondriac among other things. The house is inhabited/invaded by a plague
of Wasps – not Australian paper wasps, and therefore knowable entities
for Shirley and Bill, but ‘British’ wasps – confused with ‘killer’
European wasps.
From a seemingly banal domestic scenario grows an ever-increasing atmosphere
of menace – not least personified in the figure of STAN, the Exterminator.
He is called in when efforts to remove the wasps have failed. Shirley wants
to save them, catching them in jars and returning them to the ‘wild’;
Bill wants them killed – but has an aversion to letting an ‘exterminator’
into the house. Stan’s attitude is ambivalent – it is his job to
exterminate, but he feels an affinity to the wasps, and perhaps even more
of an affinity towards Shirley.
The presentation was a rehearsed reading under the direction of Steve Chinna,
punctuated by music specially commissioned for the play from Sydney composer
Matthew Orlovich, and incorporated dance & movement.
A subsequent full production was mounted
in November 2003.
Earlier in the Lent term 2003, Australian playwright and director Steve Chinna lead a number of Scriptlab sessions; workshops and rehearsed readings / performances of some pieces of new student writing. Steve also held sessions for script extract readings and discussion, attended by actors and directors as well as writers for both stage and screen.
The first session workshopped Jack Thorne's "Special"
and David Minto's "Johnny Marco", two short plays which were presented as
part of the year's Smorgasbord Season (5th to 9th March at The Playroom).
Further workshops were led by Andy Farrell (Sun 17th Feb)
who has directed new plays at Manchester Contact and is currently writing
a play for BBC Radio about the Falklands War where he was involved in the
naval action; and by Philip Howard (Sun 3rd March),
Artistic Director of the Traverse Theatre, whose last production - Michel
Tremblay's "Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer" - was staged by the RSC
at the Barbican.
The fourth workshop featured recent graduates John
Finnemore and Adam Barnard of (Fringe-First-nominated) Activated
Image who discussed the process of devising new work.