Working in the Following Genres:
Sketches, Skits or Very Short Plays
Collections of Scripts
The plays.
"Went tonight and had a blast!"
"The spirit of the Grand Guignol is alive long after they all thought it dead and buried… And dismembered and burnt."
"Funny, disturbing, gory, did I mention funny?"
"They were amazing - had us all in the edge of our seats!!!""
"Tales that had us guessing and gulping"
"Deliciously dark."
"I didn't expect it to be this intellectually stimulating."
"A great and very different way to spend an evening."
Nothing I write is gratuitous. Everything is intended to have a very specific effect on the audience, just not always a pleasant one. Artaud would approve.
The pieces are built to stimulate conversation. They're built to be cheap and easy to stage. I do like to think they give the actors a challenge, but most of all they're built to stimulate the audience. |
The writer.
I came to drama late, having been raised in a working class community where posh things like drama didn't exist. This experience has come in very useful. I started acting at the Bradford Playhouse, where the Yorkshire Evening Post said I had "a natural gift for comedy". Sadly I was doing Hedda Gabler at the time.
From there we move to left wing agit-prop theatre, and for a large chunk of the late eighties you could have found me jumping around in a silly rubber nose giving Margaret Thatcher a stern ticking off. Just a few short years later she resigned. Make of that what you will.
For the next lot of years I toured small scale productions, until I fell out of love with the whole thing. For a bit. It was in the small scale venues that I was happiest. The pub rooms, the community centres, the working folks' clubs, this is where it felt the most direct, the most real. So in 2023 I started Contortium, currently one of the country's biggest Grand Guignol theatres. |
The Grand Guignol.
In 1897 a police clerk started a true crime theatre. It morphed into a horror theatre and became a legend. It finally closed its doors in 1962, but today most people have heard of it. It's still in the language. The Grand Guignol.
Why do I like it? Because it fits perfectly with the ultra-portable, microbudget touring work I've been doing. Because the short pieces mean I can experiment with formats and new writers. You can afford to take risks when the risk is only one sixth of your show. |
I like it because it lessens the risk for audiences. Going to a proper theatre is expensive. There's travel and babysitters. I bought two drinks in my local "proper" theatre not long ago and it cost me eighteen quid, which I'm clearly still recovering from. We do a ten quid pub show and there are six short plays, so your chances of liking *something* is much higher. And you can potentially walk to and from the venue, and you're only paying local community club prices at the bar.
I like it because we mix horror in with cheeky sex comedies and they both have long and honourable histories in British theatre, and perennial interest. Contortium plays are easy to produce and easy to stage. They're cheap. They offer a low risk of participation. The lower the risk of participation the greater the chance of participation. More audience. Bigger audience. New audience. I'm on a crusade here. |
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