PLAYS

As soon as I started acting at Oxford, I started writing plays. My shelves soon filled up with a whole series of Methuen Modern playscripts in their comforting (albeit unreasonably expensive) blue and white covers, and I often wondered what it must be like to have your surname on the spine of one of them. (Still wondering, by the way.) But the best way to learn any craft is to watch a master at work, and the likes of Peter Nichols, Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett, Alan Ayckbourn, Harold Pinter and Peter Shaffer provided the best training in the most vibrant medium in the most wonderful language in the world.

My very first play, A Change of Air in 1975, was a full-length, two-act number set in a university student’s room and it was all about me and my best friend and one of his girlfriends whom I fancied. Of course it was. I was nineteen, what do you expect, imagination? Nevertheless it won a local competition and was put on at the Arts Centre in King Square, Bristol in the summer of 1976. I think it got a few laughs but I honestly can’t remember much about it now, I spent the whole night shaking with adrenaline. I don’t think I’d ever been more excited in my life. Since then there have been many other plays of varying lengths and ambitions, some of which did well, some of which never left my work room, where they remain to this day under lock and key.

One way of seeing your work out there is to bully whichever amateur company you’re acting with at the time to put your stuff on. This was the case with Three Chairs, A Spot, and… (I never really decided whether you were supposed to say “dot dot dot” as part of the title or just leave it hanging), which a group of mates and I performed in the Burton Rooms in Oxford in 1978, a few weeks before our finals. I don’t know how they all did. I certainly ploughed mine, what with all that writing, directing and performing getting in the way of the revision. Light of Desire was a monologue commissioned by the Playwrights Company in 1982 and went on in a gallery space just a few doors down from the Bristol Old Vic in King Street. (So near…) Play on Words (1983) was entered into that year’s Bristol One-Act Play competition and came nowhere (sorry, guys), though The Double Beaux in 1988 fared rather better at the Original One-Act Playwriting Festival in Bridgwater, winning an ensemble acting prize for its energetic cast. My most recent completed work for the stage was a full-blooded drama based on the life of King Alfred called The Wolf in the West. It won an award from the Somerset Fellowship of Drama in 2005, though it still awaits any full-scale production. If I have high hopes for any of my plays, it’s that one. But I’m still tinkering. Maybe one day.

That’s the trouble with plays. I’m with Tom Stoppard on this (as on so many other things, the man’s a genius) – a play never seems to find a final form, there’s always another refinement, a further change you can make. The best thing the world can do to a playwright – or any artist, come to that – is wait till the work is finished, then immediately beat them into insensibility so they can’t keep farting about with it.

CONSCIENCE: (entering) Is that really the best way you can express that thought?

RAS: (thinks) Possibly not. But it’ll do for now. Shall we move on?

CONSCIENCE: I thought you’d never ask.

BOTH: Ha ha ha!

(exeunt. Curtain)