Last night was my first meeting with the Nuffield Theatre Writer’s Group in Southampton.

Our leader, John Burgess, who has directed over 40 premiers of new plays in his career, was the National’s Head of New Writing from 1989-94, and co-founded the NT Studio, welcomed us all, and after we’d had a chance to tell everybody about ourselves in the time taken for a match to burn (there are 13 of us writers in the group from published authors to television writers and playwrights) we got straight to work.

We started by writing questions and then statements using only words of one syllable. John then ‘acted’ each line and we were all inspired to write better and better lines for him to perform. It was very inspiring for me and I’m really looking forward to the next two years.

On top of my current play reading list (I’m working my way through Volume One of Caryl Churchill at the moment) we were also given two other plays to read and a number of writing assignments for our homework.

I’m going to be busy!

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