Just the other day I was asked 'How did you come up with the idea for PLOT?' Good question. Where do stories come from? The answer in this case, and, I suspect in many other instances, is from a chance remark that sparks the question- what if?
Before PLOT was created, I was fooling around with some ideas for a one act play to be entered into a local drama festival. The deadline for applications was approaching and I wasn't happy with anything I had written- I wanted to find something original where I could go beyond previous pantomime restrictions.
Early one morning in August 2018, I was travelling to Oxford with my husband to a routine hospital appointment when I received a text message from my daughter Hannah. Last night she had an odd dream about a Guy Fawkes Musical and a bonfire on the village green ( just outside the village hall where we rehearse and stage our plays). As she expected, I found this highly amusing and joked that it was my new panto called PLOT. By the time I reached the waiting room, we had shared a few silly messages about high camp chorus lines and left it at that.
I couldn't leave it though. As I sat in the hospital cafe with a mug of tea and a bacon sandwich, prepared for the usual long wait, I wondered: what might a high camp Guy Fawkes Musical look like? I took out my notebook and began to scribble down a story which, with a few tweaks, and some research became PLOT. By the middle of the month, I had a title, one song, a beginning and an end.
Between August 2018 and February 2019, the script was completed, edited and accepted by the festival committee. We also set up some preview shows in a joint venture with Peppered Wit.
In February 2019 I assembled my dream team, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Except this play isn’t based on historical evidence. I made it all up. As Jamie says in Act 1 Scene 2:
" It’s what we ACTUAL play-writers call a reimagining based on actual events. It’s a metaphor. Or is it an allegory? One or the other. Anyway, its history nouveau- the critics will love it."
And some of them did!
