Keeping in touch with PenPals
Script-in-hand performance
Leith Depot: Monday 25 November 2024
Report by Andy Moseley
PenPal Productions’ Drama@TheDepot has established itself as a showcase for work by Edinburgh playwrights and performers in 2024.
A grand total of 36 short plays written by 16 writers (including myself on three occasions) have been staged, script-in-hand, by 16 actors under four directors at Leith Depot since the first event back in February.
Each one of the bi-monthly events has a different theme. Fittingly, for the last show before Christmas it was The Gathering, although only one of the plays was set in the festive season. The six writers included Jane Sunderland, Mell Flinn and Jill Franklin, the three graduates of Edinburgh University’s Playwriting MSc who set up the company, and Sophie Good, their long-term collaborator and ‘fourth PenPal’. Joining them were Emma Currie and Claire Cockburn. Emma Lynne Hurley took on directing duties for the night.
Your cast for The Gathering – Jenna Donoghue, Jordan Monks, Liz Strange and Mark O’Neill. Pic: Jill Franklin
Part of the joy of the evenings since they began has been seeing the variety of ways in which writers have responded to the themes, taking prompts such as Tainted Love and My Room on This Earth into different settings and styles that the director and actors for each night then have a day to work on and turn into something that resembles a cohesive whole. That the events are now consistently sell outs or near sell-outs demonstrates just how successful they have been at this.
insight
Shakesmouth and the Sisters, by Jane Sunderland opened proceedings and brought Shakespeare face to face with a modern day production of Macbeth as the three witches went back in time to meet the man they referred to as Shakesmouth and give him an insight into the problems he would have faced if he’d been born a few hundred years later.
Emma Currie’s Vernacular also featured characters finding themselves in a world, or at least a pub, they no longer recognise. The pub being a bar in the New Town displaying a sign warning them that their vernacular was no longer welcome here and leaving them to satirise the gentrified tone and words of the people who were replacing them.
Jordan Monks and Mark O’Neill in Vernacular. Pic: Jill Franklin
The first half concluded with Sophie Good’s Gravy, which followed a family over several Christmases, as a son left and returned and a daughter went from vegan to carnivore via motherhood, before the person who placed the most importance on the yearly gathering became the first person to cease to be able to be at future ones.
Sunderland and Good’s plays featured all four of the cast members Jenna Donoghue, Jordan Monks, Mark O’Neill and Liz Strange, with Donoghue and Strange getting a break while Monks and O’Neill played the men in Vernacular.
After the interval and Bake Sale that has also started to play a starring role in the event, the four cast were back together again in Mell Flinn’s Waiting For Good Dough, a play that showed what can be achieved with a simple pun as four people waited outside an internet sensation café for the chance to get a cake or savoury item that would either never arrive or they would never get to eat.
unwitting star performance
As well as the cast members, Flinn’s two month old also gave an unwitting star performance with a brief vocal contribution timed to perfection to coincide with the protests of the pretend baby one of the people in the queue was holding.
Spirit Level by Clare Cockburn returned to witches and time travelling. This time with curses from the past continuing to apply to the present day descendants of their original victims until the question was asked about whether it was right for grudges to be borne for that long.
Jenna Donoghue, Jordan Monks, Liz Strange and Mark O’Neill are Waiting for Good Dough. Pic: Jill Franklin
The evening ended with Jill Franklin’s Three’s a Crowd bringing us back to the theme of loss at a gathering, but in a very different way from Gravy as four birds returned to the pylon that their matriarch had fallen to her death from and their patriarch could not say goodbye to even as he was encouraged to look at the wider fields and futures that were just a short distance away.
As Penpals enters into its second year, it is going from strength to strength. As well as continuing with its bi-monthly events (the next is on Monday 3 February 2024), it’s also been awarded Edinburgh 900 funding to produce Tales of the City, an expanded version of the Drama at the Depot template with more writers and actors, plus an extended rehearsal period, developing plays inspired by the themes of Edinburgh 900, with the hope that many will develop after the event and create a theatrical legacy connected to the celebrations.
Drama at the Depot – The Gathering
Leith Depot, 138-142 Leith Walk EH6 5DT
Mon 25 November 2024
Evening: 8pm.
Follow PenPals Productions on their socials.
Facebook: @PenPalsTheatre
Twitter/X: @PenPalsTheatre
Edinburgh 900 page https://edinburgh.org/900/
Mark O’Neill, Jordan Monks, Jenna Donoghue and Liz Strange in rehearsal on the Leith Depot’s tiny stage. Pic: Jill Franklin.
ENDS
