February has seen two more writers taking Net Curtains workshops and using the opportunity to test out their scripts with the company.
The first was Helena Fox, who brought the begining twenty minutes of her script ‘Hey Joe’. Reading the piece aloud gave the company plenty to discuss, with the powerful central relationship between an estranged father and son proving a particular point of interest. Company members were intrigued by the multi-faceted connections within the play, as the mother figure was represented by a solitary figure, placed alone on the stage and unseen by the characters within the scene itself. Whether she was a ghost, a dream or a memory was not clear, and this lent the piece an interesting edge. The actors put the script on its feet and experimented with different ways of playing the most emotional scenes, providing a range of different angles on the script for Helena to observe.
The second workshop was led by Rachel Sambrooks, who brought back a revised version of ‘Clouds’ which had received the Net Curtains workshop treatment back in November. The script had been extended and altered considerably, which had given it more clarity and depth. Relationships that the company had previously enquired about had been sketched with more detail, misunderstandings had been mostly ironed out and the resulting characters felt more real and the plot more urgent. The script was not finished, but the positive reaction and feedback that Rachel received should inspire her to continue with her work on it.