Thursday night was brilliant...

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Thursday night was brilliant because I got to hear Alien for the first time. For those of you that don’t know what Alien is, it’s the play I’ve written that the Black Company will perform at Nostell Priory. The story line is simplistic – An alien lands on Earth and meets people at Nostell Priory…so it’s not going to tax peoples narrative understanding…like many of the Nostell Priory plays and there’s a few of them now…it’s the characters that matter…what they learn about themselves and each other through the course of the play…and it’s the characters that create the entertainment.

However back to the reason why Thursday was brilliant…there’s nothing better than being there as a cast respond to what you’ve written for the first time…obviously as long as that response is positive which it was on Thursday. I don’t know about other writers but when I write plays the characters and situation takes up such a large part of my head until the play is complete…I know the characters so much more deeply than I can ever set down on paper in order that the play still be entertaining…and the sequence of events is so vividly alive in my brain…so when it’s done and finished you lose them for a while and in amongst the sense of achievement there’s a little bit of loss…so imagine how brilliant it is to hear them actually come to life for the first time with a cast of actors you trust implicitly with your work making that happen…and on top of that you know it’s only the start of a process you’ll get to enjoy up until performance where those characters and moments and relationships you’ve invented will be developed into something even richer in rehearsals and further bonus still, you’ll get to share them with the audience that comes to watch the play and hear the responses and watch the reactions once more…

So yeah as the end of the first part of the process and the start of the second bit…Thursday night was brilliant…

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