Charlie Mortimer is a North West Theatre Director who has been working with New Writing since 2008. Throughout that time she has worked with various new, and experienced, writers to bring their work from early drafts to full first productions. Her theatre company Theatre By Numbers started out in Widnes, (Charlie’s home town) where she worked with local writer Allan Reilly on his piece Buck Teeth. It premiered in the Brindley and since then Charlie, and Theatre By Numbers, has been finding ways of creating, developing, engaging and producing new theatre for the North West.
Last year Charlie was invited to take part in a scheme of work, Script4Stage, set up by writer Conor Mckee and director Wyllie Longmore. Through that scheme of work she was introduced to a very supportive and effective manner of working with cast, director and writer at the early stage of scripting. This idea inspired her to seek out the various best ways of working with the writer to ensure that it is their story being told and not merely a misguided director and casts’ interpretation of the story.
Charlie has now teamed up, for a second time, with Helen East. Helen used to write for television (Brookside) and has is lecturer at Man Met as well as writing many scripts for stage. Charlie and Helen first worked together in 2009 on Seconds Out, which was chosen for the Liverpool Write Now Festival in 2010, and since then were looking for opportunities to work together again. They are now re united in developing Helen’s script Ripples in Concrete, through a process which engages the cast, director and writer at the first or very early draft. This process is what shall be discussed at the events in Manchester, Liverpool and Preston in the hope that communicating this, and other common practice, shall encourage early writers and scripts embrace working with theatre, observing firsthand how scripts are discussed at great length by performers and directors in the search of evidence as to how we may tell the writers’ story.
For this project they have been joined by three remarkably talented performers who have been working with Charlie and Helen on this project.
Una Love, currently performing in Broken for Organised Chaos Productions.
Lynne Payne, performer and creative producer at Rotten Park Road Productions.
Nicola Gardner, past performer for the Library Theatre Company and Liverpool Everyman as well as T.V. and Radio.
As part of the sharings and discussions there shall be a short demonstration of how the cast and director begin the process by reading 10 pages of a local writers work. This shall also then be discussed with the audience and suggestions opened and made as to how we can improve and what the next step would be.
The performance starts at 7:30pm on the 13th June at The Lantern Theatre, Liverpool for one night only.Tickets are priced at £5/£4 and are available from The Lantern Theatre website.
You can also go to these websites to find out more about the project, www.theatrebynumbers.co.uk and www.ripplesinconcrete.co.uk.