Bruntwood at 20 E-Book

Various

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Modern Plays
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 491

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting is the largest playwriting competition in Europe. Since its inception twenty years ago, it has received over 17,325 submissions, and awarded prizes to thirty-eight different plays across its various categories. This anthology brings together five of those extraordinary winning plays in a wide-ranging selection reflecting the history and scope of the prize – and the inestimable impact it has had over the past two decades. Pretend You Have Big Buildings by Ben Musgrave (Bruntwood Prize, 2005) is a tender and funny play about identity, loss, and growing up in Romford in the shadow of Canary Wharf. Winterlong by Andrew Sheridan (joint winner, 2008) is a shattering, heartbreaking play about searching for hope in a damaged world. Three Birds by Janice Okoh (Bruntwood Prize, 2011) is a darkly comic drama about three young siblings who find themselves home alone, without adult care. Wish List by Katherine Soper (Bruntwood Prize, 2015) is a powerful exploration of what our labour is worth and how life can be lived when the system is stacked against you. untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play by Kimber Lee (International Award, 2019) is a wickedly funny satire that wrestles with history and explodes cultural stereotypes. Also included is an incisive essay by theatre historian Rachel Clements on the impact of the Bruntwood Prize on the theatre landscape, as well as introductions by Sarah Frankcom and each of the selected authors.

Leseprobe

BRUNTWOOD AT 20:

Five Plays from the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting

Pretend You Have Big Buildings by Ben Musgrave

Winterlong by Andrew Sheridan

Three Birds by Janice Okoh

Wish List by Katherine Soper

untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play

Contents

Foreword by Sarah Frankcom

Introduction: ‘Head, Heart and Guts’ by Rachel Clements

Pretend You Have Big Buildings by Ben Musgrave

Winterlong by Andrew Sheridan

Three Birds by Janice Okoh

Wish List by Katherine Soper

untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play by Kimber Lee

A Timeline

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

ForewordSarah Frankcom

On a humid summer evening in 2005 I was asked to attend a dinner in an Italian restaurant in Manchester hosted by Braham Murray, one of the founding Artistic Directors of the Royal Exchange Theatre. In my capacity as the theatre’s New Work Associate, I pitched an idea for a prize for Northern playwrights to Michael and Jean Oglesby from Bruntwood, a Manchester-based property company who were supporters of the theatre. I was totally unprepared for Mike’s forensic interrogation of my modest proposal. I remember him asking, why would we want it to be limited by geography and not seize the opportunity to do something of national significance from here in Manchester? I didn’t disagree with him. Mike was really inspiring (and determined) when he grabbed hold of an idea. I was charged with dreaming up something bigger and bolder. And so it began.

I can’t quite believe that the prize is now twenty years old. It seems amazing that it’s still here and unearthing plays and helping them find their way to theatres and audiences. Over 17,325 plays have been submitted and, as of 2025, over £394,000 has been distributed in prize funds.

At the heart of the prize has always been a very simple belief that anyone anywhere can write a play and that the prize should provide tools, support and, most importantly, a deadline for playwrights. As the prize has grown up it’s been brilliant to see a community of playwrights emerge who have been through the Bruntwood experience as longlisted and shortlisted writers, winners and now judges. The prize has always seen itself as an investor in the playwright and the money that it has distributed has in many instances bought emerging playwrights the time to write at a critical moment in their career development.

Later when I became Artistic Director of the Royal Exchange Theatre, the prize and the plays it generated were central to my programming and partnerships. My relationship with Mike and Jean and latterly their daughter Kate deepened. Mike was very involved in all stages of the prize. He absolutely loved the ceremony and meeting the shortlisted writers and seeing their plays develop as they moved into production. Mike had an eye for an interesting play: he always claimed to not really know what made a good play, but this didn’t stop him passionately championing the plays he fell in love with as a judge. He felt he represented the audience and believed that a new play was the lifeblood of the theatre, and that there was nothing more exciting than seeing a new play meet an audience for the first time.

I’m writing this at a time when the world needs new plays more than ever, but the climate for them is very challenging and the new-writing ecology is in a critical condition. Over the years I have found myself moved by the impact of the prize. I’ve had the privilege of working with some amazing playwrights and directing some brilliant first plays that have shown me the world in a new way and deepened my understanding of what it is to be alive. I continue to meet writers who tell me that making the longlist was the first moment they felt recognised as a writer. But mostly I am still moved by the simple fact that every few years, thousands of people take a leap of imagination and embark on the journey of crafting a play.

The prize is still and has always been built on the work of many people who are passionate about what new plays can be and do. I’d like to acknowledge all the readers who’ve worked tirelessly to make sure every play is considered fairly, the judging panels, all the theatres who have been partners over the years, and all the audiences who have seen Bruntwood Prize-winning plays in theatres in Manchester, around the country and all over the world. I’d particularly like to thank Jo Combes, Sam Pritchard and Suzanne Bell who looked after and shepherded the prize at the Royal Exchange. And finally express my gratitude to Mike and Jean Oglesby and Kate Vokes who generously supported a nascent idea with such determination, passion and unwavering commitment.

Head, Heart and Guts: Twenty Years of the Bruntwood Prize for PlaywritingRachel Clements

It’s January 2016, and Erin Doherty is standing on the Royal Exchange Theatre’s Studio Stage, singing Meat Loaf’s ‘I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)’. Her character, Tamsin, has been cajoled into song by Luke (played by Shaquille Ali-Yebuah). Unaccompanied, self-conscious, Tamsin’s voice shakes and falters. Gradually, she finds her feet and, all of a sudden, the backing track kicks in. The world tilts. For a moment, Tamsin is supported by the full daft grandeur of a power ballad, and by the laughter and tears of the audience. And she soars: air guitar high kicks shed the tension of financial precarity and the constant worry that have smothered her throughout Katherine Soper’s Wish List. She is glorious. The song ends, and we’re back in Tamsin’s flat. It is awkward, silly and sad; it is hopeful, resilient and desperate; a one-two emotional and political gut-punch. It’s a kind of moment – urgent, original and deeply theatrical – which happens in many Bruntwood Prize-winning plays.

Writing in The Stage on 24 October 2024, theatre critic Anya Ryan argued that the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting has become ‘an integral part of the theatre landscape, propelling the careers of some of our most exciting writers’, in a piece whose headline declared that the prize is ‘vital to the UK’s new-writing ecology’. This collection brings together a selection of five of the thirty-eight winning plays to date, including Wish List. The texts gathered here are not presented as ‘best of the bests’, but offered as a curated group which aim to give readers a sense of the prize’s aims, development, values and impact over the past two decades.

The Bruntwood Prize has mattered to the theatre scene of the UK and beyond because, since its inception, it has been about much more than handing awards to a few exceptional plays. It has centred and celebrated the craft and creativity of the playwright, but in a way that understands the complex, interconnected network of the art and the ecology of the theatre. The plays published here are not the versions submitted to the prize but the texts as developed for production. Bruntwood Prizes, then, are the tip of a bigger iceberg: the most visible part, perhaps, but only part of the dramaturgical and developmental facilitation, and the support across the wider theatre ecology that Bruntwood and the Royal Exchange have offered to writers over the past two decades. Each of the plays in this volume is interesting and distinctive in its own right; each is committed to its own unique theatrical gesture. As dramaturg Suzanne Bell, whose involvement with the prize has been extensive, says, like many of the winning plays, they contain ‘a marriage of head, heart and guts’. Together, they speak to the theatrical boldness, the social conscience, and the connection to their moment which has characterised Bruntwood Prize plays since 2005.

Large-scale ambitions:Pretend You Have Big Buildings by Ben Musgrave

Ben Musgrave’s Pretend You Have Big Buildings won the inaugural Bruntwood Prize in 2005. Musgrave had not had a professional production staged before winning the prize, although he had completed an MA Writing for Performance at Goldsmiths College, University of London; he has gone on to a successful scriptwriting career across multiple dramatic forms, and also one that – via his longstanding work teaching at the University of East Anglia – has supported many other writers. Pretend You Have Big Buildings is distinctive for the way it combines a precise time and place (November–December 1995, Romford) with a story which has global as well as local implications, and for its negotiation of intertwined themes around grief, racism, family history, class and adolescence. In the central relationship between Danny (played in the 2007 Royal Exchange Theatre production by Sacha Dhawan) and Leon (played by Jonathan Bailey), Musgrave dramatises the fallout of disintegrating marriages, and the impact of environment on teenagers’ understandings of, and ability to inhabit, their own identities.

The play inherits and pushes at the strong social-realist tradition in British playwriting, as do Monster by Duncan Macmillan and The Cracks in My Skin by Phil Porter which also received prizes in the inaugural year. There is a strong social conscience in Musgrave’s play which can also be seen in the rest of this collection, as well as many other Bruntwood plays, particularly those which are concerned with the challenges facing young people – especially those who have been pushed to the margins (Vivienne Franzmann’s Mogadishu, which won a prize in 2008, and Anna Jordan’s Yen, which won in 2013, are also good examples of these). Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Dominic Cavendish described Musgrave’s play as ‘touching, funny, immensely assured’, while Dominic Maxwell, writing for The Times, praised it for having ‘a scope and sense of recent history that too many new plays lack’.

Although much has developed and shifted in the prize since 2005, some fundamental principles have been established from the beginning. The anonymised, multi-stage reading process is one: plays are cut loose from any assumptions that a writer’s name or biography might carry. Equally significant is the commitment not just to awarding money – important, even career-altering, as that has been – but to supporting plays through development and aspiring (though not guaranteeing) to take them into production. At twenty-six years old, Musgrave was the youngest writer to have had a play on in the 750-seater, in-the-round, main space of the Royal Exchange. Pretend You Have Big Buildings, and the Bruntwood Prize, opened doors at the Royal Exchange for early career writers. Musgrave and other prize-winning playwrights have shown that it is worth taking a risk with, and providing resources at scale for, the work of new artists, and demonstrated a confidence in new plays and in the audiences that come to see them.

Bruntwood and the North West:Winterlong by Andrew Sheridan

Winterlong, which won a prize in 2008, was Andrew Sheridan’s first play as a writer. It combines an unflinching depiction of a cruel, damaged world (via the behaviour and language of its characters) with moments of sharp tender beauty, and shards of hope that are almost too hard to hold. Lyn Gardner, reviewing the first production in the Guardian, directed by Sarah Frankcom in the Exchange’s Studio (transferring to London’s Soho Theatre), called Winterlong a ‘dense, difficult and brave’ play. Its movement across fifteen years of protagonist Oscar’s life means it’s non-naturalistic in its theatrical strategy and, although it’s oriented around a clear central figure, its social vision is expansive. There’s a poetry to its violence and horrors which allows it to shuttle between a tight focus on character and their wider situation.

The confidence of the play’s dialogue and voices owes a lot to Sheridan’s experience and craft as an established actor (particularly on stage, including at the Royal Exchange). Several other prize-winning writers including Nathan Queeley-Dennis, Fiona Peek, Gareth Farr, Luke Norris, Chris Urch and Rebecca Callard also came to writing as or after being actors, though their plays are wildly different from one another. Indeed, Callard played Helen in the first production of Winterlong, before writing A Bit of Light, which received a commendation in 2017 (and which she has adapted into a film). This connection highlights the fact that a growing awareness of the Bruntwood Prize – and of the writers who had been recognised by it – has become a significant driver for subsequent submissions to the prize.

The Mancunian genesis and location of the Bruntwood Prize matters in several ways. A writer-centred approach to and understanding of theatre-making has a long history in the UK. But from the establishment of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court in the 1950s and the development of London’s fringe theatres in the 1970s to the proliferation of ‘new writing’ in the 1990s, London has loomed large in the playwriting scene: for many, it has exerted a gravitational force. As Sarah Frankcom notes in her foreword to this volume, making Manchester another important hub for the development of plays and playwrights was a key ambition of both Bruntwood and the Royal Exchange. Reorienting or diversifying the map means that – though some Bruntwood Prize writers are London-based – a significant number of prize-winning plays come from right across the UK. Katherine Chandler’s Bird and How My Light is Spent by Alan Harris (Judges’ Award winners in 2013 and 2015) are both set in Wales; Michael John O’Neill’s Akedah, which received the Original New Voice Award in 2019, is set in Northern Ireland. There is a strand of distinctly ‘Northern’ voices in the prize’s history, too: Electric Rosary by Tim Foley, which won a Judges’ Award in 2017, is set in Northumberland. Alistair McDowall’s Brilliant Adventures is set in Middlesbrough; Gareth Farr’s Britannia Waves the Rules in Blackpool. Both won Judges’ Awards in 2011, the same year that Winterlong, the most emphatically Mancunian of the prize-winning plays to date, was first produced in the Royal Exchange’s Studio. And in the 2022 cycle, the North West Original New Voice Award (given to Patrick Hughes) came with a year-long paid residency at the Royal Exchange, providing a theatrical home for a writer in the region.

Co-productions and development opportunities:Three Birds by Janice Okoh

Janice Okoh’s Three Birds – which won the Bruntwood Prize in 2011 – also has vulnerable teenagers at the heart of the play, but there is more dark comedy in her play than in Sheridan’s or Musgrave’s, and a completely different approach to setting. Located in the flat that siblings Tiana, Tionne and Tanika live in, Okoh’s work was described by Libby Purves in The Times as ‘[t]ough stuff, but no bleak social misery lecture’, which ‘deals in harsh realism but hovers, brilliantly suspended, between dark comedy, thriller and an expressive human sympathy worthy of Tennessee Williams’. When the play moved from the Royal Exchange’s Studio to London’s Bush Theatre, Sarah Hemming commended Okoh’s ‘vivid depiction of the children, her keen ear for demotic dialogue and her moving illustration of the need for love’ in the Financial Times. It is a good example of the co-production model which has increasingly served both Bruntwood playwrights and the wider industry, making it possible for text to reach the stage. Finding suitable partner producing venues, has been crucial to the staging of Bruntwood Prize-winning plays – and to the fostering of relationships between writers and venues which might be good homes and stages for their works.

One of the main criteria for Bruntwood Prize readers to consider is whether a script is making distinctly theatrical gestures. Okoh’s play does that: the flat feels less and less safe as Three Birds progresses, and the text makes particularly deft use of the possibilities of doors and entrances on stage, as the siblings struggle to hold themselves together and keep the outside world at bay. Director Sarah Frankcom worked with young adult actors Michaela Coel, Jahvel Hall and Susan Wokoma who played the teenagers and child of the piece, thereby mobilising the collective imagination of the production and its audience. There was a related but different iteration of total confidence in collective imagining in Alistair McDowall’s Brilliant Adventures (which also won a prize in 2011), in which a large cardboard box becomes a time machine. The ‘Meat Loaf moment’ in Wish List was another. Understanding the co-creation that is happening with an audience is a key feature of a playtext, and the plays in this volume all let the audience in to their world-building.

Okoh has also successfully developed Three Birds into the six-part television series Just Act Normal, broadcast on the BBC in March 2025. Her writing was praised by Lucy Mangan of the Guardian for being ‘beautifully structured and hold[ing] its many strands in perfect tension’. Other Bruntwood writers – notably Anna Jordan, Phoebe Eclair-Powell (Shed: Exploded View, winner in 2019), and James Fritz (Parliament Square, Judges’ Award winner in 2015) – write for television and audio formats as well as for the stage. The creative industries are interconnected rather than siloed, and the Bruntwood Prize’s impact reaches beyond the stage. The prize has also forged a number of ‘legacy opportunities’, including residencies at the Banff Playwrights Lab in Canada, Melbourne Theatre Company and the National Theatre Studio to support writers to go on to develop their next plays.

Writing the contemporary moment:Wish List by Katherine Soper

Katherine Soper’s Wish List won the Bruntwood Prize in 2015, at a point where the public profile of the prize was such that it generated significant press interest. Wish List is one of the prize-winning plays which speaks most directly and critically to its social and political moment. Its two strands, connected by the beautifully drawn character of Tamsin (played in the first production by Erin Doherty), interrogate the impacts of zero-hours contracts in austerity Britain, and the effects of changes to a benefits system that is already failing to adequately support Tamsin’s brother Dean (played by Joseph Quinn). Lyn Gardner, writing in the Guardian, called it ‘a quietly essential and moving play that makes us empathise with the lives of the desperate and the unseen’, while Paul Taylor, in the Independent, praised Soper’s ability to take a ‘clear-eyed look at the interplay between two dehumanising systems’ and to arouse ‘due political indignation’. In 2015, the impacts of austerity politics were biting particularly hard. That the Oglesby family and Bruntwood maintained their commitment to supporting the arts throughout this period, and again during the Covid-19 pandemic, was a testament to their values which (particularly in the wake of the global financial crisis) seems particularly important.

Like Musgrave, Soper’s route into playwriting was via an MA (at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama). The prize led to the development of a co-production of Wish List between the Royal Exchange and the Royal Court, directed by Matthew Xia, in 2016. It was described as a ‘smashing debut play’ by Matt Wolf in the International New York Times, suggesting that the collaboration between Bruntwood and the Royal Exchange was registering in the theatre landscape beyond the UK. Wish List is a great example of how the Bruntwood Prize has provided opportunities for fostering professional relationships and providing a springboard for those with huge creative skill who don’t yet have industry connections. In a similar vein, Kendall Feaver’s working relationship with director Katy Rudd was forged through staging The Almighty Sometimes (Judges’ Award winner, 2015), and the pair have since created a hugely successful adaptation of Noel Streatfield’s Ballet Shoes at the National Theatre (2024).

International connections:untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play by Kimber Lee

As the prize moved towards its fifteenth year, two new awards were added: the Original New Voice Award (which became the North West Original New Voice Award and Residency in 2022), and the International Award. This second award was won, in 2019, by New York-based playwright Kimber Lee, whose brilliantly satirical untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play sets out to critique and explode decades upon decades of racist and sexist stereotypes of Asian women. Matt Barton, reviewing for the Financial Times described Roy Alexander Weise’s 2023 co-production between the Royal Exchange, Factory International for the Manchester International Festival, the Young Vic, and Headlong, as ‘a show that’s like a lit stick of dynamite’, while Claire Allfree called it a ‘spoofy spiky brickbat’ of a play in the Telegraph. The International Award of the prize involves a set of partnerships with a network of new-writing companies in the United States, Canada and Australia who invite playwrights from their development programmes to submit eligible work anonymously. Already, this is facilitating the introduction to the UK theatre scene and production of writers like Lee and Dave Harris, who received a commendation in 2019 for Tambo & Bones (produced by the Actors Touring Company and Stratford East). untitled is a great example of a piece which is tackling issues that play out across, and therefore need to be addressed in, multiple different cultural landscapes.

As the Bruntwood Prize has grown and developed over twenty years – in terms of the number of entries, range of satellite activities, types of awards, and its international reach – it has both connected to and embraced an international scope and vision, and recognised the globalised awareness of emerging writers, while remaining a distinctly Mancunian engine room for new writing with a commitment to its region. As Anya Ryan noted, it directly propels and nurtures an increasing number of writers’ careers and supports the UK’s new-writing theatre ecology. What’s more, it increasingly connects with playwriting cultures in the English-speaking theatre world beyond the UK. The Bruntwood Prize is a call from Manchester to a national and international writing community, celebrating plays that are ambitious, bold and compellingly current.

Sarah Frankcom is an acclaimed director and dramaturg. After joining the Royal Exchange Theatre as Literary Manager, she created the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting alongside the Oglesby family in 2005. Sarah was joint Artistic Director of the Royal Exchange Theatre from 2008–2013, and was sole Artistic Director from 2014–2019. She has directed extensively for the Exchange and in venues across the UK, including several world premieres of Bruntwood Prize-winning plays: Pretend You Have Big Buildings, Winterlong and Three Birds.

Rachel Clements is a lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Manchester. She convened the MA Playwriting for its first three years, works closely with early-career playwrights, and has published widely on contemporary British theatre.

A cross-sector partnership between the Royal Exchange Theatre, property company Bruntwood and the Oglesby Charitable Trust, the Bruntwood Prize is an opportunity for writers of any background and experience to enter unperformed plays to be judged by a panel of industry experts.

Since its inception in 2005 over 17,000 scripts have been entered, £344,000 has been awarded to thirty-eight prize-winning writers, and twenty-seven winning productions have been staged in venues across the UK. At the heart of the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting is the principle that anyone can enter – through an entirely anonymous submissions process, scripts are judged purely based on the merit of the work alone and with no knowledge of the identity of the playwright.

Each winner enters into a development process with the Royal Exchange Theatre in an endeavour to bring their work to production. There have been co-productions with the Bush Theatre, Ellie Keel Productions, HighTide, Live Theatre, Lyric Hammersmith, Manchester International Festival, Mercury Theatre Colchester, Orange Tree Theatre, Paines Plough Theatre Company, Royal Court Theatre, Sherman Theatre, Soho Theatre and the Young Vic Theatre. Work has also gone on to be produced internationally from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Sweden and the USA.

The Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting is a genuine endeavour to discover new stories and support playwright to develop their craft, providing everybody and anybody with the opportunity to explore their creativity and write a play. It offers a fantastic opportunity to hone your writing skills, whether or not you have written for the stage before.

writeaplay.co.uk

Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre Company transforms the way people see theatre, each other and the world around them. Our historic building was taken over by artists in 1976, and today it is an award-winning cultural charity that produces new theatre in-the-round, in communities, on the road and online.

Exchange remains at the heart of everything we make and do. Our currency is brand new drama and reinvigorated classics, the boldest artists and a company of highly skilled makers – all brought together in an imaginative endeavour to share ideas and experiences with the people of Greater Manchester (and beyond).

The Exchange’s unique auditorium is powerfully democratic, a space where audiences and performers meet as equals, entering and exiting through the same doors. It is the inspiration for all we do: inviting everyone to understand the past, engage in today’s big questions, collectively imagine a better future, and lose themselves in the moment of a great night out.

In 2026 our iconic theatre celebrates fifty years of producing award-winning plays, creating work that is ambitious in ideas, form and scale right in the heart of Manchester’s city centre.

royalexchange.co.uk

Bruntwood, including Bruntwood SciTech, is one of the UK’s leading and largest property providers and developers, committed to creating thriving cities and town centres for almost fifty years.

Bruntwood and Bruntwood SciTech have over £1.8bn in assets and more than 100 properties across Greater Manchester, Cheshire, Leeds, Liverpool, Birmingham Cambridge and London.

They provide workspace, residential, retail and leisure space, including the independent shopping emporium, Afflecks in Manchester City Centre.

Focused on forming long-term, consultation-led partnerships to revitalise town centres, Bruntwood has a portfolio of town centre regeneration projects with Trafford and Bury Councils. Through a community-focused approach to regeneration, Bruntwood aims to ensure social, economic and environmental sustainability and to create vibrant places that are dynamic, inspirational and futureproof.

Since 2018, Bruntwood has had a joint venture in Bruntwood SciTech alongside Legal & General, and was joined by Greater Manchester Pension Fund in October 2023. Bruntwood SciTech is the UK’s leading developer of city-wide innovation ecosystems and specialist environments helping companies – particularly those in the science, technology and innovation sectors – to form, scale and grow. It is also the largest dedicated property platform serving the growth of the UK’s knowledge economy to become a global science and technology superpower.

Recognising the urgency of the climate crisis, Bruntwood is committed to a sustainable and fair future, and was the UK’s first commercial property company to sign up to the UK Green Building Council’s Advancing Net Zero Programme. By 2030, Bruntwood’s entire portfolio will operate at net zero carbon in the areas under its direct control and in the construction of new builds and major redevelopments, and will be a net zero business by 2050. As of 2024, both Bruntwood and Bruntwood SciTech’s workspaces are powered 100% by renewable energy.

Bruntwood also actively collaborates with ambitious and ground-breaking arts and cultural organisations, in addition to supporting environmental, civic and charitable initiatives through the Oglesby Charitable Trust.

bruntwood.co.uk

The Oglesby Charitable Trust (OCT) is an independent grantmaking charity dedicated to creating thriving communities across the North of England.

Established in 2001 by the late Michael Oglesby CBE DL – founder of Bruntwood – and Jean Oglesby CBE, the Trust has since donated over £35 million, supporting organisations that deliver measurable impact in arts, education, health and social inequalities.

The organisation’s Trustees – family members and professional advisors – have been passionate ambassadors of arts and culture since the Trust was founded, and believe that philanthropy has a major role to play in the future of the sector. They support work that focuses on broadening who engages with arts and culture – as learners, performers, artists and audiences – and on increasing the use of arts and culture for learning, personal development and, crucially, social change. Excellence in the arts requires, and drives, investment, and the OCT has long committed support to artists and work of the highest standard.

The financial capacity of the OCT comes from both the philanthropic generosity of the Trust’s founders, as well as the success of Bruntwood.

oglesbycharitabletrust.org.uk

PRETEND YOU HAVE BIG BUILDINGS

Ben Musgrave

BEN MUSGRAVE

Ben Musgrave grew up in Bangladesh, India and Essex. He won first prize in the inaugural Bruntwood Prize for Pretend You Have Big Buildings, which premiered at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, as part of the 2007 Manchester International Festival. He was subsequently commissioned by the National Theatre. His play Crushed Shells and Mud, developed on attachment at the National Theatre Studio, opened at Southwark Playhouse, London, in 2015.

Other work includes Exams Are Getting Easier (Birmingham Rep); His Teeth (Only Connect), an Evening Standard and Time Out Critics’ Choice, nominated for an OffWestEnd Award for Best New Play; Politrix (The Big House); Across the Dark Water (The Point, Eastleigh); and Indigo Giant, produced in Bangladesh in 2022 and on tour in the UK in 2024, where it was nominated for an OffWestEnd Award for Best New Play. He is currently working on a new stage adaptation of LP Hartley’s The Go-Between with Eastern Angles.

For radio, his credits include The British Club; The Last Missionary of Kanaipur and Vital Signs (all BBC Radio 4). He is a Lecturer in Scriptwriting at the University of East Anglia, and his work has been supported by the Peggy Ramsay Foundation, the Royal Society of Literature, and the British Council.

IntroductionBen Musgrave, 2025

I wrote Pretend You Have Big Buildings in 2004. I was doing an MA in Writing for Performance at Goldsmiths, where I had spent a year immersing myself in possibilities of how I might be as a writer – watching Pina Bausch videos, following hunches, coming to understand more about what had a charge for me (I wanted my work to be joyful and colourful and international).

I had grown up in Bangladesh and India, but returned to the UK in 1994, and ended up going to school in Romford, in Essex. This was a massive culture shock. Romford was not the England I had spent my childhood dreaming about, but there was also something fascinating and alive about it.

I spent a long time resisting writing about Romford – but one day I just started; and something flowed quickly and easily in a way that hadn’t happened before. I had an instinct about a feeling I wanted to explore, something to do with the experience of moving between worlds, and the feeling of ‘becoming yourself’. And I ran with that. And that became Pretend You Have Big Buildings.

About six months later, I’d sent the play around a bit, and it was getting nowhere, but I saw there was a new playwriting prize called the Bruntwood Prize being launched. I did another draft of the play, and I remember reading it on a National Express coach and thinking that the play still ‘gave me that feeling’. I sent it to the competition.

Since I’d first written the play, I’d got a job with the literary department at the Birmingham Rep. It was amazing to work with writers every day, but I was barely doing any writing at all. Then, out of the blue, I got a phone call from Royal Exchange Associate Director Jo Combes telling me I’d been shortlisted for the prize. I decided to leave the Rep to focus on writing.

A few weeks later I was standing in front of a load of people, holding an impossibly heavy glass trophy, knees buckling, and it felt like the universe was supporting that decision to commit to writing. That was the first meaning of the prize.

Bruntwood really did change my life. It gave me my break – I was quickly given a studio commission by the National Theatre – but it also gave me an extraordinary first experience of playwriting as a wonderfully collaborative process – working with wise and brilliant theatremakers – not least Sarah Frankcom and Jo Combes – who nurtured me and mentored me through it, and many wonderful actors, including Jonathan Bailey, Sacha Dhawan, Shobna Gulati and Tanya Franks. During previews, the play felt precarious, but something remarkable happened on press night – the play became the world that had been inside my head, and also gave me that feeling – something to do with people becoming themselves – that resonated with me. And that was such a privilege.

Something else I want to say about the meaning of the prize. It’s tempting to think of a prize like the Bruntwood as a miracle-making machine for lifting writers ‘out of nowhere’ – as if their work developed in complete isolation. I do think the Bruntwood Prize is a miracle, and the miracle is bringing to the light wonderful work that might not have found a life elsewhere.

Sometimes, no doubt, the work has developed in isolation, but more often I think the work of the winners, and the shortlist, and the longlist… has not developed in a vacuum. Often that work has been nourished all over the country by mentors, teachers, dramaturgs, actors, fellow writers – through workshops (not least the Bruntwood Roadshows and workshops themselves), or attachments, or writing programmes, or informal chats in the bar. I wrote Big Buildings on an MA programme, and twenty years later I now teach on the scriptwriting programme at the University of East Anglia. I’ve been proud to see our writers amongst the Bruntwood shortlists and winners over the years – and I love the day the Bruntwood shortlist comes out because it’s so often a moment when writers who’ve been working at it a little while – and working with others for a while – get the break they deeply deserve. I want to celebrate the way that Bruntwood is now a (vital) part of a new-writing theatre ecology – an ecology that feels a little endangered at the moment but one that has often worked well, and changed lives. The astonishment that Bruntwood readers always express about the sheer quality of the submissions is a sign that across the country something is going right.

Pretend You Have Big Buildings was first performed at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, on 11 July 2007, with the following cast:

DANNY

Sacha Dhawan

LEON

Jonathan Bailey

RUKHSANA

Shobna Gulati

ROB

Steve North

KAREN

Tanya Franks

STEVEN

Billy Seymour

ANNIE

Susan Twist

Directors

Sarah Frankcom and Jo Combes

Designer

Jaimie Todd

Lighting Designer

David Holmes

Sound Designer

Ian Dickinson

Acknowledgements

Pretend You Have Big Buildings began life during my MA in Writing for Performance at Goldsmiths College in 2005, and I am indebted to the MA group: Eric Bland, Duncan Chalmers, Jodi Gray, Kenny Emson and Pip Mayo; to Deborah Paige, who conducted a fruitful initial workshop; and especially to John Ginman, whose expert dramaturgy guided the play to its first incarnation at BAC in July 2005. Later, Act One was staged by acting students from E15 at the Actors Centre in 2006, and I am very grateful to them (and to Caroline Eves and Abigail Gonda for the opportunity), but especially to Meriel Baistow-Clare, who directed the play, and whose work on the script set the scene for the next phase of development. I would like to thank the Dog House Group for their support, rigour and friendship: Robin Booth, Lucy Caldwell, Nick Harrop, Matt Morrison, Jennifer Tuckett, Paul Amman Brar. And many thanks also to those who have read and discussed the script with me: Steve King, Lucy Morrison, Ben Jancovich, Chris Hannan, Nicholas Hytner, Jenny Marshall, Billy Dosanjh.

Thanks to Alex Marshall and Mark Willingham for development of the Essexman routines. To Ioannis Iordanidis, Amanda Washbrook, and Alex Haughey for advice on motorbikes. To the late Jim Reed for technical support. To all at Havering Libraries, especially Simon Donaghue for introducing me to local history. To Skye Wheeler. To Nick Hern and all at Nick Hern Books. To Mel Kenyon. To my parents.

And of course to Bruntwood and the Royal Exchange, without whom none of this extraordinary business would have come about. Finally, and especially, to Jo Combes and Sarah Frankcom, whose exemplary stewardship of the play’s development has brought the script on no end.

And – an update for 2025: to Selene Burn, who was such a wonderful person in my life before even 2007.

B.M.

Historical Note

Havering Council built the Dolphin, the swimming pool referred to by the characters, in the eighties. Its distinctive pyramidal roof – which looked a little like the top of Canary Wharf – was the most remarkable architectural feature of Romford town centre. When pieces of roof panelling began to fall off, the pool was closed down, and remained derelict for ten years. In 2003, the Dolphin was finally razed to the ground, and an enormous ASDA began to take shape.

Characters

DANNY, fifteen, mixed heritage

LEON, fifteen, white, Essex

RUKHSANA, thirty-seven, Indian

ROB, forty, white, Essex

KAREN, forty, white, Essex

STEVEN, fifteen, white, Essex

ANNIE, forty-two, white, Essex

Various recorded voices

Act Onetakes place in November to mid-December 1995.

Act Twotakes place in the hours after Act One.

Notes on the Text

A new line indicates a new impulse of thought or speech, and may replace a comma.

A blank line within speech generally replaces a beat.

A forward slash [ / ] indicates the point at which the next designated speech begins.

Italics within speech indicate added emphasis (except when in parentheses, which indicate a stage direction).

However, speech within parentheses is generally to be regarded as internal – or at any rate exclusive of other characters in the scene.

ACT ONE: Canary Wharf

Scene One

An aeroplane.

RUKHSANA and DANNY, side by side.

DANNY looks out of the window. He generally addresses thelandscape.

DANNY Hey, London

RUKHSANA holds a claret UK passport. Shegenerally addresses the audience.

RUKHSANA Look of this, this

DANNY (To the landscape.) Look at you

The light on the loop of the river

RUKHSANA And the embassy took his.

Yours. Yours. They took it away

I remember the picture but it’s

Fading it’s all dammed up in my head.

DANNY The Thames.

The PILOT makes an announcement.

PILOT’S VOICE

It’s a bit chilly down on the ground, ladies and gents, about three degrees Celsius

RUKHSANA Oh my God.

PILOT’S VOICE

And quite a strong north wind so / do

DANNY (Imitating the PILOT.)

‘Do wrap up warm, ladies and gents.’

Do wrap up warm.

Or you won’t know what’s hit you.

DANNY looks out of the window.

RUKHSANA And there’s a list of things I have to remember.

Just to get us from the airport.

Things about staying calm and being strong and not being offended by coldness

DANNY And England.

From the way you’re looking

From the sky over the coast so green… !

I think you’re going to be just right.

A judder of violent turbulence. RUKHSANA reacts badly.

Mum

It’s normal

RUKHSANA We’re falling?

DANNY It’s perfectly normal.

He’ll announce it. Like this:

‘Just a spot of turbulence, ladies and gentlemen’

With his English voice.

PILOT’S VOICE

Just entering a patch of turbulence there, ladies and gents, we should be clear shortly.

RUKHSANA (To the audience.)

I know where I’m going no more

Than the poor bastards to my right.

The wide-eyed family in their best clothes

Who packed their lunch in Bombay

And eat it with their hands.

The lights flicker out. The plane is landing.

DANNY Hold my hand

RUKHSANA Are we landing?

DANNY Yes. We’re landing.

She holds his hand. The plane touches down.

RUKHSANA And this family

They will have relations waiting

Seven little cousins

Waving

Miraculous placards

And I have no placard.

Only this strange son

Who’s dreamed of this day for fifteen years.

Who thinks he knows

How to hail a taxi.

ROB stands by the Canary Wharf Tower.

By his car. A smart suit. He speaks as if to acompanion.

ROB I tell you

I can’t take my eyes off that!

And by Christmas they reckon all the office space will be taken

And all the lights turned on again.

The company’s just moved the HQ right up there.

And they got all of us supervisors, the white-collars and that, they brought us all in to talk about the future.

They ask me what I think of the new locale.

I say, (A joke.) ‘Well it’s not small’

They laugh

(A cheeky smile.) ‘It’s not small’

This bloke says: ‘D’you know how big it is?’

‘No.’

‘It’s taller than the Telecom Tower.

It’s taller than the Natwest Tower.’

(A cheeky nonchalance.) ‘Oh yeah?’

‘It’s the tallest structure in the country.’

(Coolly.) ‘Oh yeah?’

Nice and cool. Don’t give it away. Don’t give nothing away.

‘Fucking stupid name for a tower,’ I proceed, ‘Canary Wharf’.

RUKHSANA and DANNY are now in a taxizooming east. They gaze out of the window.

DANNY Look at it.

RUKHSANA And the roads are smooth here, Danny, you’ll notice that and nobody uses their horn so the roads are quiet and

DANNY It’s

RUKHSANA And at this stage of a city it always looks like this

DANNY Concrete and pebbledash

ROB Course I was burning ta say

‘I was born two minutes walk away from here.’

I was actually born two minutes away from the tallest structure in the country.

RUKHSANA Look at that!

It is Canary Wharf. DANNY is impressed.

DANNY Is it near here?

RUKHSANA Maybe.

DANNY I hope it’s near here.

ROB is still at Canary Wharf.

ROB And our house. All gone. Wiped away.

Pwwwhhht.

And up comes this fackin (Tower.)

This

I mean I’m not a socialist

I’m not sayin

I mean it sure as fuck’s an improvement but what I wanna know is

Who’s been made the mug in all this?

Relax. He gets his keys out and zaps the remotelocking system. The car makes its unlockingsound and light. He gets in.

Remote central-locking.

He puts on a pair of chamois gloves, and somedriving glasses.

He shuts the door.

Electric Windows.

He puts on some music, which continues to theend of the scene.

CD player, as standard.

On the passenger seat is a bag from an expensive shopping boutique.

And something for the lady.

Ignition. His car growls into life. He zooms off.

DANNY Is this right?

RUKHSANA What?

DANNY (To the taxi driver.) Excuse me.

RUKHSANA Relax.

DANNY Excuse me, we’ve moved past the centre.

That sign that green sign

It says we’re headed east.

Excuse me.

ROB is driving east. He loosens his tie.

ROB Royal Hospital on the right. St Clem’s. Where Leon was born.

Which was just before

(A complicated manoeuvre.)

Excuse me

It’s a ’mare this.

Just before we moved out to Romford.

Nah, it weren’t too bad growing up in the East End. It was a good community spirit.

But, er

Well things change, don’t they?

The people change.

Something up on the road.

Here we go…

(To an errant motorist.)

Come on, mate.

Are you going?

YOU GONNA BE A PRAT ALL YER LIFE?

Well GO then!

Dickhead fucking dickhead.

ROB beeps his horn. He can’t take it any more.

This isn’t the fucking day for this.

DANNY I don’t believe it. Did you know?

RUKHSANA No.

DANNY He said

RUKHSANA He never showed me!

DANNY He said it is always warmer, it is always warmer in the centre of the city.

ROB is now at Forest Gate.

ROB West Ham down there.

Funnily enough. Funnily enough

You do not see a white face round there except on a match day.

RUKHSANA Never showed me any of this.

ROB I don’t have a problem. That was how I was raised.

The taxi screeches to a halt at the lights.

DANNY And after all he said

ROB And there is a moment.

DANNY After all those stories

ROB And we’re coming up to it. Just past the tollgate.

Just after the point where the London Road meets Whalebone Lane:

A farm.

A strip of countryside that stretches north to south.

It’s the end of London. And this is Romford.

RUKHSANA This is what you are.

ROB It don’t last long

LEON enters. The Dolphin appears, apyramidal structure housing a broken-downswimming pool. He speaks directly to theaudience.

LEON But just pretend

ROB The roundabouts, the ring road, the swimming pool they built and closed down.

LEON Just pretend you havvem

ROB This is it.

LEON That you got the big buildings that make you proud.

ROB This is where we moved. This is where we can breathe. Raise a family.

ROB stops his car, and gets out.

LEON Just lie.

Just dream. It don’t matter.

Fuckin pretend it

One day, in nineteen ninety-five, it came out that shithole swimming pool.

That broken down swimming pool they called the Dolphin

That pyramid they built and closed down.

It burst outta there.

Like you know one of those fairy-tale oak trees: Romford Castle

Like someone had wished it, you know?

Pretend

Just pretend. There’s no harm I swear

That it cracked through dirty glass, asbestos, corrugated steel.

Romford Castle

Cutting off the ring road.

This massive tower and a moat that joined the river

Lovely.

Our own

Proper

Fuck-off

Castle.

Scene Two

Man and Boy

LEON and ROB. The living room of ROB’s house. They areboth nervous.

ROB Where’s your mother?

LEON She’s out.

With friends, she said. She won’t be long.

ROB She alright today, is she?

LEON Yeah.

ROB She okay?

LEON Oh yeah, she was chattin away.

No problem.

ROB She had her tea?

LEON Sort of.

ROB Here we go.

LEON Nah – I put cheese ’n’ ham toast on, right?

ROB Oh no.

LEON For her birthday!

ROB I thought I could smell something burnin.

LEON Dint burn too bad.

ROB What are you two like?

LEON (Over-defensive.) What have I done?

ROB Nothing.

Beat.

LEON What’s that, then? (In the bag.)

ROB For her birthday.

He pulls an expensive dress from the bag.

It’s what she wanted.

LEON Let’s have a look then?

LEON examines it.

No, it’s nice. It’s nice.

ROB So you gonna behave yerself tonight?

LEON Course I am.

ROB Pictures with Steven?

LEON Yeah.

ROB Because your mum and me, we’re going out tonight.

LEON I know.

ROB I don’t want a repeat of last time.

LEON Shut up, man.

ROBDon’t / you

LEON Just / leave it

ROB Tell me / what to say

LEON So are they gonna sack you all then?

ROB Oh fuckssake, Leon

Don’t ask me don’t ask me.

LEON What did you tell them?

ROB Ar

LEON Well?

ROB (Explodes.) I told those wankers

Head-office papershufflers.

I said

‘We shouldn’t even be discussing this.

It’s ridiculous we’re even discussing this.’

LEON That’s right!

ROB ‘And it’s not just us who gets fucked if we take the package.

There’s hundreds who’ll lose their jobs if we give way. You know – black and white.

And not just the boys on the floor. The whole supply chain.’

LEON That’s right.

ROB It’s all joined up.

This bloke Nathaniel come in. Brown-skinned, but you can tell he’s money.

‘You take redundancy now, it’ll be easier in the long term.

We could lay before you some very interesting offers.’

I say, ‘How long have you been in this country, Nathaniel?’

Coz I

I gave this company twenty years of my life.’

He turns to me. Looks me right in the eyes. Smiles.

‘We’ve already structured very attractive terms

For those in long service

Who voluntarily accept the redundancy package.’

But then the union guys take over and we just have to sit there.

And Nathaniel comes back.

‘Gents… do you want the good news or the bad news?’

Pause. Okay.

‘We’re not going to make anyone redundant, for the moment.’

LEON Fuckin A!

ROB And we’re nearly jumpin up an down, Lee, we think we’re laughin then he goes

‘Here’s the bad news.’

Four-day week. Even supervisors.

No more overtime.

We’re taking a pay cut.

We had to sign it.

I ain’t gonna let it go, Lee!

This is your job in three, four years’ time.

If we can just hang on, fings’ll perk up.

This is your future. I want you

To have a future.

They don’t hug.

Scene Three

Hot Water

That evening. A lounge/kitchen, Romford, in darkness. ANNIE, DANNY’s aunt, is showing RUKHSANA and DANNY thehouse. ANNIE wears motorbike leathers, and has placed herhelmet close by her. There is a basin in the room, a trunk and afew other packing boxes lying around.

ANNIE slowly increases the intensity of the light.

ANNIE That’s the dimmer switch there.

That lets you change the brightness.

He was good with wires that much I’ll say for him.

He did it all when he was seventeen. Rigged it all up.

Saved her a fortune.

Well, don’t just stand there, come in.

But mind out for the boxes.

It’s just old stuff I’ll be getting rid of it.

ANNIE turns the tap on. High pressure.

Hot.

RUKHSANA runs her hand under.

RUKHSANA Very hot!

ANNIE Bet you didn’t have hot water where you was from?

DANNY There was

RUKHSANA In some places.

DANNY In most places.

RUKHSANA I’m looking forward to a bath!

ANNIE jams the tap off.

I always liked a good English bath!

ANNIE Do you speak Indian, then, Danny?

RUKHSANA Not much.

ANNIE Did you not teach him it?

RUKHSANA Everyone spoke English.

ANNIE That’s funny coz the Indians in Forest Gate, they don’t speak it.

I never understood why Simon took off in the first place. Globetrotting.

Fine. It’s different. It’s hot. Or it’s cold. New food. New drink.

But I coulda told you something shit like this would happen.

I coulda told you that for nothing.

Most of the time we don’t even know what country you’re in.

Mum’s on her deathbed, I can’t reach him for weeks.

(To DANNY.)

Did you even know your dad had a sister?

(To RUKHSANA.)

Did you cut Danny off from your family as well?

Did you take him to see them?

(Realising.) Oh…

You didn’t, did you?

What did you think about that, Danny?

I mean I couldn’t understand it. This was my brother.

My nephew and I never see him. That’s not right, is it?

What a bastard he was.

RUKHSANA You made your views plain

ANNIE You weren’t there.

RUKHSANA What you stood for.

ANNIE You weren’t there what was so wrong with what I stood for?

No tell me.

What was so wrong? I was his sister, he didn’t have to hate me!

We would call him up at university he’d change his voice, pretend he was someone else.

He was a bastard.

DANNY Get lost.

ANNIE (To RUKHSANA.)

You got a right little Mogul here, don’tcha?

Simon, he come to see Mum once in fifteen years.

He don’t even come back for the funeral.

Oh he was a triffic son, he was a wonderful son f’r ’er.

Still, Mum gives him the house.

‘He was better than us,’ that’s what she said

‘He went off to make the world a better place.’

If you was better than us, why the fuck should you wanna come back?

What can we offer you?

You gonna be claiming?

Is that why?

I would, in your position.

Coz I bet he didn’t leave you much. Did he? What did he leave ya?

Still you gotta look after your own, don’t you?

She tosses RUKHSANA the key.

I contacted a school.

Well somebody had to.

In this country it’s the law to go to school.

It’s not too rough.

DANNY We won’t be here long.

ANNIE Oh won’tcha?

RUKHSANA No, we won’t be here long at all.

DANNY We know where we’re not welcome.

ANNIE I didn’t say that. Did I?

ANNIE points to a plastic shopping bag.

I got some groceries.

Happy Shopper

It’s round the corner.

Patel’s.

(Defensively.) Nice people, you know? I didn’t have a problem.

I try to help you.

Do my duty.

Would you say I haven’t tried to help you here?

RUKHSANA He’s dead.

Beat. ANNIE picks up her helmet, gently.

ANNIE Yeah.

Yeah, I know.

Goodbye, Danny.

You got my number.

You give me a call, yeah? If she can’t hack it.

DANNY is silent. ANNIE exits.

DANNY I should have smacked her the way she spoke to you.

RUKHSANA Yes!

DANNY A right hook.

RUKHSANA In the teeth.

DANNY Put your dukes up, lady!

RUKHSANA Ha!

Something shifts in RUKHSANA. A downturn.

Oh God.

DANNY Sit down. It’s okay. Go on.

I’ll make us a cup of tea.

RUKHSANA No.

DANNY Oh Mum.

RUKHSANA No tea.

DANNY Mum.

RUKHSANA It’s nothing.

DANNY You were doing really well today.

(Imitating ANNIE.)

‘I’ll tell ya something for naffing’

RUKHSANA Ha!

DANNY ‘Do you speak Indian then, Danny?’

RUKHSANA No comedy show!

DANNY ‘I’ll tell you something for nothing.’

RUKHSANA Your voices!

DANNY ‘I’m telling ya, he was a bastard.’

RUKHSANA Language.

DANNY Dad wasn’t a bit like her, was he?

RUKHSANA No.

DANNY When you first met him?

RUKHSANA No.

DANNY Why did we not hear about her?

RUKHSANA She made her views plain.

DANNY And your parents?

Why did we come back?

RUKHSANA You always wanted to come back!

You remember in India

The hassling dirty boys

Running alongside you, asking you

DANNY (In an Indian accent.) ‘What country?’

RUKHSANA ‘What country?’

DANNY England!

RUKHSANA ‘Englan!’

DANNY Englan!

RUKHSANA Manchester United!

DANNYWest Ham United!

RUKHSANA Gary Lineker!

DANNY Why did we come here?

Beat.

RUKHSANA Because you educate your children in England.

To do otherwise would sabotage your future.

Everyone knows that in the end you head to England.

DANNY I don’t think this is what they meant.

RUKHSANA You remember that time in Bombay.

That awful hotel.

Before we found our apartment.

You turned the tap and it ran red.

DANNY The pipes were rusty.

RUKHSANA You thought it was blood.

DANNY I know now. The pipes were rusty.

RUKHSANA Remember how scared you were.

But this is England.

Here we don’t have to worry about anything.

Things not working or malaria pills or power cuts.

DANNY Or roads.

RUKHSANADanny please!

DANNY There aren’t any roads in England.

RUKHSANAPlease.

DANNY This isn’t what he said it was like.

RUKHSANA I KNOW THIS ISN’T WHAT HE SAID.

Beat.

DANNY All this stuff. Here. There must be something interesting.

RUKHSANA Don’t.

DANNY Years and years old.

RUKHSANA Don’t open it.

DANNY And not just… Grandma’s

RUKHSANA Danny!

DANNY opens up the trunk.

You don’t know what you’ll find. Please.

DANNY pulls out, slowly, a motorcyclist’shelmet. A motorcyclist’s jacket.

RUKHSANA is sick in the basin. DANNY isforced to hold her.

DANNY I’ll clean you up.

RUKHSANA Don’t creep / around me, Danny!

She moves to the motorcyclist’s suit. She holdsit. She barely listens to DANNY.

DANNY Tomorrow.

We’ll start looking for somewhere else.

We’ll sell this place.

Move further in.

Mum?

It’s going to be great.

Tomorrow, we’ll get the newspapers.

The London Times.

The Manchester Guardian.

Start looking for a job.

We’ll make up your CV:

University of Sheffield, BA.

Mum?

Marketing manager.

High-level.

International.

A big glass office.

When India went international.

Tomorrow. Do you promise me?

You’ve been like this for weeks

But we’re here now.

No more waiting.

You promised everything would be transformed.

As soon as we got here.

Are you listening to me?

Beat.

RUKHSANA Will you leave me for a little bit?

Please. Go out. Explore the territory.

DANNY You promised you were going to try.

RUKHSANA Yes. Tomorrow. Yes.

She doesn’t kiss him.

DANNY exits. RUKHSANA watches himleave, goes over to the bike helmet and stares itin the eye. She holds the suit.

It’s you, isn’t it?

It’s you.

You bastard

You won’t even show your face.

You never said you had a motorbike!

There is no reply. She examines the jacket,which has little round subversive badges on it.

These little badges.

Southend. 1977.

You never told me, any of this!

She flings the helmet back into the trunk.

Did I ever know you?

She flings the suit back in the trunk. Shuts it.

She tries to exit, but the dimmer switch is ather eyeline. She stops. She lovingly reduces thelight. Until it’s all off.

Scene Four

The Pink Room

Later that evening. A master bedroom full of soft pink light andsleep. Hanging from the ceiling is an open clothes rack packedto bursting with women’s clothes. To one side, a lady’s dresser,packed with cosmetics.

LEON speaks to the audience.

LEON Pretend

He smears dark foundation on his face.

There’s no harm in this

You like the feel of it.

So let them go out, the old boy, the old gel

Let them patch things up again.

And creep upstairs when the door slams.

Scan the master bedroom.

He did this place up for her

New curtains

Bamboo bedposts

Winnie-the-Pooh footrug.

‘When he did that room up,’ she says, ‘I fell in love wiv him all over again.’

He takes his shirt off.

So just pretend

You’ve got all your life ahead of you

All of the future.

Choices.

You could fall in love

You could have kids

You could earn a million.

You could work in a car factory all yer life, there’s all to play for.

He applies eyeliner in an impressionist style.

There’s no harm. There’s no trouble. It’s alright.

He opens one of his mother’s dresser drawers.

The soft of lacies

Just try em on, for size, like, and don’t worry.

Underwear falls from the sky into this room.

A lace slip descends from the ceiling. LEON awaits it.

Blackout. Time briefly passes, then…

LEON is wearing the slip, and ROB, holding LEON’s collar, has just swept LEON’s face,smeared in mud pack, across the dresser. LEON has also wet himself, although this isn’t clearto ROB yet, partly because LEON disguisesit. Both ROB, and LEON’s mum, KAREN, aresomewhat undressed. KAREN was wearingthe dress that ROB bought for her a few scenesago. ROB has his shirt undone.

LEON Aaaahhhh

ROB Fackin

LEON (And they think there’s nobody home and they go for it)

ROB Fackin

LEON (And it just streams out)

ROB Want me to put yer face to bed, do ya?

LEON (Warm and I can’t control it.)

ROB Are you a girl?

LEON No!

ROB Putting your face on for a night on the town?

KAREN ROB!

ROB There are many things my son could have been

There are many things my son

KAREN LEEEVE him

LEON (And I can see your argument, Dad, in all its clarity and you’ve got some rock-hard good points in there and I respect that I respect that, Dad)

KAREN LEEEEVE him, Robert.

LEON (And though my soul is flingin round the tumble-dryer)

ROB It’s not fuckin right, Kazza.

KAREN It’s

ROB Not bleedin

KAREN It’s alright

ROB We know he’s a prat.

We know he’s a fuckin disaster zone.

And now it turns out

KAREN It’s

ROB He’s a fackin queer.

KAREN It’s alright!

LEON Not a queer!

ROB Are you sayin that’s alright, Karen?

LEON No, it’s not alright

It wouldn’t be.