‘Silver Gulls …’ by Ms Paige Turner
In 1977 (gosh!) I directed Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’ with a bunch of warm and widely cosmopolitan Canadian students at the Dome Theatre in Montreal. It’s my favourite of Chekhov’s seven full-length plays. As a director’s gift the cast gave me a silver seagull locket which I have always kept and treasured. ‘Because,’ they said, ‘they could not find any jewellery relating to ‘three sisters’.
‘The Seagull’ is one of Chekhov’s earlier plays: a study in what it is to be an artist and human – or a study in what it is to ‘want’ to be an artist and human. Konstantin is the trigger-happy son of the successful actress Madame Arkadina but he’s envious of his mother’s partner: the successful young writer Trigorin. I say ‘trigger-happy’ as Konstantin shoots the gull, which is symbolic of the man who shoots the free bird: the young ingénue Nina thereby destroying her art and her being. After unsuccessfully shooting himself dead, he ultimately manages to do so. So he’s not really happy about anything at all especially as Trigorin falls for the young Nina with whom Konstantin is in love. So they all shoot the bird. They destroy each other and their own selves.
In this study to be an artist we see the successful Trigorin, unable to function without the relationship with the older Madame Arkadina. One can suspect that his success may be linked to the contacts he makes and has made with the established actress. He’s not satisfied with his creative works. Nina falls for him – or does she fall for his success? Konstantin is not successful and criticizes what he considers his mother’s commercial artistic leanings. Nina discovers the path to fame does not glitter and Madame Arkadina’s brother is a successful High Court Judge but always wanted to write.
The National staged this with the minimum of set, reminiscent of a rehearsal room. (Chekhov would have embraced this, as words were it all for him. The last thing the playwright would have wanted was a screeching seagull.) It almost could have been a radio play but I wouldn’t have wanted to miss all those facial expressions transported across the stage like thought bubbles. They almost re-wrote the play too, updating with references to social media and casting directors.
It worked. I loved it. Loved the cast and still love my silver seagull pendant.
My four plays are available from www.stagescripts.com

‘Boiling Points’ by Ms Paige Turner

Mister Justin Case and I recently went to see the National Theatre’s production of Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’.
I have played the part of Mary Warren (the Proctors’ hapless maidservant) at the Ashcroft Theatre, Croydon, wrote on the play as my teaching diploma thesis at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and subsequently directed it at the Amersham & Wycombe College. So I have vested interest.
I used parts of my thesis to introduce a number of scenes enacted by my BND students. (Getting them to rehearsals was a nightmare: I had to work my way around their various part-time employment which I couldn’t beat so joined them with a flexible rehearsal schedule.) It paid off. I opted to have the whole cast on stage during the scenes to avoid backstage chatter and encourage observation of one of the finest plays, in my opinion, ever written.
I was therefore a little surprised that the National also topped and tailed the play with a narrative taken from Miller’s own prologue and had the hysterical girls frequently seated during a number of scenes. The former device obviously used as estimating that a proportion of the audience may not be aware of the seventeenth century Salem witch trials.
Proctor, played by Brendan Cowell was the all-rugged outspoken farmer. Hale, the minister flown in to cast out the so-called witchcraft, was played by Fisayo Akinade (also trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama). This was interesting casting of an ‘of colour’ actor and it worked really well. Erin Doherty who is an award-winning actress, having played Princess Anne in the last ‘The Crown’ series was also an interesting take on Abigail Williams. Abigail has had an affair with John Proctor and she then accuses his wife Elizabeth of witchcraft. Doherty presents us with a neurotic, twitching adolescent: bitter revenge nibbling into the core of the character.
Here’s my feature written for ‘Writing Magazine’ some years ago on the subject of ‘Theme’ because Miller always does ‘Theme’ so well.

Arthur Miller wrote the theme of his play at the top of every A4 typescript page. It was a constant reminder of what he was writing about. The theme is the purpose of your words. Why are you writing this play? What do you want to say? Whose thinking and what thinking are you trying to change?
Theme can be reduced to one word. It can often be one of those ‘shun’ words. Arthur Miller might have put ‘persecution’ at the top of each page when he was writing ‘The Crucible’. Of course the theme of a play can mean something different to each member of the audience. And it isn’t always necessary to know the theme before we begin writing. Themes can emerge.
The theme then can be developed from one word to one sentence. For example, one might suggest that the theme of ‘Hamlet’ is ‘procrastination’ but we could elucidate by saying in modern terms that ‘slow drivers can cause as much havoc on motorways as rash, impulsive ones’. Then the sentence can be developed further still in the scene and so the play overall.
Like the light refracting from a multi-faceted and well cut diamond, the theme should bounce off of every scene written and be observed from different angles.
Very often the title will contain the theme. The Crucible? It’s a container in which substances are heated to high temperatures and then evaporate into thin air. Neat when you consider Miller was using the witches of Salem, Massachusetts, as a political analogy for the McCarthy trials of the fifties in America. Artists with certain political sympathies simply disappeared.
Well. In the past few weeks we didn’t really need a crucible to hasten the disappearance of politicians, did we?

‘All these Memoirs …’ by Ms Paige Turner.
We are rained down with memoirs. Plentiful, pouring forth and post-pandemic. I’ve worked it out.
March 2020. Lockdown. Celebrities can’t perform. Write. For 9 months to a year.
March 21. Send to publishers. Who WFH.
Autumn 22 – Memoir launch/TV appearances/
In time for Christmas.
I am writing this way as I am reading the Swazi, star-struck Richard E Grant’s memoir ‘A Pocketful of Happiness’. Written in diary form. Like this.
I am, of course, mesmerised. Grant recounts his wife’s final year – from her diagnosis of terminal lung cancer to her death in September 2021. His wife was the dialect coach and phonetician – Joan Washington. But she was much more, we learn.
I know Joan was much more than a dialect coach. She changed the trajectory of my life. When I was finishing my training at the Central School of Speech and Drama she told me there was an ad for a voice coach in Montreal. It was on the tutor’s noticeboard. But she thought I could do it. She was right. And she wrote to me my whole year in Montreal.
She was also my Teaching Practice Tutor visiting me in my third Central term when I was on practice in an inner London primary school. I was beside myself. One child attended the nit clinic every Friday to have her hair cleaned. By Monday the nits were back. I was in despair. The class was nitted to the brim. I looked at Joan. She looked at me. Then she scratched her head and burst out laughing. We sat in that Bethnal Green classroom and hooted.
I’m not through Grant’s memoir yet but it’s gruelling when you read about someone facing a terminal illness who had such an influence on your life. Everyone wanted to be Joan. Or become Joan. Or sound like her: a voice with rich chocolate shades of brown. Rather like the Queen – ‘I will not look upon her like again’.
The anthology ‘When This is All Over …’ can be bought here:

https://amzn.to/3xi8iay

My novel ‘Shakespeare’s Clock’ can be bought here:

https://www.waterstones.com/book/shakespeares-clock/jan-moran-neil/9781912964635

https://www.cranthorpemillner.com/product/jan-moran-neil-shakespeares-clock/

https://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/fiction-poetry/shakespeares-clock,jan-moran-neil-9781912964635

I am also available for readings from the novel if you wish to book me in person or virtually!

‘Dialogue with the Queen …’ by Ms Paige Turner

Dialogue with the Queen

Last night I dreamt the Queen said to me,
“Oh Janet, weren’t you in the crowd at Jubilee
in … nineteen seventy seven?
Wasn’t it that little town in Devon?”

“Falmouth,” I replied.

“Ah yes, and in nineteen eighty two
at Regent’s Park, we remember asking you -
‘how has been the weather?’”

I said, “I replied to you, ‘not bad’ but I lied.
In fact the weather could not have been wetter.”

“Janet,” said she,
“you were the invisible voice of Puck’s fairy.
This, I believe, is what you have always been …
a little one doing good deeds unseen.
It’s always so nice to see you
and we are always so interested too
to know how you are in particular.
And so is the Duke of Edinburgh.”

This is called ‘illusions of grandeur’.

1998 (From her collection ‘Serving Bluebird Pie’.)

We were aboard the Queen Victoria ship, sailing from Carthegena, Spain on Thursday 8th September when we received the news. Former Royal correspondent Jenny Bond had delivered her speech ‘What a Woman: the Queen’ only two days before.

The Queen. ‘We shall not see her like again.’ (‘Hamlet’) Long live the King.

‘Blog 300 …’ by Ms Paige Turner
I had my brows dyed this afternoon. The lovely beauty therapist said that when she was training she was told that one isn’t a Mistress of Brows until one has completed 150 treatments.
Malcolm Gladwell who is very hot on numbers says one cannot be a master of any skill until one has practised 10,000 times.
This is my 300 bi-monthly blog. That means I have been posting for 600 weeks which is roughly 12 years – since 2010. Where do the years and blogs go to? Maybe I have a long way to go until 10,000 – but to coin a phrase (which is a cliché in itself) ‘practice makes perfect’. With a ‘c’ for the noun, I believe.
Thank you dearly my three blog readers – to whom I am not related. If you are reading this, please leave a note to say I am not writing to Mars. Which might raise a few eyebrows.
My novel ‘Shakespeare’s Clock’ is available on Amazon, my publishers Cranthorpe Millner, Foyles and Waterstones.

https://www.waterstones.com/book/shakespeares-clock/jan-moran-neil/9781912964635

https://www.cranthorpemillner.com/product/jan-moran-neil-shakespeares-clock/

https://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/fiction-poetry/shakespeares-clock,jan-moran-neil-9781912964635

The pandemic anthology ‘When This is All Over …’ for the Rennie Grove Hospice Care is available on Amazon here. https://amzn.to/3xi8iay
My plays scripts are available from www.stagescripts.co.uk

‘Flying Nannies …’ by Ms Paige Turner
Of late, I have focused on ‘Theatre’. It’s because we were Thespian-starved during the pandemic and we are now seeing as much theatre as we can afford. This trip was primarily to give our five-year-old granddaughter a break from summer club. She has two working parents and is on school holiday.
PL Travers, author of the ‘Mary Poppins’ series of novels had confessed that the story was largely autobiographical. Probably not the flying nanny bit but more the ‘Mr Banks father’. Pamela Travers lost her own father who was also a banker when she was seven. The character Mr Banks has an epiphany … when he refuses a loan to a kind man who later gives each of the visiting Banks’ children a sixpence. The kind man tells the children to spend their sixpences wisely. And Mr Banks has a volte-face.
The umbrella with the parrot head our granddaughter wanted cost a lot more than sixpence. But she was swept up with the magic. And so was I. I had my own epiphany as Mary Poppins – brilliantly executed by Zizi Stallen – soared above the West End audience. What joy that must be, I thought, to be transported above an applauding audience. What a metaphor.
Of course neither Zizi nor Mary Poppins could possibly see their adoring crowd. They would always be blinded by the Fresnals and the spotlights. Theatre does that, of course. It can be both elevating and blinding.
The Banks’ children offer up their sixpences to their father when he is down on his financial luck – because the best way to spend your money is on those you love.
I hope our granddaughter remembers this. ‘Cos the umbrella with the parrot head cost thirty quid. But I hope it helps her soar on rainy days.
My plays are available from www.stagescripts.com
Creative Ink for Actors Reunion – Bun Feast – Saturday 13th May, 2023. Amersham Barn Hall. 20th Anniversary – when we set out to deliver ‘Blackberry Promises’.

‘Knocking on Doors …’ by Ms Paige Turner
In response to my last bi-month’s blog ‘Memory, Misappropriation and Menageries …’ focusing on Tennessee Williams’s ‘The Glass Menagerie’, my former Creative Writing student Steve Givens from St Louis, Missouri, USA emailed me his story. Steve was visiting Florida as a 19-year-old English student and made a stop at Ernest Hemingway’s house when someone told him where the titanic Tennessee lived. Steve went there. He knocked on the playwright’s door and was invited in. Tennessee signed Steve’s copy of ‘The Glass Menagerie’ which he happened to have on his person and which he was studying at the time.
A couple of days after Steve emailed me his story, a young writer named Mbulelo Ngcubo from Cape Town whom I am guiding on his children’s book emailed me. Mbulelo had been to hear the award-winning novelist Patricia Schonstein (‘Skyline’) speak about her writing journey. Mbulelo approached Patricia after the talk and spoke of his own journey. She invited him to her home in Cape Town and gave him some helpful advice.
There is a touch of synchronicity here (timing is all) and when this happens, Jung might say, ‘Sit up and take notice’. Knocking on doors can be beneficial and I admire both Steve and Mbulelo’s courage. I also know them both to be the most unassuming of individuals. They are grateful, I am sure, for the hospitality of two great writers. I am grateful to have both of these productive writers in my life.
‘When This Is All Over …’ published by Creative ink is available on Amazon for the Rennie Grove Hospice Care.
My novel ‘Shakespeare’s Clock’ published by Cranthorpe Millner, is available on Amazon and all leading book stores.

‘Memory, Misappropriation and Menageries … ‘by Ms Paige Turner.
‘The Glass Menagerie’ by Tennessee Williams – a play told in flashback by a narrator who is one of the characters. A play about fragility and seeing the past through a triangular prism: the dysfunction of a family unit of three: mother, brother, sister – all abandoned by a father who worked for a telephone company and ‘fell in love with long distances’.
My eyes fought to find the ‘The’ on the poster at the Duke of York’s. Such is this modern passion for paring down language. Mister Justin Case said I should always read the small print. A safari guide once said to me, ‘How you gonna spot a leopard if you can’t spot the butter on the table?’
There also seems to be a current passion for misappropriation. The fourth character in the play is the gentleman caller – a friend of the brother/narrator who is bullied by his mother into inviting ‘any nice friend’ to ‘call on’ his disabled sister. Jeremy Herrin has cast a young actor of colour as the gentleman caller. There is a kind of absurdity in this casting. I think it’s fair enough to cut out all of Amanda’s – the mother’s – N words but she would have been truly horrified to entertain a gentleman caller of colour for her daughter. And this play is so definitely set in thirties St Louis. I find it difficult to re-write history and distort a period play. Amanda is a product of her time and class and hence her ancient distorted thinking.
However. I’ve seen and acted in a mass of theatre in my time. And Victor Alli’s performance is one of the best I have ever had the pleasure to experience. My, does this actor own his space – which is at the root of Jim’s character counteracting Laura’s inability to own an inch of hers.
So we must accept that a dramatic licence was issued and applaud this exemplary performance.
It’s also a play about guilt. Like the brother/narrator – Williams abandoned his family to explore the wider world. Hopefully he was redeemed by giving us such classics and the royalty money for his sister’s care.
Next month: ‘Mary Poppins’.
My plays are available from www.stagescripts.com
Creative Ink for Actors Reunion – Bun Feast – Saturday 13th May, 2023. Amersham Barn Hall. 20th Anniversary – when we set out to deliver ‘Blackberry Promises’.

‘Seeing Behind the Lines …’ by Ms Paige Turner
Mister Double Cream from Uxbridge – one of my three blog readers – aka playwright Phillip Sheahan – has asked me to write this in less than 500 words. Here goes on the hottest UK day on record.
Three years ago I volunteered to organise a reunion for my alma mater The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama alumni at mine, planned for March 2020. March 2020. Say no more. The whole complement (18) were coming. 2021 was a wash out – so working my way round like a Sudoku grid for all 18’s available dates we arrived at Saturday 16th July, 2022.
How we skipped the train strikes is a mystery, but we didn’t skip the BA4 and BA5 Covid variants: one by one, eight bluebottles fell off the wall to mix my metaphors. Add in cancelled plane flights to the mix and we were left with ten.
The day was magic. We are all knocking seventy, give or take a year or two and it had been fifty years since we climbed into a Central leotard. But as is our wont, on second view the years dissipate before our eyes and we do not see furrows. Lines are only made by laughter anyway: memories of Maureen having presumably swallowed a pin and rushed to A and E. (She still swears blind that she did.) Another having lost his white socks (euphemism for virginity) the night before our performance of Wesker’s Roots and me being asked by our Techie Tutor to go and find a left handed screwdriver and I did. We could have been back in the Swiss Cottage pub, high on barley wine: the cheap girl’s scotch. No. Not Covid or wasps or age could wither us. For essence is ever present.
How fortunate was I to follow a course which produced amongst others: a veritable voice bard, a renowned casting director (‘Chariots of Fire’etc), voice over agent and BBC presenter, documentary maker, radio presenter, actresses who have filmed with Elizabeth Taylor and appeared in ‘Coronation Street’, ‘Casualty’ and ‘Harry Potter’, with daughters who have starred in ‘Downton Abbey’ and ‘Peaky Blinders’, a Guinness World Record holder for ensemble spoons-playing, heads of drama departments in challenging London and Manchester schools who collectively have directed hundreds of shows, creator of a drama company for those with learning disabilities, Central tutor and not least, a discoverer of the ancient tree – the Porlock Pippin and biographer.. unforgottenexmoor.com How cool is all that?

There will be a 20th anniversary reunion for my theatre company Creative Ink for Actors on Saturday 13th May 2023. It will be a bun feast to which all your partners and children are invited at the Amersham Centre where we performed so many of my plays. Diarise it.
Hot holiday reading!
‘When This is All Over …’ a pandemic anthology/Creative Ink

https://amzn.to/3xi8iay

My novel ‘Shakespeare’s Clock’.

https://www.waterstones.com/book/shakespeares-clock/jan-moran-neil/9781912964635

https://www.cranthorpemillner.com/product/jan-moran-neil-shakespeares-clock/

https://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/fiction-poetry/shakespeares-clock,jan-moran-neil-9781912964635

That’s 500 words, Mister Double Cream from Uxbridge. Have you melted yet?

Premise and Performance by Ms Paige Turner
Mister Justin Case and I are on a post pandemic Theatre Gorge. We’ve just been to see ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird’ at the Gielgud Theatre with Rafe Spall giving a warm and beautiful performance as Atticus Finch, the defence lawyer who takes on Tom Robinson’s case of accused rape. Tom is ‘of colour’ and in a 30s’ Southern American small town, he is as good as guilty and dead.
Harper Lee’s novel won the Pulitzer prize and we then watched the 1962 film in which Gregory Peck gave an equally warm and beautiful performance as the defending lawyer. It’s not my place to re-tell plot here, go and see the play if you can – but the ‘premise’ between book and current staging is different. I read the book twice more than twenty years ago but it seems to me the ‘premise’ of the novel is the learning of when to speak out and when to stay silent. (Ha! The ‘premise’ of my novel ‘Shakespeare’s Clock’!) For Atticus speaks out in defending the guiltless Tom, but learns, by a later experience that to remain silent is the wiser and better path.
Aaron Sorkin’s play focuses on Atticus’s belief that all men are good and worthy of respect even if they do not feel that black lives matter, which deviates from Lee’s novel. Sorkin also gives Calpurnia – Atticus’s maid ‘of colour’ – fresh lines to say to her ‘master’. ‘When you respect all men whatever their values, think of who you are disrespecting.’ The fact that no Calpurnia would have said these words to her ‘master’ in a 30s’ Southern American state is not, I am sure, the writer’s point. It’s something called dramatic licence. And Sorkin, the writer has used Calpurnia to make a point; to change the ‘premise’ of the work which Lee, the original author had created.
Last month we went to see Jodie Cromer, as a defence lawyer, in ‘Prima Facie’ – a one-woman show which is transferring to Broadway. I won’t go into that premise. See the play if you can. Next month is Tennessee Williams’ ‘The Glass Menagerie’. One of my old favourites – departing from the law but an examination of the notion of memory – for all those out there writing their memoirs!
You can purchase my novel ‘Shakespeare’s Clock’ here …

https://www.waterstones.com/book/shakespeares-clock/jan-moran-neil/9781912964635

https://www.cranthorpemillner.com/product/jan-moran-neil-shakespeares-clock/

https://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/fiction-poetry/shakespeares-clock,jan-moran-neil-9781912964635

I am also available for readings from the novel if you wish to book me in person or virtually!