SCENE FIVE

Harry enters hesitantly from SR and looks around.

HARRY: (To himself) I’m pretty sure I didn’t write anything about Lucy running off crying. What happened? Guess I’d better set up the next scene.

Harry drags TABLE 2 over to CSR and places it on its side to represent Esmerelda’s bedroom wall. He also moves one of the chairs a little way behind the table and faces it towards the audience. Then Harry exits SL. Esmerelda enters SR. She sits in the chair and mimes combing her hair as if looking in a mirror. Horatio enters SL and mimes throwing stones at Esmerelda’s bedroom window. Hearing the sound Esmerelda rises, walks to the table, and throws open the ‘window’.

HORATIO: Oh beauty! Oh Emma-

ESMERELDA: Esmerelda.

HORATIO: Oh Esmerelda! I apologise for the lateness of the hour, but I had to see you again. Can I come in?

ESMERELDA: My parents are asleep and I’m getting ready for bed.

HORATIO: Do they despise me, your parents, like Juliet’s despised Romeo’s? Can they not see the beauty of our love?

ESMERELDA: I have not yet told them. It’s all happening so fast (aside) without any real plot development.

(more…)

Read Part One

SCENE THREE

Extra 1 and Extra 2 sit on the two US chairs. Horatio and Esmerelda enter SR, Esmerelda’s arm linked somewhat uneasily through Horatio’s.

HORATIO: Here we are, at (with strong emphasis for the audience’s benefit) the theatre.

ESMERELDA: What are we going to see?

HORATIO: A play.

TRENT: Obviously.

Emma stifles a snicker.

ESMERELDA: What play, Horatio?

HORATIO: William Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo & Juliet’, a classic love story about two starcross’d lovers who desperately want to be together, but cannot be because their families are at war and they do not have the benefits, the freedoms, of our modern- day life where there is nothing to keep two people who love each other apart.

(more…)

Unfortunately I have been, and continue to be, rather too busy to write anything for the site. There should be some new content in a few weeks, but until then I’ll post the short play I wrote for submission at the end of last year. I realise that reading plays is rather boring, but this one barely merits performance, so this is the only form in which it’s available. Hopefully this will tide over my miniscule, though much appreciated, readership until I have some time to get something decent up here, and in the meantime I might bug Molly to let me put some more of her poetry up (or anyone else that wants to volunteer something). Here’s the play:

Horatio & Esmerelda

SCENE ONE

The Stage is empty and illuminated with white artificial stage lighting. HARRY walks out to the front of the stage. TRENT is sitting, as he will be for much of the play, in the first row of the audience, writing in a notebook.

HARRY: Ladies and Gentlemen, my name is Harold Singer, writer, actor and casting director, and I would like to welcome you to the first performance of my first play, ‘Horatio and Esmerelda’. Tonight I shall be playing the part of Horatio, a shy young man who overcomes his insecurities when he meets the girl of his dreams in a library. Slowly, as their love blooms, she brings him more and more out of his shell, bestows him with that lustre that only love can-

TRENT raises his hand, a pen between his fingers, as if in a classroom

HARRY: (To Trent) Um, yes?

TRENT: What are you doing?

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