Polly Tisdall, the current recipient of the Kevin Elyot Award, is publishing an audio diary, ‘Kevin Elyot, Crop Circles & Me’ as part of her residency at the Theatre Collection as she explores the Kevin Elyot archive and her own writing practice. The annual award established in 2016, generously funded by an endowment from members of Kevin’s family, supports a writer-in-residence at the Theatre Collection to inspire a new dramatic work or other creative or academic outcome. It is given in memory of Kevin Elyot (1951-2014) – an alumnus of the University of Bristol Drama Department – and the influence he has had on writing and the Arts.
Episode 2 is available to listen to below along with a transcript. If you haven’t listened to episode 1, please head to our earlier blog post. Polly’s audio diary is also available to listen to via Polly’s website with new episodes being published throughout her residency.
Dec 2024 Dreaming in Doodles Transcript
So today I’m in the Reading Room at the archive about to delve back into three big green boxes full of scripts and programmes and press cuttings and letters. And I’m still focusing on My Night with Reg. One of Elyot’s most famous plays, as I mentioned before, and at the moment I’m just really intrigued to understand as much as I can about his process of writing that play.
And I’m just looking back through my notes over the last few visits that I’ve made here and one thing that just keeps coming back to me and standing out, which is less about the play and more about, I suppose, as playwrights, how we dream. Even as we’re making notes to ourselves.
There’s a note that Kevin Elyot’s written after lots of different ideas of what form the play could take and ideas for through lines, many of which are very comic. He’s then made a little note in capitals, it’s sort of like a doodle. And it reads ‘Miriam Margolyes, Alan Rickman in Making It by Kevin Elyot’. And then he’s done a similar thing with My Night with Reg. He’s sketched out a playbill which reads ‘Coming next at the Bush Theatre’.
And I think there’s just something so human about these doodles. Maybe they seem egotistical, but I don’t know how real they were for Kevin, or how fantastical really. I may well come to find that out, but I think for me they just resonate because as artists we have to dream and we have to dream big and dare to imagine that this, these notes that we’re making in a spiral bound notebook in our house or in a cafe somewhere, or in a library, however mundane they might seem, we have to imagine them growing into something so much bigger and so much more public. And we always have to think about the audience and about the actors and about all of these elements that are going to come together to make our writing live. And I just love seeing these, these doodles, this sort of dreaming by doodling that Elyot does in his notes to himself.
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So, I’m just in the little kitchenette for staff and volunteers, that’s just outside the Theatre Collection Reading Rooms. And once again having a little break, some tea and yeah, I’m still thinking about this idea of dreaming and it’s making me consider how I dream, how I kind of I suppose find my way into the vision, the big vision for the stories I want to tell and what helps me make that live, particularly in the early stages. I’m really right at the beginning with this new play that I’m thinking about and that I pitched for this award.
And at the moment I know that there are three characters and I’ve got a kind of sense of where they come from. One of them, I think is very much this Wiltshire woman. This lady who lives very rurally, who I mentioned in my last audio diary. And then I think I’ve got a Bristolian, a young man. And then an American as well.
So I sort of know that much, but when I’m dreaming into those characters at the moment, I’ve realised, very different to the notes I’m finding in Kevin’s scribblings, I’m casting them with with people that I know – with friends, other actors who I know from drama school, for example, or people that I’ve worked with before and that I have had fun working with. And that’s interesting, I suppose in some ways it’s making me think, should I be dreaming bigger?
And that’s not because I don’t want to work with my friends and with those people. But there’s something interesting about what Kevin’s doing there I think when he’s dreaming about his plays and who might perform them. I feel like he’s thinking really big. Whether or not that ends up happening, whether he gets Alan Rickman, in fact, I know now from looking through the productions of My Night with Reg today that he doesn’t get Alan Rickman on stage for that. I don’t believe Alan Rickman ends up in any of his work that I’m aware of so far, from my reading of his notes. But maybe it’s about helping him to think really big and to believe in his work.
And actually today I had a little sneaky Google in the middle of my my archive research on Kevin because this has got me thinking that I think very local with my work, which is maybe a good thing. But I don’t really go out there and consider what are the big theatres who run playwriting schemes and where could I be sending off my scraps of writing to?
And maybe I should be doing more of that. So I looked up the Royal Court, which you would have thought that I would have done many times before, but I haven’t. I’ve been very focused on Bristol and the South West and I think that is great and I’m very passionate about regional work and I want to write stuff that is about this region in many ways, and can be staged here. But it is good to think a little bit beyond my immediate surroundings, I think and beyond the people that I know because it sort of puts an onus on the writing, on the work, to be excellent. It feels like a challenge. So that’s where I’m at and I think that’s the inspiration that I’m taking away today is to think a little bit bigger.