Creating and encouraging small scale grass roots theatre.
Offering and producing scripts that are built to be cheap and easy to stage.
Taking away the barriers to theatre, encouraging creativity in everyone.
What you're seeing are plays and notes written for my own group, Contortium Theatre, which tours modern Grand Guignol currently around West Yorkshire. The pieces here were written to a challenge:
The dream? The dream is that you and a bunch of your fellow maniacs will be sitting around a table, in a pub or café, wanting to make theatre. You will look at each other and say "we'd love to, but we can't afford, or we haven't got..." And then someone will say "well we could do a couple of Cheap Thrills. You can do Cheap Thrills with pretty much nothing, and that'll at least get us started," and you will. You will launch with the aid of my plays.
The dream is that the pieces here will encourage anyone to have a go. Remove barriers to participation. That anyone will be able to pick up a couple of these little scripts, put them together into an evening, and have a go. That in pub rooms, and studios, and community centres all over the world potentially, my little scripts will be the encouragement people need to have a go at theatre. They'll get them started. That'd be good.
For those not familiar, Grand Guignol was a style of theatre that occupied its own, very special place in Parisian Theatre, from 1897 to 1962. It was never all that big, in fact it was tiny really; one converted little chapel up a side street, but it exerted a fascination that generated a legend that persists to this day. It was a horror theatre, famed for its magnificent, to the point of borderline comical, gore. It gave playwrights license to go to places more respectable theatres would run screaming from. When they tried to open a branch of the Grand Guignol theatre in London in the 1920s, the Establishment HATED it and finally killed it. Which is always a good sign.
Grand Guignol arranged its shows as an evening of short pieces. This is genius, especially if your audience isn't used to the theatre - if they don't like a piece then there's another one coming in ten minutes. They only have to hold concentration for ten minutes. Nothing outstays its welcome.
It allows you to explore everywhere and you can do social issues - you can put serious social issues in; there's a silly comedy just before it, and a guy getting eaten by space rats straight afterward, you can do whatever you want with the time inbetween.
That's changed since I put this site up. A lot of the pieces have been published by Lazybee plays. They handle the licenses for full and longer runs, however I still have a budget for self-promotion, so I can still offer (I need a decent name for basically straight swaps - one night's rights for singing the play's praises. It'll come to me).
For bigger audiences and longer runs we're off to Lazybee for a proper license.
Have been removed as they're in the process of being published by a proper publisher. I'll put them back once the licensing is clear.