Bham Rep Young Writers Window I

Transmissions 2003
Birmingham Rep The Door
Saturday 5th July 2003: Rod Dungate

Part I

4 young writing talents on show lively and diverse talents in the makingBirmingham Rep works closely with young writers and each year stages a number of plays or extracts in with-script productions. This year 16 writers are on show over four performances. Here are four plays from the first Saturday.

KHAMOSHI, by Asif Masud is a taut play with admirably sparse dialogue. 18 year old Asif studies performance at a local college and his play shows a promising writing talent. On the face of it the play is about young Shazad, disaffected, unsure of who he is and where he's going. He gets mixed up with a drugs scam and messes up. But the story is only half this play, beneath it lie untapped emotions and attempted relationships that cannot blossom. I found the middle part of the story muddled in execution but much admire the tough conciseness of this bleak play.

Ayesha Ahmed Janet is a student at Birmingham University. She shows a clear command of language and image in COMING HOME. It's a hybrid play part psychological realism part myth or story-telling. Her formal language gives her play a distanced and flat feeling hypnotic like the best of some of early Bond plays. Hers is a story of displaced peoples, of our need to have roots. It's powerful stuff: I felt the play could have been tightened and Janet sometimes falls victim to her own strength imagery is occasionally forced and self-conscious.

Gem Auddy's SOMEWHERE WITHIN is a dark play (I gather it's abridged from a fuller version). It explores the idea that someone can read other people's minds. The central image is of a family gathering around a dying relative what we hear them think does them no favours! Interesting theme with nascent black humour. My qualm about this piece (and it may be in the abridgment) is that there is too much direct address and not enough drama. Perhaps director Therese Collins could have been more helpful in shaping the extract.

The final piece of this day's parcel was REVELATIONS from Charlie Samuda. A little more shaping would have strengthened the play but this writer has a delicious sense of the absurd - two archangels are delegated by God to work with a focus group mere hours before the end of the world. Samuda appears to be drawing on a rich vein of popular culture, picking and mixing as he feels fit, and making it entirely his own. All this and he's 14. A bright future indeed.

KHAMOSHI by Asif Masud
Director: Therese Collins

COMING HOME by Ayesha Ahmed Janet
Director: Caroline Jester

SOMEWHERE WITHIN by Gem Auddy
Director: Therese Collins

REVELATIONS by Charlie Samuda
Director: Carl Miller

2003-07-08 08:57:58