TO MARK its 50th birthday, the Traverse Theatre is asking would-be writers to pen a 500-word play for the chance to win a year’s support to stage their own production.
Can you write a play that’s just 500 words long? That’s the challenge being issued by the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh this month, as it launches a search for 50 new writers. The Traverse’s writing competition marks the beginning of the theatre’s 50th birthday celebrations, which will continue throughout next year. The 50 people chosen will be mentored throughout the Traverse’s anniversary year, via workshops, panel discussions and one-to-one meetings, and the work they create will be showcased in a new writing festival. You don’t have to be an experienced playwright, or have written for the stage at all – in fact, if you have had more than two professional productions staged you cannot enter.
The Scotsman has a long relationship with this flagship Scottish theatre venue, whose work has won dozens of our Fringe First new writing awards over the years, so we’re very pleased to support the competition.
Today, to help inspire budding writers, we are exclusively printing brand new 500 word plays by two acclaimed Scottish writers – Zinnie Harris (writer of The Wheel and Further Than The Furthest Thing) and Kieran Hurley (creator of the shows Beats and Hitch).
To enter, submit your 500 word script to {http://www.traverse.submittable.com|traverse.submittable.com|Link to submit} by 14 November.
ANDREW EATON, ARTS EDITOR
Skylight - Zinnie Harris
A man walks into an empty room.
He looks around.
He opens a cupboard.
Looks inside, closes it again.
Looks under the sink.
Looks up at the ceiling.
A woman walks in.
Stuart: Now don’t get excited.
Meg: The carpets in the bedrooms are bang on, and the gate into the garden and they’ve left us a bottle of wine, complimentary.
Stuart: There’s a problem.
Meg: Wait a minute, I’ll see if there is a corkscrew.
Stuart: Meg?
Meg: What problem?
He points at the ceiling.
She looks up.
Meg: Oh!
Stuart: It’s a new house. It’s so new, its smells like the concrete is still wet.
Meg: Well maybe they …
Stuart: It’s a hole.
She peers at it.
Meg: Maybe they are coming back, maybe they haven’t finished. What are you doing?
Stuart: Cancelling the bankers’ order.
Meg: What?
Stuart: You know what these guys are like, you make the purchase they down their tools.
Meg: Wait a minute.
Stuart: They won’t come back, they’ve got their money that will be them.
Meg: We don’t know that.
Stuart: I’ve been here before. I’ve been ripped off before and I am not buying a house from men like that.
Meg: Stuart.
Stuart: Years it will take us to get compensation and that if …
Meg: But in all other ways …
Stuart: It has a hole in the roof. What other ways are there? Yes they managed to put the walls up straight, there is a floor, doors but, oh sorry we forgot about the roof.
Meg: You can see the sky.
Stuart: It’s a hole.
Beat.
Stuart: Pass me that, I need the number of the bank.
Meg: Can you just wait a minute, can we talk about this?
Stuart: What is there to talk about, if I can get through to the bank quick …
Meg: We’ve been dreaming of this house, of
waking up in it, living in it, planting a garden out the back.
Stuart: We aren’t buying it.
Meg: Because it isn’t quite finished, it isn’t quite perfect.
Stuart: There is a hole in the roof
Meg: Maybe it’s a feature.
Stuart: Don’t be ridiculous.
Meg: Maybe it’s supposed to let the light in, maybe it’s supposed to remind us of something.
Stuart: Like what?
Meg: Like the elements, like living under the sky.
Stuart: The rain and the snow and the wind, that will be great when they are coming through.
Meg: I like it.
Stuart: Don’t be absurd. It’s a mistake, a bit of shoddy workmanship. How can you like it? We can walk out the door, spend our money on somewhere else. What are you doing?
Meg: I’m checking.
Stuart: Checking what?
Meg: Look. It’s raining, yes, look out the front door. It’s pissing it down, our coats are both soaked, but in here, under the hole.
She holds out her hand
Stuart: Meg.
Meg: It’s dry.
He looks
Stuart: Maybe the rain blows the wind straight over or …
He looks up at the ceiling
She climbs on to the chair.
Meg: Give me a lift up.
Stuart: No.
Meg: Don’t be a dick.
Stuart: You’ve got to stop this…
Meg: And leave this thing to mystery. To always wonder?
He gives her a hand.
Stuart: They can do things with materials these days, they can …
Meg: They can’t stop the rain.
She has climbed up to the hole.
She looks out.
Stuart: OK, then tell me what you can see. The
same grotty view you can see from the kitchen, don’t tell me. Don’t mind me when you have to wipe the rain from your face. And the wind has blown your hair sideways. Are you going to come down? Meg?
She comes back down.
Stuart: What did you see?
Meg: You should go up.
Stuart: I don’t need to look out of a hole in a house that we aren’t buying.
Meg: Go up.
Stuart: Just tell me what you saw.
Meg: I saw a beach.
Stuart: Meg.
Meg: Children playing, that’s what I saw.
Stuart: We are nowhere near the sea.
Meg: You and me eating a picnic, baby on my lap …
Stuart: Listen if you are being funny …
Meg: Go up.
Stuart: I am wearing a suit.
Meg: Go up.
Stuart: An expensive suit and I have to be back at work in 20 minutes.
Meg: Stuart?
He sighs and takes his suit jacket off.
Stuart: You’ll have to give me a hand.
Meg: I will.
He goes up.
He looks out.
Beat.
He comes back down.
Meg: You see.
Stuart: It wasn’t a beach.
Meg: No? It wasn’t raining though was it?
He looks back up
Meg: Tell me what you saw.
Beat.
Stuart: I saw the same grotty view as from the kitchen.
Meg: You’re lying.
He looks back up.
He goes back up.
He looks out again.
He comes back down.
Meg: So what do you want to do?
Stuart: I’m going to go back to work.
Meg: And then what are you going to do?
Beat.
Stuart: I’m not sure.
Holyrood Press Room - Kieran Hurley
He enters.
He enters and he walks, solemnly.
Solemnly and with purpose.
Towards the podium.
They’ve set up a small podium you see in this, makeshift, I suppose, press room.
Committee Room 4, a makeshift press room.
For this.
We see microphones.
The podium right, is hooked up to all these microphones pointing.
Eagerly pointing towards his face. All sorts of microphone shapes and sizes pointing, ridiculous almost.
Like a cartoon, like a parody really.
Like a parody of a press room, yes that’s right.
Only it’s real. The weight
The weight of it.
It’s unbelievably real.
Yes.
Here in the makeshift press room.
Of the Holyrood parliament.
Here in Edinburgh.
Here.
He stands here.
Can we see it?
What?
Edinburgh? Can we see it?
Maybe we can. Maybe at this point we see a sort of, I don’t know, montage.
A montage of the city. Rooftops. Skylines. The financial centre.
Office workers with their Metros, a mother stuck in traffic, an old man in a Pilton high rise, closing his curtains.
His constituents.
His constituents, yes I suppose. Some of them.
A café in Leith, a young woman dabs cappuccino from her lips with a paper napkin.
Good image, nice.
Thanks.
Some schoolchildren crossing the street.
School kids, yes, great. A man, a man selling newspapers.
We can’t see the headlines.
No. In fact we can’t even hear. The whole thing.
The whole thing is silent.
Silently showing now the Castle of course, and Calton Hill, a silhouette, Holyrood, the parliament, where he inside he stands, here.
Establishment shots of the city, this city.
The city of his dreams.
Yes. Well no. That’s London. Or Paris maybe.
Sure. Of course.
This city. This.
This. Here.
Here.
On this monumental day
This day that, for him, is about to become monumental.
He shakes.
A close-up now. We see him shake. In his hands as he touches his notes.
A slight twitch between his index finger and his thumb.
His fingers leave a sweaty mark.
He is disgraced.
Do we want them to feel sorry him?
How do you mean?
Do we want them to feel? For him, now?
It’s difficult really. I suppose we want them to connect to sort of fleetingly understand to see him in a warmer, almost as though more human sort of circumstance.
A brief flirtation with empathy.
A brief flirtation with empathy, yes, that’s great. That’s really exactly it.
But ultimately.
Ultimately, what?
Ultimately do they feel sorry?
Well no. No, how could you?
Yes, I suppose that’s right. How could you, after this?
It’s brief. The empathy, it’s brief and ultimately hollow
He is hollow. A hollow husk of a man, quivering.
The cameras flash.
His shell hardens.
We’re going to need a good actor.
Yes. Absolutely, yes.
He goes to speak.
The cameras flash.
Cut.