As Liverpool’s Write Now festival prepares to return for a second year, Laura Davis meets the writers
WRITE Now, Liverpool’s festival of one-act plays, returns for a second year next week, with eight new productions being performed on rotation at the Actors Studio. Here’s what to expect:
Excess Baggage
Newlyweds Jack and Kristy are in the airport awaiting their honeymoon but, when a stranger leaves his bag with Jack, Kristy’s suspicions are raised. Perhaps he is a terrorist, planning to blow the airport up? One thing is certain – they are now in too deep and can’t leave the bag without becoming suspects themselves.
Liverpool-based writer David P Griffiths, 28, says: “I am interested in what makes people react the way that they do. How do people take an innocent scenario like an old man leaving his bag behind at an airport and twist it? Why do people see the sinister side?
“Everybody has a story about something silly that’s happened to them at an airport – be that detained by security, leaving something you shouldn't have in your hand luggage or a mad dash across the terminal, kids in tow. It seemed a naturally farcical setting to examine society’s fears and phobias.”
Mrs Bojangles
An unconventional romance between teenagers Leila, a Muslim, and Paul, a boy from the “wrong side of the tracks”, is helped and hindered by Mrs Brigitte Bower, a retired showgirl who elects herself their “go-between”.
But when Paul’s brother attempts to hold up Leila’s father’s shop, Paul is forced to choose where his loyalties lie.
Liverpool-based writer Stephanie Blakeborough, 36,Šsays: “It seems that every time you turn on the news these days, there is a story about terrorism and Muslim extremists so I decided to write a story about a Muslim character who is just trying to live her life, figure out if the boy that she likes likes her and pass her A-Levels.
“I decided to give Paul an ambition to live a different kind of life from that of his family, but I did my best to acknowledge that he had a lot of forces working against him.”
