Next play reading confirmed!

This month we will be reading Animal Instinct by Alex Gwyther and Paul Davidson, on Monday 28th May, 6pm at Theatre Deli.

Alex Gwyther

Alex Gwyther is a writer and actor. Writing credits include Our Friends, The Enemy (New Wimbledon Studio, Edinburgh Fringe, UK Tour, Theater Row New York), The Cost Of A Player (commissioned by The Premier League) and Eyes Closed, Ears Covered (The Bunker Theatre, London). In 2017 he was shortlisted for Most Promising New Playwright at the Offies and has work published by Oberon. He is currently developing a new one man play Ripped and writing for screen.

Paul Davidson

After undertaking the MA Screen writing course alongside MA screen Acting at The Drama Centre London, Paul wrote his first short film for the Graduate Showcase. Since then he has been involved in numerous projects both in the UK as well as internationally.

He wrote award winning music video ‘Witch In Me’, has had his work showcased at BAC in London, and has released the award winning short comedy ‘Article 50’ with Mini Mammoth Films.

He has experience as a stand up comedian and working in improvisational comedy groups and is currently co-writing a short format online comedy as well as developing his first feature screenplay.

More information coming soon

In your late twenties you start to look to the future. You perhaps realise that the assumptions you made at 16 about where you’d be at 27, 33 or 40 come from media related hype, involving ancient societal pressures on any woman over 27 to marry immediately and sort her life out, all the while with a deeply ingrained will to overachieve but zero direction, and various emotional scars from watching too many Disney movies. It’s the classic, ‘When I am 27 I will have an enviable career at some fabulous advertising/fashion/film/fine art company, be married, with a son and daughter, own a flat in the city, a house in the country, and a German Shorthaired Pointer’

Now this is not true for most ‘millennials’. If you are reading this and thinking, ‘Well I pretty much have all that’ or even ‘I made good choices throughout my late teens and early twenties’ and you’re under 33, well, good for you. Most of us are somewhere in-between, somewhere far behind, or frantically sifting through the reduced jam section in Fortnum and Mason, secretly hoping that this small taste of the high life will act as a catalyst for disillusionment, and remind us of what truly matters. Hopefully at some point we’ll be able to whole-heartedly give the jam away to passers by on the street as an act of liberation from society, capitalism and our family’s expectations. The truth is, when the time comes that we start to look back and realise that we can’t redo anything, whenever that time does come, the shock of it can be no better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

There are some classic, supposedly helpful questions that you (or someone else) will ask when faced with any sort of existential crisis. If you’re starting to question your life choices, or if you’re feeling lost, like you aren’t quite sure what your purpose is, or that something is missing and you can’t put your finger on what, you often get greeted with an array of comments like ‘Where do you see yourself in 5 years?’, ’What is your life’s purpose?’, or ‘What is it that makes you happy?’. Certain thought processes might work for us at a specific time, but we often make the mistake of thinking that everyone who is struggling is having the same issues as we had that one time. We might get directed to Ted Talks that mean a lot to the person suggesting it but seem very obvious to us, or someone might buy us a copy of The Secret. We’re all different and learn our lessons at different times, and there’s no one solution for feeling out of sync, or we’d all have already done it.

These questions are problematic: sometimes they work but not all of them work for everyone. Saying that in five years time you’d like to be in a West End show or running your own incredibly successful contemporary art gallery in Mayfair isn’t helpful, because even if it’s not completely unrealistic, it relies on far too many factors that you can’t control. The same goes for falling in love and getting married. Asking someone what makes them happy is not a helpful retrieval question when their response is to shout ‘Pizza’ at you. That having been said, I have a friend who loves pizza, and has spent the last five years running Napoli style pizza restaurants. She is incredibly fulfilled, and even has a pizza tattoo on her ankle.

Of all of the questions I remember being asked, ‘What is your life’s purpose?’ is the most annoying. To me it’s arrogant to assume that anyone has a purpose, and is suggestive of the idea that the speaker knows the meaning of life, and if they do they’d save us all a lot of angst by sharing it.

I get into a panic particularly when people ask me what I do. I met with a friend recently who I hadn’t seen in years, and she asked me where I was working now. ‘Erm, well, I have 5 jobs at the moment, unless you count the unpaid projects I’m working on and then it’s more’. I caught myself, and I wondered whether the gaping feeling I sometimes get in my chest was to do with me not really deciding on a particular path? Have I wasted my 20s refusing to make a decision about who I am?

I trained as an actor, and when I graduated, after working in a restaurant part-time since I was 14, I decided that I wouldn’t be one of those actors who worked a job that they hate in order to carry on being an actor. So I took other seeming eclectic freelance jobs, hoping that one day I’d find that thing that paid the bills and allowed me to go off on semi-glamorous theatre tours around the UK. I did and still do a lot of writing, I worked in front-of-house management at theatres and festivals, I was a copywriter, an art gallery assistant and a singer in a band. I worked for a magazine, I worked as a producer, a dramaturge and even a runner on film sets. Now my main day job is teaching Shakespeare to students, and storytelling (I still have 4 jobs if you don’t count the acting work).

No matter how well we do, it’s always possible to doubt ourselves and our choices. Who is to define what success is? Who has ever really experienced something where the gratification of ‘success’ doesn’t eventually decay and leave us just as vulnerable to self-doubt and angst as we ever were? Success in it’s modern context can’t fulfil us, the buzz you get from being celebrated doesn’t last, but creativity in whatever role you play can, and doing something because you feel it’s worthwhile can.

If you have too many interests (aka. freelancer) does that mean you’re forever doomed to be a jack of all trades and master of none? Aimlessly wandering from one glorified ‘entry level’ position to the next, doomed to work temp contracts with no real purpose or understanding of where anything is leading you? You’re either in the middle of the river going full speed ahead or holding on to the sides, whilst floating slowly down the stream, never wanting to jump so far into a path that you can’t get out and try something else.

Someone asked me a question the other day that I found profoundly useful. They said, ‘Who are you and what do you do? Don’t tell me what you do for a living. What is it that you do?’ I thought for a moment, desperately trying not to think about what answer would get me more work. I entertain? No. That’s what I’m good at but that’s not why I do it. I am the vessel for other people’s words? Aptly poetic but not quite right either as I write stories too, and sometime I just help other people tell theirs. I tell stories. I am a storyteller. Everything I’ve done (bar my glittering career as a supervisor in a nightclub on Brighton seafront) has been to tell, or aid in telling, stories.

I have my pizza friend who just loves Italian food and hospitality, spent her birthday last year going on a food tour of Italy and has a pizza tattoo on her ankle. I have an actor friend who loves performing, but is also an activist within the arts, and feels just as passionately about equal representation for BAME and female identifying artists, about creating role models for minority audiences, and about fuelling what she does with that fire. I also have a friend who was on the way to becoming a big shot theatre producer, but gave it all up to study anthropology and become a Steiner teacher because, like me, she believes that stories can be shared in many ways.

 Hi, I’m Kate and I’m a storyteller. I believe that stories can change the world, and that stories help us learn about what it is to be human, and that stories make us human. I don’t own a dog or a house but that’s OK, and when I do I know exactly how I will decorate it. Who are you?

Kate-Lois Elliott, Co-Producer, Backbone Theatre

We’ve workshopped various scripts over the last few sessions at Theatre Deli, including a workshop and performance of the talented Emma Richardson’s new work ‘Sugar Daddy Dot Com’ as part of Mind The Gap at the Theatre Delicatessen bar.

We’ve also worked on comedy sketches and short films. If you’re attending a comedy night, though we will have some specific scripts available, we encourage you to bring a script or idea along with you.

It’s a space to play around with ideas, figure out what works and what doesn’t, and hopefully produce some new material as well as developing existing scripts.

If you are interested in coming along as an actor, writer or both please email team@backbonetheatre.com