From Bath to Cork with Baby Grace

My first play, "The Stakeknife in the Graveyard" is being read in the Cork Art Theatre one-act play competition.  I’ll know in January how the judges rate it. 

I’ve had a review from someone who better remain nameless because he’s not given me permission to quote him. (See below for that review.)

My second play is much more ambitious. 

It’s a full length, three act number, with at least six important parts.  After you’ve been to it, you’ll have a great feel for America in the second half of the nineteenth century.

I’ve been building up the characters and making wonderful progress.  But not one line of dialogue was written, until yesterday.  That’s when I had the thought of writing the play on my mobile phone.

Nokia E51 has a notes function.  A place where I can jot down notes, fragments of dialogue, like…

"Did you know Abraham?"

"Who?"

"Abe Lincoln?"

"Now how could someone like me know the President of the United States?"

"I did."

"Oooh. The big double double-yous knows the big men does he?  Good for you darling."

"He was your Captain… your Captain.  You  must have know him.  I didn’t ask if you’d met him."

"Oh, all right.  Of course I knew him.  Wasn’t he the reason I changed sides in the Civil War…"

If I write another hundred or two such snippets, all I’ll have to do is glue them together. And Bob’s your uncle.  I wonder if anyone’s done it before? Written a play on their mobile? 

If I can think of it, someone’s done it. Maybe readers will enlighten me…

I googled "writing a play on my mobile phone" and this came up:

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First review of "The Stakeknife in the Graveyard" (after reading the script only)

"I read the Stakeknife in the Graveyard this morning which I am 
assuming is largely about Freddie Scappaticci, or the kind of men 
who end up torturing their own flesh and blood and the dehumanising 
effects of the sort of war fought in NI. I think the play expresses 
well the kind of isolation that is the inevitable outcome of a 
conflict where neighbours and families are thrown into conflict with 
each other, blurring identities, destroying personality, perverting 
normal human feeling and rendering loyalty meaningless. The location, 
the sparse dialogue - more internal than conversational - the 
innuendo, the hints rather than the revelations, all serve to veil 
full exposition and to heighten the sense of a pervasive unease and 
sinister occlusion. Aodh’s final outburst on page 33 goes some way 
towards a catharsis, but with the arrival of the shadowy overseeing 
figure in the graveyard, we are back to business as usual - the 
ongoing accounting and recording of the list of the dead and the 
undoubted grim promise of more.

Now, where did I leave that whiskey bottle?!"

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I’ll be forever grateful to that author.  I couldn’t resist sharing those finely chosen words, that prose I admire so much.