Stuart Ardern
Writer of pantomime scripts, one-act plays
and really wild stuff
Stuart ArdernWriter of pantomime scripts, one-act plays |
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| Stuart first appeared on the stage at the age of ten in a school production of Mother Goose. "I don't recall who wrote the script - it was a published play, rather than a home-grown effort - but what I do remember is that it wasn't particularly funny." It took him a long time to turn his hand to attempting to write something funnier, but once he started writing, a stream of successful shows followed quickly. His approach to writing pantomime scripts starts with a storyline, but the simple story is not enough to keep everyone involved in the show. "All plays sit within a cultural framework. One of the sources of humour is to take a familiar cultural reference point and to approach it from an unexpected angle. The difficulty is that the more access we have to information, the more fragmentary our cultural references become. I can't assume that you have read the same books or watched the same TV programmes as me." Stuart's approach to this dilemma is to throw in ideas from many sources. "Very few people will twig every joke, but there should be enough to keep everyone amused." |
| Frequently, there are themes running through the pantomime scripts which have nothing to do with the main story.
These often start as small ideas and develop into major obsessions, such as the amphibian fixation in Puss-in-Boots. In Dick
Whittington, a habit of throwing in lines from Shakespeare turned into a full character. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves developed a theme of fairy tales, so that within the script
there are references to Hansel and Gretel, The King's New Clothes, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty,
and a host of other familiar tales. With Robin
Hood and the Singing Nun, many of the cross-references are to films. Besides the obvious source of singing
nuns, there are guest appearances of Gone with the Wind, Deliverance, Lord of the Rings and
even Apocalypse Now. "There are even one or two hidden jokes. Things that I put in to amuse myself and left in because they didn't do any harm. In the first production of Cinderella, when the director was discussing a particular character, she always ended up describing the person as stupid. This is probably true, but I got my revenge in Aladdin by naming one of the characters Ting Ming, which can be translated from Chinese as 'Quite Bright'." This crossword puzzle approach to writing has led from pantomimes into other forms, particularly the one-act mysteries. "The idea is to present the audience with a puzzle and then twist the solution so that something unexpected happens, but not so unexpected that the audience feels cheated." Hence in Miss Glossop Comes to Tea, and Miss Glossop's Weekend Break, the audience is led through the story by an incompetent detective, whilst Dead Ringer features crosses and double crosses. |
| Stuart Ardern is English. (Genealogists will be able to pinpoint his home town within a 25 mile radius.) After brief spells in the Netherlands and California, he is back working from a base in the South of England. Stuart is the boss of Lazy Bee Scripts. He acts, and often directs his own plays, but is unhappy directing himself ("I don't do what I'm told"). Stuart is married with two children. He says he is younger than he looks, or older, depending on how old you think he looks. |
| Geoff Bamber | |||
| Georgina Cawood | |||
| Julie Cordingley | |||
| Jon Dwyer | |||
| Gerald P. Murphy | |||
| Sue Gordon | |||