Plays Database
The Mystery of Jack and the Clones of Chaos
A time-traveller from the future journeys back to 2010 to investigate the strange case of Jack, a thirteen year old boy who believes his life is being taken over by alien clones of himself. The clones look and sound just like him, but behave in ways he never would. They are messy, dirty, rude, destructive, obsessed with girls, clothes and music, sometimes childish, sometimes violent and frightening and get him into all sorts of trouble with his mother, his friends and teachers. When they invade his bedroom, Jack teams up with a famous female pop singer in a final battle to regain control of his life. The time-traveller is revealed as Jack, now grown up, revisiting his own adolescence and coming face-to-face with his younger self. A comedy-drama play about the confusions and battles of growing up, it runs for 45 minutes and is performed by one adult male actor and one teenage male actor with multi-role playing.
What Light
In 2011 two fourteen year old boys, Jack and Daniel, best friends, argue violently about money and possessions, their families and who is to blame for the economic crisis their country is suffering. Ugly things are said about their families. Vicious opinions and accusations they have heard from their parents and learnt from the media are repeated. Their friendship is destroyed.
Suddenly it is 2061 and Jack and Daniel are old men. The world has been transformed and they live in squalor and poverty in tents in a bleak wilderness. Nothing remains of the world they knew as boys, except their hatred and mistrust, which has become an obsession with the years. Their days are spent in hatred and fear of each other and waiting for good things to fall from the sky or grow on the trees, which is all they remember from their youth.
Each has a grandchild, Sid and Nancy, who have known no other life, but now as they enter adolescence they begin to question their grandfathers’ view of the world and ask themselves why they hate each other so much and why life must be so brutal. Their tents are haunted by the zombie ghosts of global celebrities from 2011, who the grandfathers use to terrorise their grandchildren into accepting the situation. But the young people reject the past and their grandfathers and join forces. They destroy the power of the zombie ghosts and leave to find a better life. The grandfathers remember their boyhood friendship fifty years before and realise this is the world they created through their passive acceptance of the situation in the past and believing the lies they were told about each other. But hope lies in their grandchildren who are doing what they never did – asking questions and taking action.
THE BOOK OF PUBERTOSIS or THE EXPULSION FROM CHILDHOOD
Short play written for the PLATFORM 11+ Final Production FACE ME Time of Transition
Santa's Last Christmas
Short Play written for the PLATFORM 11+ Final Production FACE ME Time of Transition
Here come the European Boat People
The performance is based on a kind of creative and amusing, even dramatic, turning upside down of the actual worldwide situation. It imagines that a series of factors, such as climate change and the discovery of new materials, will cause the collapse of Europe and of all the Western countries, which will be replaced by the African countries as the new economic rulers. So, rafts and crafts of all kinds change their course, bringing Italians and Europeans to search for jobs (dirty, dangerous, humiliating or whatever) in the new leading countries of the world.
The performance is about two migrants: Giorgio comes from Milan, Northern Italy, where he was previously an employee in the glittering fashion industry; Carmine comes from Southern Italy, from the Calabria Region, He has already emigrated once before. The first time, he went with all his family to Germany, the country once considered to be the engine of Europe, where he worked at the Mercedes Company. The two migrants, travelling different routes, meet on a cold Christmas night on the Southern Sicilian shores, in a remote and hidden place, whilst waiting for a raft, which will take them to the rich African shores.
The night is special, the sky is starry, the wait is long, the fears as well as the hopes are endless. Thinking about the world and life in general, they become friends, sympathetic and curious about each other’s past. Like Mary Poppins’ bag, Carmine’s suitcase contains all the ingredients of the typical Christmas Eve dinner, traditional food and also coffee, because a man coming from the South always brings along the coffee machine. Time passes among memories and reflections, fears and dreams and the ghosts of our times take off in a sad and conceited way. There is time to weave branches found on the beach, to leave a little crèche in a rock gorge and to ask Baby Jesus for a new life. Maybe the raft will arrive at midnight and maybe they will leave through the immense, unknown and dark sea. The things value has changed, the Western richness has proved not to last forever, the wheel has turned and will do so again, scoffing at humankind. During this special night there is also place for fireworks, because we, the human beings, are like this: we want to believe that one day the world will be different.
Andromedas Island
A girl and a boy are washed ashore, on an island, after a
shipwreck. They have to stay alive and find their way home. But the
boy is abducted by a woman who wears a horned mask and calls
herself Andromeda. It is her island. Ancient gods have punished
her for being vain. The Gods granted her eternal life and unearthly
beauty but put a spell on her as well. They took away her soul and
doomed her to live forever in solitude and to wear the mask. Whoever
sees her beauty is forever attracted to it. But Andromeda
herself is denied love and human feelings. Only when someone is
able to love her for whom she really is, without seeing her face,
can she be human again. Andromeda offers the children a choice:
one of them must stay, the other can go back home. They both
want to stay in order to save a friend’s life. The boy takes off
the mask, believing that the girl will leave, but she escapes and
goes on a quest to save her friend. She is willing to pay
whatever it takes to save the boy not knowing exactly why.
(In the end it turns aout that the whole quest was the dream of an
old widow in her deathbed. She dies happy, being able to experience
love and all the desires of her youth once more. Old people are
never really old, their souls stays young forever. Moments before
her death she relived her life story disguised as a romantic
adventure in which she was able to meet her dead husband once
again… and be young.)
The Hangar
A group of people have moved into an aircraft hangar following an apocalypse.
There they have developed a strict class system and rules of behaviour.
A power-game develops when Noah begins hears a voice from outside of the hangar. Everything begins to fall apart. A boy breaks in, but was he really out there to start with? What happens to human relationships when absolutely everything is ordered and regulated? What happens to language and memory? Is there space for love and tenderness?
(Written for DUS – the Norwegian version of the British “Connect” – program)