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Click on a link to take you to one of the delightful, choicest fruits of my pen ... Congratulations to the Abbey Players who won the Warwickshire 1-Act Play Competition with Jacobson's Organ
Catching Lightning in a Bottle These were the words used by Ed Sullivan on his TV show to describe Jean Seberg when she was plucked from 18,000 hopefuls to star in Otto Preminger's film of the George Bernard Shaw play Saint Joan. The film was panned by the critics and Seberg stuttered through a life making forgettable films and is now largely forgotten herself, although Godard’s A Bout de Souffle remains an Art-house classic. She was also the love interest in Airport, Paint Your Wagon and The Mouse That Roared. A film star before she even made a film, Seberg’s life went on a downhill trajectory. Married four times and struggling with drink and anti-depressants, she became the victim of a vicious smear campaign by J.Edgar Hoover and the FBI. They claimed that her unborn baby had been fathered by an activist in the Black Panther movement and conducted a newspaper campaign to pillory Seberg. The baby was born prematurely and lived only two days. Seberg displayed the body to the press in a glass-lidded coffin to prove that her (white) French husband was the father. Each year, on the anniversary of the child’s death Seberg attempted to take her own life. In 1979, the Paris police investigating a car that had been abandoned in a side-street, found Jean Seberg’s badly decomposing body hidden under a blanket on the car’s back seat. This time, she’d succeeded. This one-woman play traces Seberg’s life from film star before a frame is shot to her death in that Parisian cul-de-sac. The play has had several professional rehearsed readings at major theatres in the Northwest of England, performed by the wonderful Julia Rounthwaite and directed by Eileen Murphy. Running time: 85 minutes ********* The first of a trilogy about hapless, neurotic postgraduate student, Nigel Struthers. Nigel, a post-graduate student, is funding a night on the town by donating sperm. Although the spirit is willing, his flesh is all too weak. It is a solitary business, but does prim Nurse Rogers care enough for her struggling patient to lend a helping hand?
Nigel’s Wrist is a robust comedy for an adult audience, which takes swipes at psychoanalysis, male sexuality and nationalism but is, in essence, a comedy. The author maintains that it is not autobiographical! Nigel’s Wrist received its first professional production at the Theatre by the Lake in Keswick and was also the winner of the Siemens-Congleton Players Biannual One-Act Playwright Award. “Nigel’s Wrist manages to be very funny and extremely rude without losing its innocence. It’s a tough trick and Nick Corder pulls it off impressively, if you’ll pardon the expression” – Alan Plater, playwright. “Outrageously and excruciatingly funny! The brilliance of the writing leaps out and grabs you by the short and curly hairs” – Jim Eldridge, playwright and creator of Radio 4’s King Street Junior. Running Time: 30 minutes. ********* The hapless, neurotic Nigel Struthers is back for another awkward encounter with the opposite sex! He and Fiona Jacobson are preparing for their blind date. They seem heaven-sent for each other – both are sharp, intelligent, neurotic, over-mothered and in need of love.
As they get ready, they both imagine how it might turn out – will he be a sex-obsessed, football bore? Will she be a frigid frump? When they meet, it looks like love at first sigh, and a second date is on the cards. But will the course of love run smooth? Running time: 40 minutes. ********* It is the morning after the big night out to celebrate Nigel gaining his PhD. The new Doctor Struthers, the inept, lovelorn hero of Nigel’s Wrist and Jacobson’s Organ, wakes up with a hangover, a strange women and a sports bag that belongs to neither of them! Caroline, a pretty, vivacious, young actress, has somehow got the impression that Nigel is a medical doctor with an eccentric cure for bad backs involving breast re-alignment!
As they decide which of them is the rightful owner of the sports bag and its mysterious contents, they challenge each other to a movie quiz, where the stakes become ever higher. Is this Nigel’s chance to find love or at least the opportunity to make love? Running Time: 35 minutes All three Nigel plays are published by Cressrelles. Contact Simon Smith 10 Station Road Industrial Estate, Colwall, Malvern, WR13 6RN, Tel: 01684 540154 ********* For a slightly longer naughty play, why not try Shagathon? Set in the bizarre world of a tournament for sexual athletes, Shagathon is a light-hearted poke at the vanities of fame, the flimsiness and tawdriness of the sporting world and how the Great British public is prepared to watch almost anything (including this play) for its titillation and amusement. “… so remarkably rude that the surreal and outrageous become the norm as we are jollied along on a tide of disbelieving, chuckling acceptance” John Slim, Evening Mail “Puerile, pointless and silly” The Kidderminster Shuttle. Well, if you ran a newspaper named after a small airport bus, you'd be pissed off as well. Running Time: 55 minutes Contact Simon Smith 10 Station Road Industrial Estate, Colwall, Malvern, WR13 6RN, Tel: 01684 540154 ********* Fire in Her Belly - The Screen Lasses' Story Based on the true stories of the women who worked at the pit-heads of the West Cumbrian coal-fields, this play was staged in Whitehaven during 2004. It also featured on Radio 4's Woman's Hour. This DvD is now sold out. Does that make it a collectors' item...?
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