Birdsong Adapted from Sebastian Faulks’s novel. The Haymarket, Basingstoke, 24th January 2013
Dramatist Rachel Wagstaff is quite right in saying “Birdsong is in an incredibly powerful novel”. As a “literary novel”, it’s a haunting piece set across different times and locations. Sadly, this adaptation does not do the book full justice and leading inevitably to a disappointing theatrical experience. The Amiens pre-war scenes where Stephen Wraysford meets...
An Idea – An Extract from Dogtooth Chronicals
AN IDEA Wolfgang, Dreamscape Beneath my feet the cold ground is hardened. There were ridges ploughed into the Earth long ago, when it was soft and giving. Now it is as concrete, desperate to trip me and crunch on my bones. I see a figure in the distance. I pray a gentleman, stood solitary in...
Writer’s Block…
WRITER’S BLOCK Roxanne Ratcliffe, Next to Nowhere The empty white page bleeds to an empty white world. I’m walking and yet there’s nothing. The pale sky merges to the pale snowy landscape, except there is no landscape, no trees, no shapes. Just an expanse of white page, blank. Maybe here I am truly lost. Spinning...
First Look: The Greater Thief
The day the man at the end of the road got shot was a fairy tale day. It was a day I’d spent in another world wondering if my prince would trot round the corner and along the grisly north London street on a white horse. I thought it all through thoroughly, as I sat...
Pumpkin flavoured delights…
The oversees caffeine giant strikes again with an American twist on a festive tradition. Ahhh STARBUCKS™, you are sometimes so wonderful… For weeks now Americans have been bombarding the internet with pumpkins. Treats of all kinds have been appearing because of Thanksgiving and Halloween but mainly they have been boasting about the latest PUMPKIN flavoured creation to be adapted to coffee or iced treat...
The Often Overlooked Value of a Second Hand Book…
People who look through the dirt encrusted window of a second hand bookshop and see nothing but a dark, musty cellar of a room, full of aging tombs nobody wants; you are deluded. Those who peep, nervously through the highly polished window of a second hand book shop and see an immaculate and expansive, scholarly scene...
Death of a Screenwriter; Part One
His lifetime spent at a desk, blank pages hold him at gunpoint. Relationships as fleeting as the British summer, and his wealth; pocket money. ‘Why be a writer’ he says, it’s a cold truth that all screenwriters have to put themselves through, the trouble is most are blinded by their aspirations and dreams, each letter...
A notecard, tucked in your back pocket.
I love the way you dance around this, delightfully like a pearl-soft, peach-with-the-skin-on secret. I love all the little words tumbling down, carefully like beads of snow or capsules of fire. I love it nearly enough to resort to form, but you know me better than that. So I grind up my girlish guts into...
