I’ll talk about my plays and what I’m about when it comes to writing them.
The first two plays I wrote were the Con and the Medium. The Con is about two old friends who go into their local for a drink and are approached by a stranger who is carrying a shoe box, which he places carefully down on the table in front of them. Having gained their attention he tells them that the box contains a world. It is the exact replica of the world they live on but in miniature. He tells them that it is stopped from bouncing around in the box by a team of small men who hold their arms up and the world revolves between their arms. There are a team of these tiny men because their arms do get tired so they need relieving every now and again. He then tells them that the responsibility is getting too much for him. He leaves them to talk while he gets another drink. When he re-joins them they express an interest in owning this box so he talks them into giving him all their savings. Once he has their money he walks out, picking up a shopping bag full of shoe boxes on the way.
The Medium is about a recently widowed lady who, along with her daughter, goes to see a medium and try to contact her late husband. The reason being that, at the reading of the will, her husband left all his money to a mystery person, and she wants to know who this person is. There is a twist at the end.
These are short plays of about 15 to 20 minutes. Both need three players. The Con three men. The Medium three ladies.
The theatre group I was with performed these two plays in their Christmas show of 2008. In 2010 we were rehearsing Hobson’s Choice in the theatre of a local school. The changing room was a classroom adjacent to the stage. One day I turned up for the rehearsal and walked across the stage, from there to the dressing room. As I was entering the dressing room I saw the director, the chairman, his wife, who was secretary, and two other people standing near the door at the far end of the classroom. I heard the director saying to the others. ‘We’ll not perform any more of his plays as long as he has a hole in his arse.’ She looked up and saw me then ran out of the room quickly followed by the chairman and the rest. For the rest of the evening she would not look at me.
Was I put off writing more plays? No! Because writing is my hobby. It is an escape into a fantasy world where I can’t be hurt or harmed.
Shortly after this I was watching The Two Ronnies on TV and they used to do a sketch with two yokels, usually stood next to, or leaning on, a five bar gate. I had this idea to write something similar, but placed my two old men in a bar and called them Al and Bert. I wrote a number of short plays about those two. Christmas, The Holiday, The Election. They were fun to write about, because you can sit in any public bar in the world and you can see two men just like them. Sat at their table with a drink and putting the world to rights al-and–bert-2 Of course I had to invent families for them to talk about. Al is married to Annie, they have a daughter called Elsie. Bert is married to Mary, but they couldn’t have children. Then in later life Mary started to go blind, which came as a bombshell on Bert. However they gave her a guide dog.
In 2010 I was told by the doctor that I had high cholesterol, which shocked me because I thought that it was only overweight people who got that. When I told my good friend Pamela, who proof read all my plays, she simply said ‘why don’t you write a play about it?’ I sat on that thought for a while then started writing. The three characters are Tom, Dick and Harry, original names I know, but they were only supposed to be working names, but they stuck.
Harry! The Mouse who wanted a whole 