By Lisa McMullin
I’ve got a play on for the next couple of weeks at a new venue in South London and Chris Jones kindly offered to spread the word if I wanted to write a short blog about it.
And I realised that, actually, this play is only in existence because of LSF.
It may not be everybody’s cup of tea – it’s about abuse and exploitation in prostitution and the media. A lot of the language is explicit. It has a point to make (and the audience is welcome to disagree with it). It’s got humour and warmth (I hope) but it’s not Pretty Woman.
And the reason it’s not Pretty Woman is the London Screenwriters’ Festival.
At the festival, a couple of years ago, I had a session with one of the script doctors (form the lovely Euroscript team) about a TV script I was working on. It was a gritty drama about sex trafficking and the script doctor asked me how much I really knew about the world of prostitution. How much research had I actually done? I floundered a little. I’d read some books, done some Googling, watched some documentaries. It turned out that one of the script doctor’s good friends had escaped prostitution and was sick to the back teeth of the way the world is often presented in TV and film.
She asked me to hold fire on my script until I’d really, really researched the subject matter. She then gave me an amazing number of contacts and sources to approach – people who had lived through the experience. Real people. And suddenly my ‘gritty drama’ seemed a little glib and light. So I binned it. And I threw myself into the researching of that world. And the more I heard and saw and learned the more I realised I wanted to write a drama with a very clear POV of this world and a play seemed the best medium to use. If you fancy some provocative drama, pop along to The Pie House Arts venue in Deptford this week or next!
Get your tiockets here… http://matchsticktheatre.com/priceless
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Posted by a member of the London Screenwriters’ Festival team.
