I'm home

Well now I'm back. We had a fairly good time coping with the heat and the relatives and the lizards. HM didn’t want to come home.

I’m getting bigger now. It’s fairly obvious that I’m very much so pregnant. Went out last night to see some friends, it was pretty fun. We ate so much pizza I felt like a turtle.

The play is doing my head in. I've received some feedback from a real writer friend of mine and I feel deep down that she’s not really understood what I was trying to do. The aim of Alcatraz was for me to try a departure from the stream-of-consciousness stuff and have a go at comedy. She seems to think I should make characters more serious (Simon and Birkenbeck), remove the other-worldly feel of Franko talking to the audience and work on Rateye and Franko’s separateness from Eden, Bober, Mel and Ken. Strangely, the characters I was less happy with and thought needed more work were the ones that escaped.

Frankly, Simon and Birkenbeck are not really to be taken seriously. Their actions go against what would commonly be acceptable for their sect in some misguided way to save souls. They (Birkenbeck anyway) are unlikely to remain a Jehovah’s Witness for the long term as their behaviour falls more in line as to what a Evangelical Pentecostal Christian would do. Birkenbeck is the character who needs to evolve in a way to fully reach his potential and part of that would possibly to leave his childhood religion behind. It’s just something he has not recognised at this point. This is a very sad but realistic fact that all people have to face. There are commonly some things that need to be let go of for a progression to be made into adulthood. Like Starchild Birkenbeck will loose something of himself along the way and it will hurt him, but it is a necessary wound.

Franko and Rateye are very separate from the kids simply because of their age and status. Rateye is forty while most of the younger characters are seventeen. He presents the most mature and most immature of the characters, I mean really, he’s a forty year old man hanging about in a club which attracts teenagers. He is the king of this world while simultaneously being a right sad old fart. Franko is the middle character as he converses with the teenagers, spikes them and with the older clientele as well. However he is no Goth or biker or punk, just a Frenchman so is separate while being the bridge. Possibly Franko is the loneliest person in the piece and he confides in the audience as he needs to. I think if he had a confidant in the world it would disrupt the symbolism and contrast to Franko’s innate distrust and growing paranoia.

Perhaps I should do another draft with the view to make it more realistic and just see how it feels? But the problem is I like it being weird!