DRAMA
THE PLAY’S THE THING Max Parfitt (Year 10) was one of Dulwich’s hopeful young playwrights who took part in this year’s New Views competition. With a little help and a large amount of perseverance, he has turned his initial ideas for characters into a script… I n the past year, six of us have written a half-hour play, three of which have made it onto the longlist of a national competition. Surely writing an article on the experience can’t be too difficult? Back in September I received an email inviting me to join a group of boys in Year 10 involved with a project run by the National Theatre. The New Views scheme is a playwriting course that takes place over several months, culminating in each participant writing a 30-minute play to enter into a national competition. This involves a number of workshops, as well as opportunities to visit the theatre and to work with professionals to improve our writing. The winning play would be performed by professional actors at the National Theatre. The twelve of us who agreed to this challenge met with Miss Prendergast and Miss Cross each Friday lunch break for 40 minutes of writing or inspiration. We were each given a picture and told to write whatever came into our heads. We looked into everything we saw, everything we read, to find a topic. Something good, something gripping, something which deserved a play, or at least an attempt at one. As part of this quest, we saw two productions at the National Theatre, Our Country’s Good and Wonder.Land , and attended a workshop where writer Winsome Pinnock shared her knowledge gained from a BA in English and Drama from Goldsmiths, University of London, and helped us develop our thoughts into characters. By the end of the day, we had our characters and a 30-minute script seemed like no time at all. We did, however, still have to write it. It turns out it is quite a large jump between an idea and a script. You sit down bursting with ideas and your characters refuse to do what you want them to. You can have the best plot plan in the world, but however much you beg your character he looks back at you from the page and refuses to carry out your orders. You are at a dead end. I would love to conjure up the image of sitting scribbling at a desk, suddenly bringing your fist down
upon the table, crumpling up your work and lobbing it into an overflowing paper bin. Sadly however, with our computerised world, there is nothing so romantic. Let’s just say my ‘delete’ key has faded somewhat. Two terms, 25 pages and 4,000 words later… After our last talk with Winsome Pinnock, our plays finally left our digital hands and flew across to the drama department for their final e-journey to the National in mid- April. Recently we were very excited to find out that three of us – Cameron Hooper, Harry Goodwin and me – had made it through to the long list. New Views, as I mentioned at the start, was a wonderful experience. I feel I can speak for everyone who took part in saying it was a lot of fun and there is one thing we have all taken away with us: when writing a play, a director, an English teacher and a playwright are possibly the three most helpful people you can have around.
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