Jonathan Kaufman 18 June 2019
Ten minutes – 600 seconds – might not sound like a lot of time but you’d be surprised what you can cram into that short space. Remember, it’s VERY easy to bore an audience in ten minutes, let alone two hours, so consider the following points:
- What’s the story? We want to know what happens next so create some expectation from the word go: who are these people? Why are they there? What do they want from each other? And most importantly WHAT’S AT STAKE?
- Keep it simple. You’re not writing The Crucible or Hamlet. You don’t need more than two, at most three, and certainly no more than four, characters. Consider the permutations in terms of relationships of even three characters. Again, ask what they WANT of each of other. Simple objectives can be made complex by both situation and status – who has all the power here? How does the other character challenge that power structure? Play with shifting the status from one character to another and back again. This creates a DYNAMIC which is what most fascinates an audience.
- Drive the dramatic action through dialogue. A short play doesn’t need lots of physical action – maybe your characters don’t even need to leave their chairs – but it does need them to DO things to each other. How do they use their words to win over, seduce, coerce, persuade, intimidate, belittle, manipulate, attack, defend, provoke, inspire one another? From these verbal interactions build up a story based on shifting statuses, characters trying to achieve simple, then more complex, goals.
- Surprise us. Go on, we don’t want to second guess the outcome of your simple scenario, so genuinely surprise us. Shock us out of our complacency. We meet an old married couple celebrating an anniversary – we expect some recriminations maybe, some heartfelt regrets – but we don’t expect a ruthless confrontation between an arch-manipulator and a broken martyr. These characters are revealed to have always hated each other, while pretending an outward veneer of perfection. So pull the rug from under our feet. Surprise us.
- Write from the heart – not just what you know. The old cliché – write what you know – forget it. Invent. Make stuff up. Imagine what if. Take us to some interesting places – the interior of the human heart. Avoid short plays set on trains, buses or at train stations, bus stops. Instead create interesting worlds and put interesting, outwardly simple but inwardly complex characters there. Put them through hell. You’ve got ten minutes. Go!
Come and see how our writers did it, in Postcards this Saturday at the Sydenham Centre.
This week it’s 
Sydenham’s Crowley brothers, Dan and Richard, who manage this family business, have been long-time supporters of my work, all the way back to my first shows in the garden of the Dolphin Pub (Dan even appeared in drag as Flute the Bellows-Mender in my production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream back in 2008!) and when I was Director of Sydenham Arts Festival between 2009-2015. Property World’s dedication to community organisations like mine is second to none, and their invaluable support over the years has enabled me to bring a wide array of events and activities to Sydenham.
So being my own lighting designer and operator has its advantages – and disadvantages. On the plus side I get to create my own lighting effects, lighting a show just the way I like it. I discovered many years ago that a theatre show doesn’t look like a proper theatre show until you shine the lights on the stage. And even with the limited lighting rig at Sydenham Centre – seven lights in total at the moment, plus a moveable back light for shadow effects etc – it’s surprising how many varied lighting states you can create!
For today’s show, then, later this evening (6pm if you can make it, the show’s completely FREE!) we will be borrowing a light from a very helpful video maker called DeRae (thanks DeRae!) and the audience will get the full experience (see fantastic dress rehearsal pics by Mark Drinkwater 
Picking plays for our next scratch night [
