The World

Written: 2005

A co-production between the Byre Theatre, St. Andrews, and Queen Margaret University College

Cast: 11.

I wrote this as a technical/educational exercise for half the final year of BA acting students of Queen Margaret University College. We had been working on it together for the best part of three years. Meeting regularly, sharing ideas and research. From a technical point of view, the aim was to write a play for 11 people in which each cast member had more or less the same size of part as everyone else. From an educational point of view, the aim was to allow the students to gain insight into how a play was written. From a personal point of view, the latter part of the process was utterly overshadowed by my wife’s illness and death, and working with the students helped keep my creativity alive. But the final writing of it occurred after her death, while I was in the deepest mourning. I can’t judge its value at all: I am simply proud I delivered it on time and that it worked.

The play tells what happens when the trinity of God the Mother, God the Father and God the Son become weary of the world they have created and decide to destroy it. In the course of the night, they meet representatives of the planet: and this meeting will either save or destroy the world.