It’s playtime, 24:7

by michealjacob

So I wrote a play, submitted it to the 24:7 theatre festival without either hope or expectation, and got on with other things.  It was a surprise, then ,to learn that the play had been selected, particularly since my last dramatic production had been in my schooldays.  Apparently one of the things that made it attractive was its Brechtian aspects, of which I hadn’t at all been aware, but which I now claim have been absolutely integral from the very beginning.

The play is called Daylight Robbery, and is a comedy-drama police procedural set in 1888, featuring Manchester’s first celebrity detective, Jerome Caminada. I first came across Caminada while delving into Manchester history, and deepened my knowledge with his two volumes of memoirs.  He comes across as intuitive, dogged, rather pleased with himself (as he should have been, given his clear-up rate), and a man who balanced locking up villains with concern for their post-prison welfare.  In many ways a man of his time, he was also rather ahead of it.

Instead of drawing on one of his real cases, I made up a new one, while drawing on the memoirs for texture and colour and language.  Caminada has two mysteries to solve, a series of robberies of single gentlemen in the leafy suburb of Didsbury, and a tall dead man in a too-small suit fished out of the open sewer that was the River Medlock.  Characters include an informer, a musical hall singer, a dodgy landlady, a proto-feminist, and a mysterious widow.

What makes the play a little unusual is that it involves around 20 characters in 26 scenes across forty five minutes, with a cast of six and a musician, and thus presents a challenge to the cast, and to the director, not to mention the writer and producer, ie me.

When I heard the play had been chosen, I hadn’t looked at the script for three months, and reading it was a revelation.  I’m either a glass full or glass empty person, and when I came back to the piece, it felt that the glass was entirely empty.  Could I really have written such a simplistic story?  What was I thinking when I put in those embarrassingly unfunny jokes? Why were many of the characters so thin?  Having advised writers over the years to tuck away the draft they like and then revisit it, I experienced just why that advice is so sound.  With some distance, it felt like someone else’s script, which allowed me to approach it and make notes from a neutral basis.

My first step was to recruit another pair of eyes, someone whose script notes have always been both solid and inspired, so I asked my former colleague Katherine Beacon if she would help.  She agreed.  It was reassuring when we met that the notes I had made for myself were notes that she had too, but she also had immensely useful and fundamental things to say in terms of plot and character, which made a second draft more enjoyable than challenging.  Rather than writing a draft immediately though, I did a new storyline, on which Katherine commented, and then a script, received more notes, did another script, and so on.

Meanwhile, I wanted to find a director who could realise and add to the eccentric vision.  I really wanted Darren R L Gordon to do it, but when we met he needed to be convinced with a new draft, which gave me further impetus to get the script right. His work on one of last year’s 24:7 plays made me feel he was the right choice and now, happily, he is on board.

24:7 runs an excellent ‘foot in the door’ scheme by which a drama student is attached to each production.  Having met them all at a scary but necessary production briefing day, there was one in particular who I thought would be exciting to work with, and who would, I hope, gain from the experience, so now I have Nicola Holt as my assistant producer.

Darren, Nicola and I are meeting next week to thrash through all the practical and creative things that need to be agreed and done, as we move on towards the show week of 19 to 26 July.  But I was greatly reassured to go to Oldham Coliseum on Friday night where short extracts from all of the festival plays were staged in the studio.  Everything felt as if it was moving in the right direction.  But there is a long way to go, and there are more drafts to be done as Darren considers his staging and actors bring their own insights to the piece.

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this, I’m working with the gang who used to be the Sketch in the City players and are now Cafe Society towards a ‘pop-up, site-specific’ sketch event in Chorlton at the end of June.  Of which more later.  Emboldened by the play, I have written my first sketch, but that may be a step too far.