W.O.K.E. UP!

My early cancellation.

I started writing W.O.K.E UP! In 2017 in reaction to something that happened to me way back then. Clearly it’s taken me 6 years to get to the point where I finally have an almost finished play. But as is often the case with me, I didn’t know what the heck I was trying to say about the event and ended up writing reams of waffle before I found out.

The incident… my publisher, Samuel French who published Sex Cells, (since morphed into Concord Theatricals) rejected my second play, a farce called, Curl Up & Die. The rejection email was a disappointment but I told myself that you can’t please all of the people all of the time. I would have left it at that except the reasons they gave for the turndown weren’t based on the quality of the writing or whether they liked the play, but on ‘the change‘, as they saw it, ‘in attitudes and sensitivity regarding international characters’. That was enough to make me question what was going on. My ‘international character’ was a chauvinistic Spanish photographer, dressed in leather. Most of the courses and books on writing suggest that we write from experience and I’ve spent years as a session hairdresser and make-up artist going on shoots, often abroad, working with photographers. Some of them were chauvinists, some wore leather and frequently they were not from the UK. So why my character, Jordi Chinchilla should be problematic was a mystery, especially since he was based on truth.

The acquisitions man at Concord also ‘strongly suggested’ that I remove a line in the play referring to Mecca Bingo. The worry being that people might get the bingo hall confused with the Holy City and take offence. I wonder if anyone has been in touch with Mecca to let them know that this is an issue. The owners of the bingo halls not the city.

I was seriously concerned as to why a publishing house would self censor? Who were they trying to appease? Who were they afraid of offending? And since when did publishers stop championing author’s free expression??? When Lady Chatterly’s Lover was eventually published in the UK, Penguin Books defended it in court. Nowadays Penguin Books are more likely to want to sanitise their authors. See Roald Dahl. (Fortunately there was such a backlash they’ve capitulated and are going to leave the man’s work as he wrote it). The words, bloody cheek spring to mind.

But I didn’t know then what I know now and even though I can be a bit slow on the uptake I knew that I didn’t agree with what was going on. A publisher should be free to reject my work if they don’t like it. Not so if they are adhering to idealogical groupthink whereby every author must hold similar views.

Fast forward to 2023 and this, it seems, is where we are at. Either we sanitise our own work in order to get accepted by our publishers or we are shamed into silence and lose revenue.

I now realise that my experience was a cancelation and it had come early. In a way this has left me free to write what the heck I want. In any case, my new publisher, Stagescripts are still staying true to their values and have already offered to publish W.O.K.E. UP! Three cheers to them.

WOKE UP! expresses all, no not all, (that would make it six hours long), some of my feelings about the increasingly rapid changes that are occurring, especially in our language. I can hardly believe that in a country like the UK we are having to watch what we say in public for fear of being shamed and name called. Those who say that this is not really happening are part of the problem and I would point to the number of people who have lost their livelihoods for expressing the wrong opinion. Fortunately, humour is one way to combat what feels like an increasingly, stifling, censorious, virtue-signalling, time and I hope to have you laughing in the aisles. I’ve also gone all out and said what some, if not most of us are truly thinking.

Wish me luck. I might need it.