My First Play by Nick Hern

Author:Nick Hern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nick Hern Books

The Normal Heart (1993, 2011), The Destiny of Me (1993)

Elizabeth Kuti

My first play was called The Three Ghastly Deeds and it was written and performed with my friends Ruth, Lotte and Sarah when we were about ten. We stole the idea of a school for witches from Jill Murphy’s Worst Witch books (this was, of course, aeons back in the misty pre-Harry Potter era of 1979), and then invented our own plot. The play centred on three witch-pupils who compete to carry out the ghastliest deed possible for a Hallowe’en contest. We each chose a character and got a chunk of the play to write by ourselves. My character was called Duncenia and she was none too bright but offered comic relief by misunderstanding things (an oldie but goodie). We didn’t talk to the boys in our class at that stage of our lives – they were the enemy – so the play was entirely made up of female characters, and we were allowed to rehearse it and then stage it in front of the entire school. It was such a massive and uproarious success – in my memory, at least – that we decided to write another play the next summer, in the term that was to be our last at primary school.

This one was an even more ambitious idea – a period comedy set in the time of Queen Elizabeth I. It was called The Regal Robbery, and again it was a collaborative venture, each of us writing a section. My character this time was the villain, called Dastardly Egbert, and he was the one who carried out the regal robbery by stealing Queen Bess’s crown. The entire school was trundled into the hall to watch it, and given that the school had about three hundred and fifty pupils it was definitely not the smallest audience that I have ever played to. We performed it on our very last day at that school, and so it became the swan song of our primary education. As we were leaving the playground for the very last time, one of our most lovely and enlightened teachers, Mr Strong, heaved open his classroom window and shouted after us, ‘Your play was brilliant!’

Over the years Mr Strong’s own writing has become very familiar to me – he is Jeremy Strong, the prolific and popular children’s author, and his books now throng the shelves of bookshops and libraries – but in 1979 he was unpublished, and still trying out on us, the lucky kids in his classroom, lots of the funny stories he’d written (one of my particular favourites, I remember, was about a girl called ‘Iona Banana’ who got into terrible trouble whenever she introduced herself – ‘yes, dear, you may well own a banana, but what is your name?’… and so forth). I didn’t know that Mr Strong would be a famous writer one day, but I knew that I really cared what he thought of the play we had made because he was funny and creative and full of heart.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.