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 3 is available to listen to below along with a transcript. If you haven’t listened to earlier episodes, please head to the previous Kevin Elyot Award blog posts. Polly’s audio diary is also available to listen to via Polly’s website with new episodes being published throughout her residency.
Jan 2025: Pinning it Down transcript
I’m just opening one of my green boxes.
I’ve been through quite a few of these now and I suppose having slightly got over the kind of initial excitement of just seeing Elyot’s notes and his handwriting and all of that kind of fun bit of delving into this archive, I suppose what’s really striking me now is how rigorous Elyot is, how he questions his decisions as a writer and really grapples with how he’s creating meaning and what it is that he’s trying to say and he really tries to get to the bottom of that. And that’s just really helpful to see.
So just one example of him playing with structure and trying to pin himself down: I’m going to share with you some notes that he’s made here when he’s playing with some ideas for a piece. He’s written ‘a possible through line, a person who’s always let things drift, been taken advantage of, suddenly decides to affront’. He’s written affront, but I presume he means confront, anyway, ‘affront his destiny, resolutions, new lease of life, change of surroundings and lifestyle, etc but then’ those are in capitals, ‘but then fate takes the upper hand and he falls a victim to cancer but keep it comic also cancer rather than AIDS, because that’s another irony he decided to remain celibate but look how good it does him. PS The Lover is a shit’, brackets, ‘may be a prostitute’, close brackets, ‘and’ in capitals ‘he inherits everything and’ in capitals ‘he fucks around despite AIDS. The Russian roulette syndrome. So lots of AIDS chat, but cancer’s the killer’.
So he’s kind of sketching out there, I guess the whole, the whole structure in a very broad brushstrokes, but really getting down for himself on the page what this is going to be and how he’s going to up the stakes. And then he’s written later on, a few pages on, the whole sequence of the play is of plans being thwarted. And then he’s noted to himself, ‘put into dramatic action above ideas – a plan is worked out, only to be dashed’.
So it’s just really evident here that he’s got this idea, he’s got this sense of it, he’s got this character. He’s working out what the ironies are of the piece and how he can really stretch that and emphasise it. And then he’s noting to himself that has to be visible, we have to see it happen in the action of the play. So he’s a very – he seems very conscious or keen to make conscious for himself what is he’s trying to say and how he’s going to do it.
And maybe that’s just obvious that as good playwrights, we should be doing that. Good playwrights in sort of quotation marks. Who knows what that what means, what a good process looks like. But it’s very useful for me to see because I think most of the time when I’m thinking about a piece or writing a piece, I’m not always that clear about exactly what it is I want to say. There’s often several things, a number of things that are kind of crowding in that I want to say or I want to draw attention to, but it’s quite rare that I that I think I go through my ideas and my action in this way and consider how to amp it up. Or the best way to show that theme. I think that’s absolutely something that I should be doing and I want to approach this next play, The Crop Circle Cafe, as it’s working-titled a bit more in that spirit, I think it needs it. I think the idea that I have for that piece requires more of this type of thinking.
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Right, so I’ve I’ve come home after my visit to the archive today and on the back of that experience of looking at how Elyot plans, or at least begins to structure and how he asks himself those questions and tries to to pin himself down. I’ve tried to do a similar thing with Crop Circle Cafe and I realise I haven’t shared in this audio diary yet even the starting point concept, so I should do that.
So my initial idea, my starting point for the Crop Circle Cafe, working title, is this cafe that I used to go to when I was? Maybe about 12? with my family on an A road in Wiltshire and it was quite a, it was sort of like a temporary hut sort of style building at the side of the road. But the owner had done it up inside with all these photos of crop circles and all this kind of paraphernalia to do with alien sightings in that part of Wiltshire. And I’ve always remembered the cafe. We only went there a few times but I found it fascinating as a young person, and I still find fascinating that kind of mash up of beliefs, I think, and superstitions and ancient traditions and rituals and military land that all coexist in that part of Wiltshire, very close to where I grew up.
Yeah, and so the idea for the play is to set the action in that café, though it will probably change shape and be be a bit different within the play than it was in real life. And to bring together these characters, who all have very different relationships to land and very different ideas about the supernatural and the spiritual. And to bring them into conversation with one another, and it might be I think, they may well form a sort of science fiction book club or a group that explores conspiracy theories and they all become tight friends. But then I think things are going to go very wrong for them. And I want it to be comic. But also I think it will touch on some quite dark and some difficult tensions as well.
So this is what I’ve just been scribbling down really for myself inspired by Kevin and his process is what is the central question for me in Crop Circle Cafe. And I’ve just written, ‘is it the one that I’ve pitched which is about belief and land and how our beliefs shape our relationship to land and the actions that we will take to protect it?’ Because I think that is what it’s about as a play, but that seems quite big and I guess I’m asking myself now what’s the starting point within that big theme.
I’m still, I mean, I’m just exploring at the moment I think, what I’ve written here is ‘people trying to come back to the land in different ways. The green quest.’ There are some flawed ways of returning to the land, but they’re not necessarily ignoble, but they are in tension with one another, these three people. And then I’m considering, I suppose, for each character what that means.
There’s a lot that I could share with you, but most of it at the moment is really just ramblings because I’m, yeah, going through each character, trying to work out their relationship to the land, I think. And how is it that each of them is trying to come back to the land and what does that mean for them? But this has been very helpful to give myself space to ask these questions because it’s actually helping me unpack the action of the play to you know, how am I going to, as Kevin was discussing for himself in his notes, how am I going to show these tensions? How are they going to rear their heads in the action of the play? And I think I’ve got some ideas.