My play, Meat, is finished and entered for the Verity Bargate Award, the biggest prize for new playwrights in the UK. I cycled to Soho Theatre on Friday to drop it off after tightening it up over the past week and a half, and I’m pleased with how it’s turned out. There are bits that could have been tightened up even more but overall it works so I have few complaints.
The story is set in 1885 London and follows a male dwarf prostitute and a servant girl. Both become involved with ‘respectable’ people and pay a heavy price for trusting the wrong folk. It’s really about how people lose their humanity when sex becomes a commodity, but it also hints at how the mechanisms that allow this trade to happen are signs of a much bigger problem. The spread of venereal disease in the play is a metaphor for a wider canker permeating society.
It’s got sex, disease, rape, mutilation and murder and it stemmed from a simple idea of a love story between a dwarf whore and a respectable woman, the Norfolk prostitute killings and a love of Jacobean revenge tragedy.
Here’s a speech from the script. It comes from a politician infected with syphilis:
‘Our wealth and our position in the world is built on horrible atrocities, Nathaniel. We decimate large swathes of humanity every day so don’t expect the architects of that atrocity to be overly concerned by a few women who sell their arses for gin. Leave it to the reform workers or the Salvation Army… They care and they’re better at it… It is a stark reality of the modern world.’
It’s either going to bomb big-style and not get past the first round or grab somebody’s attention and have a fighting chance of really getting noticed.
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