Trying To Connect

I've read five of the plays from the Connections volume I referenced the other day and enjoyed each of them to some extent, with that extent usually being a lot. Mind you, I think you have to be a bit of a theatre person to grasp how some of them work on stage, and even then I couldn't quite visualise fully Howard Brenton's The Guffin (yes, there are some big-name dramatists involved) and Stacey Gregg's I'm Spilling My Heart Out Here. But I grasped enough of these to get a sense of how exciting they'd be to witness - at least by a teenage audience attuned to their concerns - and how they are meant to work. (I know that sounds patronising, but it isn't meant to. Such concerns are passionately real and thought-provoking to all, but they tend, to some degree, to push back on old geezers like myself.)

The only disappointment I feel in relation to the volume relates to what was primarily on my mind in 2017 with regard to the 2014 compilation: above all I'd really like to find a piece we could do as part of a production with my drama guys. However, there are two key problems regarding this: the plays (so far) are wonderfully edgy, but too edgy for these shores, I think, and they are very, very British. I like a sense of the local but there's a limit and adaptation necessarily loses something (even as it might gain something else) and when that something becomes too much of a thing you end up failing to do justice to the material, I'm afraid.

The play I've most enjoyed so far has been the most obviously conventional in terms of telling a story. Ryan Craig's We Lost Elijah struck me as a brilliant bit of theatre and I can almost figure out a way to get it done in our context - almost, but not quite, I'm afraid. A pity, but I've still got fifteen plays to read, with five more from this volume and ten from a different Connections to go.