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 5 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.
So I’m just at my favourite cafe, across the road from the Theatre Collection, and I just wanted to share, I guess, the workshop that I just ran with the Theatre Collection. We welcomed some playwrights, mostly playwrights, theatre makers and a few people who are also actors and directors, to come and hear some extracts from different drafts of My Night with Reg. As a kind of chance to reflect, really, on Elyot’s writing process and how he drafts and redrafts and the edits he makes. And the title of the workshop was What Is Lost? and, I suppose I set that title thinking about that, that old idea of killing your darlings as a writer and having to, I suppose, just occasionally, get rid of something that you really love, but which doesn’t serve the play anymore, or rearrange things or edit down or totally rewrite until the same theme is actually coming through more clearly or the same character arc or emotion.
So, that’s what we were exploring in the workshop. And then we had an opportunity for people to share different drafts of their own writing, which was really wonderful as well. And I just wanted to share tiny extracts of the three different drafts of My Night With Reg that we looked at just this afternoon. So the first one, they’re all quite late drafts of the play, quite far on in Elyot’s process, overall. But it’s really fascinating to see how much changes across these three drafts. I’ll only give you a few lines from each, because we read about 6 pages from each one, which is obviously quite a lot! But this is the earliest of the three drafts, and it begins.
It’s the very first scene of the play, the opening of the play, and I’ll just share, maybe the first half a page or so.
Scene One
Late afternoon, cloudy. Guy is preparing the room for guests. Last minute dusting and tidying. Eric is in the conservatory painting a window frame. John leans against the doorway to the conservatory, watching him. He is smoking a cigarette. A bowl of nuts sits on the coffee table.
Guy: I refuse to die for the sake of a poke. I’ve caught every disease there is to catch many times over, and several simultaneously. I only have to wink at somebody and I get a discharge down at the clinic. They now have a whole cabinet devoted to my files. The hours I’ve spent in that place trussed up on a table, thumbing through House and Garden. While one doctor after another has gazed in amazement at some exotic fungus or extraordinary polyp. I was even accused of introducing the Super crab to this country. Very large and particularly tenacious. In fact, my doctor said it was the first case of venereal lobster he’d ever come across. He tried everything. Powders, lotions, tweezers. At one point, he even asked them to go. In the end, he suggested I jump into a pan of boiling water and serve myself up Thermador.”
So that’s the opening of the play, in this particular draft, with that monologue from Guy, and then in the next draft, as the play is developing, we get this version instead.
Scene One
Every Breath You Take by The Police starts playing as the stage lights come up. The music fades. Late afternoon, cloudy. Guy is pouring two gin and tonics at the drinks table. Eric is in the conservatory painting a window frame. He’s listening to a Walkman, occasionally moving to the music. John leans against the entrance to the conservatory, watching him. A bowl of nuts sits on the coffee table.
Guy: You’ve got that look about you. Who was it and what did you do? No, I don’t want to know.
John: The film wasn’t up to much. Two hours of French people talking, couldn’t see the point. When’s everyone coming?
Guy: Everyone is two people. Any minute now.
John: Two people for a flat warming?
Guy: Four, including us and that suits me fine. Glancing through the names in my address book, I realised I didn’t like most of them and the rest had either split up or died. Of the ones who’d split up I couldn’t decide which partner to invite. And the dead people were no problem at all.
Handing John the drink.
Cheers.
John: Cheers. To your new flat.
Guy: Thanks.
So that’s the next version of the scene and in both of them, I should say, Guy is talking to John and John has just arrived at his flat and that probably wasn’t clear from the monologue opening of the first one I read just then.
And then this is the third – and very close to final – draft of the scene, which, if you know the play, you might be familiar with.
Scene One
Every Breath You Take by The Police starts playing as the lights come up. The music fades. Late afternoon. Cloudy. Eric is painting a window frame in the conservatory. He’s listening to a Walkman. John and Guy are standing in the sitting room. Guy is wearing an apron.
John. Am I early?
Guy: No.
John: I couldn’t remember what time you said.
Guy: You’re not, really.
John glances at the apron. Guy suddenly remembers he’s wearing it.
Taking it off.
I was just stiffening some egg whites.
John: You look well.
Guy: Do I?
John: Yes.
Guy: I’ve been to Lanzarote.
John. Oh.
Guy: You look well too.
John: Thanks.
Guy: You don’t look a day older.
John: Well.
Guy: You don’t. Honestly, you’re just the same.
OK. And that’s the end of that first page of the opening scene in that final latest draft, and I just wanted to share those with you because in the workshop, obviously we read a lot more, but people found it really fascinating. To read them in sequence from the earlier draft to the later draft, and to note what has changed and what becomes what, I suppose, is either lost or buried within the text, and Elyot has a real reputation for the craft of the unsaid, of saying so much through what is not said on stage.
And I think in reading those three drafts in sequence, you can see the craft of that building. He loses more and more text and more and more of the avert statements. You know, in that very first draft, we have this very clear opening line: ‘ refuse to die for the sake of a poke.’ And we observed in the workshop tonight, it’s almost like that’s just stating one of the key themes of the play: about desire and death and mortality against the backdrop of AIDS and how people are dealing with that reality and the decisions they’re making. That is very upfront in this earlier draft and the relationship between Guy and John, although I didn’t read you sections on that, is much more established. They’re much closer already. They’re much more connected, they’re much more in touch with one another than they are by the time we get to the final draft. And their dialogue in the final draught allows the audience to discover so much more of the themes rather than having them stated upfront.
So it’s a real education for me anyway, in observing and reading through these scenes about how our plays develop or how they can develop and the craft and the finessing that happens, I suppose, when you remove text, let the dialogue lead, but keep all of that ticking underneath what’s said. Yeah, it’s just really exciting.
And I think tonight’s workshop was a really exciting opportunity to share some of that with other people, other creatives in the South West and get their input and observations. I learned a lot more about the piece, about the the drafts, by doing that and hearing from other playwrights and then reflecting on our own work and our own drafts. Sometimes it’s hard to know. I think when you’re redrafting and cutting sections of work, there’s a fear that you are just losing things and that they might – You might not be going in the right direction with the edits you’re making. And I think sometimes that does happen. But also, I think from what we observed tonight with the playwrights work that was shared, and also what we observe in Kevin’s work, and what I’m learning as I’m doing this with my own writing with a play I’ve been writing for some time, at the moment that I’m submitting to an award next month – and I’m making some big cuts and changes based on some feedback from a mentor – I guess what I’m learning is that, by and large, most of the time, we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. You know, the the iterative rewriting process. It allows us to maybe get those upfront statements and big themes, you know that were right in the middle of the page. It allows us to get them kind of out of our system, and then embed them beneath the text in a later draft. And that seems to happen fairly naturally, often. Which is exciting and gives me some trust in my own process and in my own rewrites.