Morgan's Boys
This play was written in 1996. After positive comment from a number of London fringe theatres, including the Bush, it was produced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 1998.
Reviews - What the critics made of it.
At the start of “Morgan’s Boys” communication between the characters is utterly impossible, and yet it is vital for them both that it should be established. Each seeks control in an emotional game halfway between judo and chess: with intense emotion harnessed to a relentless unsentimentality. The darkness of the world they operate in is made darker by their calm acceptance of its rules; and against that darkness their actions stand out like lightning.
A great sadness of early middle age can be the realisation that one has learnt how to do whatever it is that one does, and that the future consists of nothing but carrying on doing it a little better each time, until the end. To this life sentence, playwriting is a glorious antidote. To do something one has never done before, something that one has no right to be good at, and to find that one can do it well – that is truly an undeserved gift and it should be celebrated as such.
A few moments stand out in the process of writing, producing, and directing the play. The rehearsed reading at the Battersea Arts Centre; the subsequent video showing that led to our production manager joining us and making the whole thing possible; the process of designing the flyers with Max Lucci, an outstanding graphic designer whose images captured the atmosphere of the piece before it even existed; the sheer terror of the first morning of rehearsals, where two experienced professionals looked at me and expected me to know what I was doing; and the moment, two weeks later, when the words took on a life of their own and became suddenly unfamiliar. The way that an audience would laugh (sometimes uproariously) at the awkward collisions of the first act; the way those same people would scarcely dare to breathe by the end of the third act, and would roll out of the theatre concussed but grateful.
The reviews were good (although I must say that one of the reviewers will be better at his job when he has learnt to overcome his prejudices) and there was interest in further productions in Spain, Germany, Australia and the United States. Each of these projects eventually evaporated for its own reasons. The trouble with plays that have a strong character of theur own is that they cannot easily be marketed as a commodity, and commodities are, on the whole, easier to persuade managements to try out. But interest continues and more than one further production is still under discussion.
