Full Length Plays
"THE RELUCTANT EMIGRE" a full-length play for 10 women & 2 fjuvs; ISBN: 978-1-872758-27-5; £7.00 each Royalties £50 per performance
The year is 1789. After the First Fleet of male prisoners had been sent from England to the new colony in Australia it became obvious to the authorities that women prisoners were needed "to prevent gross irregularities." Sarah Whitlam is a naive young country-woman who fell in love with a soldier and ran away with him. When he was posted abroad Sarah had trouble paying the rent and was accused by her landlady of stealing and pawning some metal fire cheeks. She was innocent of the crime but after a miscarriage of justice was found guilty and now finds herself fastened in chains, being taken on board a merchant ship about to leave her native land, sentenced to seven years beyond the seas. She has to decide whether to accept her punishment or try, against all the odds, to prove her innocence.
Freely download first part of "The Reluctant Emigre"
"WASPS" a tragy/comedy for 8 women; ISBN 1-872758-06-1; £7.00 each; Royalties £50 per performance
Set in a traffic wardens office the play sees the first day at work for a new young female warden and explores the interaction between different characters, one of whom is an introverted pigeon lover on the edge of a nervous breakdown who hardly speaks.
In the second act they are called in to be interviewed for promotion and while they wait they hold an impromptu birthday party for the pigeon lover. A forgotten present is left over at the end which when given to her will send her over the edge - but who could have given it and why?
(First performed by Criterion Players, Coventry)
Freely download first part of "Wasps"
"HARRY'S BIRD" a drama for 3f + lm; ISBN 1-872758-07-X; £7.00 each; Royalties £50 per performance
Harry Moss is a failed writer being taken by his wife to a hospice for the terminally ill. He is extremely bitter towards her and the staff until his final days are enlivened by the arrival of a young girl over the wall after a frisbee from the probation hostel next door. He teaches her to read and she, in return, gives him hope in his darkest hour.
(First performed at the Edinburgh Fringe and later by Mapperley Mavericks, Nottingham)
Freely download first part of "Harry's Bird"
"THE ECKERSLEY RISING" a comedy for 4f + 4m + I teenager (doubling) or 8f + 7m (Singly) ISBN 1-872758-02-9 £7.00 each
Royalties £50 per performance
Walter Midgley is an inoffensive little clerk working in a building firm for an arrogant councillor. He is put upon by both his boss and his wife until one day he decides to give up work and build a chicken shed in his tiny back yard. Having built the shed he moves his amateur radio gear in alongside his chickens and for a while all goes well. However one night for some reason Walter receives a signal on his aerial that appears to be coming from a planet in outer space. He sends a copy of the signal to London but locally he is made the laughing stock of the neighbourhood. Only then does he decide to reply himself to the signal by sending up his own home-made rocket powered by the methane gas from his chicken manure ! The day comes for the big launch with all the usual media attention but the rocket refuses to budge until later that night when all is quiet and his wife goes searching for him in the darkness of the rocket.
(First performed by Burton Joyce Players, Nottingham in 2006)
Freely download first part of "The Eckerseley Rising"
"MY BROTHER'S KEEPER" Drama for 2f + 4m (2NS); ISBN 1-872758-09-6; £7.00each Royalties £50 per performance
A middle-aged writer returns home to his brother who is looking after their dying father. The writer left home at an early age to find fame and fortune while the other brother, who was equally talented musically, stayed to look after the ageing parents. The writer and the brother's wife do not get on and he has thoughtlessly invited his young actress girlfriend to the house. The stress of looking after the old man builds to a climax at the end of the first act when the stay-at-home brother suggests that the only way out of their predicament is euthanasia. While they are arguing about whether to do such a thing the decision is taken away from them as the old man dies a natural death.
In the second act the funeral places further stresses on the family as the writer mourns his father and the actress finds out that her boyfriend hasn’t seen his own son by his first marriage for a number of years. She tries to make him face up to his responsibilities and at the end of the play the stay-at-home brother turns down an opportunity to make a break and the writer learns several painful home truths and is finally re-united with the son he hasn’t seen for so long
(This play was chosen from 150 scripts to reach the final of the Pittsburgh 2,000 New Play Festival, first read in public in the UK at the Questors Theatre, Ealing, London and published in Holland & Belgium by Vink & Co.)
Freely download first part of "My Brother's Keeper"
"THE POWER AND THE GLORY" 15f + 15m ISBN 1-872758-10-X; £7.00 each Royalties £50 per performance
A powerful drama based on a combination of two events which actually occurred in different parts of the world. A small village sleeps in the summer sun at the end of the war, untouched by all that has gone before, when the peace is disturbed by the arrival of a group of soldiers. The villagers cannot be aware of how much their lives are about to change during the next few weeks as the local mayor organises a dance for the soldiers and one of them is subsequently found dead.
In the second act the senior officer believes that the person who did the killing must have told the priest in the confessional and he gives instructions for him to be tortured to get at the truth. However they are unable to find the offender and they then decide to remove all the food from the villagers to loosen their tongues. When the villagers end up starving they begin to revert to their animal state and there are scenes of group savagery. Eventually the final conflict is between the power of the military versus the spiritual glory offered by the nuns as they serve the final bread and wine.
Freely download first part of "The Power & the Glory"
“MY FATHER’S HOUSE” Drama for 3f + 3m + 2 juvs; ISBN 1-872758-23-1; £7.00 each; Royalties £50 per performance
Set in the American Dustbowl in 1929, we see one family’s struggle to cope with grinding poverty as Fate throws everything at them. The Macdonald’s landlord is chasing them for the rent and his spoilt son plays with their two boys. They find a black hobo hiding in their woodshed who is unable to speak and take him in. The racist landlord doesn’t like this and while the latter can pay for his son to have a minor operation, the same can’t be said for the Macdonald’s, whose youngest son is soon seriously injured in a fall from a nearby tree. Joe Macdonald is told that to encourage his son to get better he needs to think of something for him to aim for so he decides to build him a tree house. This doesn’t seem to work until the black hobo points out a phrase from the Bible …"My Father’s house has many rooms” and Joe begins extending the tree house until people come from far and wide to see it. This prompts the landlord to want to use it as a money-making venture and he asks Joe to help him with promises of becoming a member of an organization that he’s in. Joe isn’t sure what to do and then the hobo is arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. The family goes to a Speaking Competition and while there, Joe learns that the hobo has been lynched by the local KKK. He then has to decide whether to make a stand and to speak out to the assembled throng or to keep quiet and live with the guilt.
(Recently chosen by LAMDA for Volume 4 Acting Anthology)
Freely download first part of "My Father's House"
“THE PERSONAL ASSISTANT” Drama for 3f & 2m (doubling) ISBN 1-872758-22-3; £7.00 each; Royalties £50 per performance
An old, wheelchair-bound, visually handicapped man is looking for a personal assistant to look after him in his retirement and an applicant arrives to be interviewed for the job. He seems to fit the bill and is taken on for a trial period. His first task is to take the old man out for a walk in his wheelchair through the countryside towards the nearby cliff-tops. As they walk we see flashbacks of a time when the old man was younger and worked as the Principal of a college. We then see that one of his employees was a would-be novelist whose career frustration led to him using the college photocopier without permission and who the Principal was therefore forced to dismiss. As we come to the end of Act One we learn that the personal assistant is in fact none other than the same aggrieved ex-employee who has now come back in disguise with thoughts of revenge.
Freely download first part of "The Personal Assistant"
"SEPIA SERENADE" A large-cast musical comedy ISBN: 978187275824X; £7.00 each; Royalties £50 per performance
The local drama group are just about to stage their next production when an old man who is the hall caretaker interrupts events when he comes in with his grandchildren and asks if the group are willing to show his magic lantern slides on the ancient wooden projector that he's clutching. Naturally the producer politely refuses but then there is a strange and unexpected power cut and they need something as a fill-in very quickly. Lo and behold, the caretaker's old projector doesnt need electricity so the group are forced to let him show his slides of his past life while they ad lib musical songs of the era around him. At the end they find the cause of the power cut and just who caused it.
(First performed in 1980 by Burton Joyce Players, Nottingham with old songs that are freely performable as being out of their copyright period)
Freely download first part of "Sepia Serenade"