The Swastika Party

A Writer’s View

Many of my plays are long! I have written two-act plays, even three-act plays. My more recent works have been single act plays.

It has become fashionable in UK theatre to point to the shorter attention span of audiences in a more film and television based age of “sound-bites”.

I have sat in audiences where newcomers to the theatre have either been pleasantly surprised by the shortness of a play, or have been horrified that their tenner has been used up so quickly! “Is that it? There isn’t a second half?”

The Swastika Party is a one act play, about seventy minutes long. It would have been easy to divide the play into two halves at the point where the main dramatic event of the play takes place.

From a writing perspective I have enjoyed the immediacy of a one-acter. During the Blitz there was little time for respite. There were “intervals” in the bombing but the overall experience of nightly bombing was one of continuity and this is reflected in the writing.

The writing process was a series of drafts, supported by much discussion and a workshop with some actors. Though a play for four women, we used male actors during the workshop to help create the environment around the play we wanted to explore.

The final draft of the play consists of about twelve scenes, most of which take place in the cosy, and later somewhat claustrophobic living room of a shared flat in London. This allows an intensity in the dialogue. Other rooms are off stage. One or two outside scenes give a glimpse into the world of war-torm London but mostly the play is set in a shared home.

The dialogue is quite naturalistic and there is no high drama in the play, though there is much tension around the main dramatic event - the appearance of a swastika, daubed upon the living room wall, whilst our main characters are out for a rare night “on the town” together. This piece of vandalism, though dramatic, is not overplayed in the writing. Once it has been scrawled, there it is, and much of the second half of the play is about the tensions it creates in the four friends.

Early drafts of the play looked overly moralistic to me and I had to cut out where that had crept in, for this is not a morality play, nor a political one. I wanted to the writing to tell a story of friendships under pressure, and how symbols can impact on our lives. In this way I hope The Swastika Party speaks to audiences of today.

The play took about three months in total to write, though the bulk of it was completed over a three-week period. I tend to write first from imagination, tapping into the spirit of the period and then researching the details, and correcting afterwards.