If you’re interested, this post is all about the ideas and concept behind my play Boy-friend (which you can read here).
It couldn’t have ended up more different from the original idea, to be honest. My friend, and co-worker at the time Becca (yes, I named Becky for her) told me this story…
She had this friend, who was gay. They’d gone on holiday together to Spain. Near the end of their holiday, out of the blue, he asks her to sleep with him. Why? Because he wanted to check he was really gay.
Becca didn’t, but the story was funny, and I thought it’d make a good comedy. I started writing it, but for some reason, I couldn’t make it funny. I wrote and wrote but nothing even close to a joke ended up on the paper. In the end, I just decided to write what I evidently wanted to, and it just came out a whole lot darker. Sometime when you write, it’s effortless. It just feels like you’re remembering a story, and all you have to do is write it. For the first three quarters of this script, it was like that for me. Then the easiness stopped, and I was stuck for a good few months.
Until I saw this:
I’m not a massive fan of Skins (well, series one and two were brill anyway), but it was on the TV, muted, while I was writing one night. When I started writing again the next day, this image was stuck in my head. I still have no idea what happens in the actual episode, but I shamelessly took that image and used it. That’s how the final scenes came to be.
I’m not sure I’ve explained the ideas behind Boy-friend very well. I think I just wanted to write a play about unrequited-love-gone-horribly-wrong, which it really is. And for a dark story, there are some funny bits too. Most of Becky’s dream sequences made me laugh when I thought of them!
In the spirit of my new page (robcurrie.tumblr.com/writing!), I thought I’d write a bit about where the plays came from, inspiration-wise. So I’ll start with The Aging Process.
So here’s me and the gang in a village called Comrie. It’s not far from Dundee, but we all rented a house there for a few days and called it a holiday. Four days and nights of heavy drinking, board games, and walking in the forest trying to find our way home (surely it’s this way?). It was amazing.
When we were on the bus heading home, I noticed this teenage boy sitting in a knock-off leather jacket, surrounded on all sides by old women. And I laughed at the image of it, but I had to identify as well. I’m from a tiny village like Comrie myself, and I’ve been that boy. I even had a similar jacket, and I will try to find photographic evidence of this. That was the start of the idea for the play - the boy surrounded by old women. I wrote a few scenes, called the boy Max, and set it in Comrie (it’s not named in the script, but in my head, that’s where it is!).
The story clicked into place a few weeks later. I was walking around back home, and went past the old-folks home by the beach. It’s got a conservatory, and the ladies always seem to sit there. And that’s when Peg came to life - new to the home, and furious to be there.
I had a teenager, and an elderly woman. I generally feel like three is a good number of characters, and the missing demographic seemed to be middle age. So Henry arrived, mid-crisis, in his Porsche. The Porsche started as a cliche, but turned out to be very useful when I got towards the final scenes!
So yeah, that’s about it. I hope you found that interesting, and apologies if you haven’t read the play and this made no sense! :D
Been making changes, I’ve gotten rid of the seperate Tumblr I had for writing stuff, because I … just couldn’t remember why I’d made it a thing on it’s own! So I’ve added a new page to this blog where you can read a couple of plays I wrote for radio. That’s all I’ve put up at the moment, but I’m gonna add more things, like short stories and stuff very soon!
A new launch video for the new Vimeo. Watch and see what’s in store!
video by m ss ng p eces
I want new Vimeo!!
EDIT: Got it! :D
(via mattschwarz)
Owen Pallett - The Great Elsewhere
Having a Skype conversation with my family makes me miss them more than just a phone call.
I generally think my job is pretty boring, but I feel like I want write a little. Just got to thinking about the customers that come in, and how some of them are really nice. I’ve worked there for almost 2 years now and sort of gotten to know the regulars. One lady who always gets a cappucino brought in her holiday photos of New York at Christmas to show me. One guy gave me a book on Yoga to read. One man tells me about his boxing matches. Another tells me about how he’s having his second baby, and he’s terrified. It’s a nice kind of social-ness, but the weird thing is I know none of their names (except the Yoga guy, he introduced himself). I think in a job with not a lot to shout about, being able to chat and make a kind of community with the people who come in is actually pretty good.
