Supernova 6: A Festival of New One-Act Plays

The Authors

Mark Wakeman

Mark has been writing for as long as he can remember and doesn't seem to intend stopping anytime soon. He is the only writer to have featured in every one of the previous Supernova Festivals, a fact that he is both very proud of and astounded by.

He started writing plays at University but can't remember why, there was probably beer involved. The University Theatre company performed several of his one act plays and he was asked to script their Edinburgh Festival Venture, a Tarantino inspired thriller of a bank robbery gone wrong 'Undue Aggravation' which made it's only appearance on the English stage in 1995's festival. He wrote a second full length play, a madcap comedy called 'Terror at Blagg Castle' which had its world premier at the Portsmouth Arts Centre in Reginald Road performed by the Goggles Theatre company. Both plays were greeted with staggering indifference by audiences and critics alike and have never been seen since.

When Bench Theatre decided to perform a festival of one act plays under the banner of 'Supernova' he decided to brush off his keyboard and try again and this time people seemed to like them. Following this he found himself as a writer and performer with the short lived 'Vicar's Daughters' comedy team until an ill advised charity performance led to a near lynching and his vow to never write comedy again. He lied.

For 'Supernova 3' He set himself the challenge of writing a serious play as the suggestion had been made that he could only write comedy, so he wrote the thriller 'Father for Justice' to prove that he could write something different. Audience reaction was very positive, so at each subsequent Supernova he has challenged himself by writing what he calls his 'Experiments', writing in styles and genres that are not his natural inclination just to see what happens. This years 'Grotto' is his latest attempt at such a piece.

A number of his plays have been revived and entered into the Totton Festival of Drama and the all England Drama Festival where he has won a number of awards for his writing. He also wrote the last two Bench Christmas Pantomimes 'Cinderella: A Christmas Adventure' and 'Aladdin' and is musing over the idea of writing another to finish the trilogy.

Chris Vanstone

This is Chris' first play to be staged. He lives in Emsworth and has been writing for the last five years, though he is not prolific (i.e. lazy!) and his submissions for Supernova represent his first works in just shy of a year.

His style of writing is varied though most often naturalistic with a heavy focus on natural dialogue, everyday scenarios and social situations. 'The Challenge' is a slight move away from his usual territory... while the focus on dialogue may remain, it sits alongside a more darkly comic element.

After studying Drama at Winchester, Chris attended Exeter University to study Playwriting where he started writing. He found his greatest success a year later when he submitted his dissertation piece, half of a full length play, to the Royal Court Young Writers Programme and was subsequently offered a place. The weekly trips to London were inspiring and invaluable and Chris returned the following year as part of the Royal Court Studio Group.

Chris joined the Bench in 2012 because he wanted to get back in to acting and felt it would help with his writing. Having appeared in three productions this year, Supernova 6 has offered him a fantastic opportunity to try out his playwriting skills, something for which he is most grateful.

Pete Barrett

Pete Barrett has been writing plays for the last forty years. Plays produced professionally at the Wolsey in Ipswich include broad comedies like 'The Complete Corruption of Carrington' and 'The Revenge of the Mutant Cockle', satirical pieces like ''Guilty (a woman is tried for her failures as a mother, a wife and a female) and 'Jackals' (A middle class family home is surrounded and seemingly menaced by the unemployed), and serious pieces like 'Day-Dreaming on the Motorway'. His play 'The Dying of the Light' was a full length production at the Wolsey Studio. The 'Revenge of the Mutant Cockle' was runner up at last year's All England Play Festival.

A few years ago, he was commissioned to write short stories for the Interact Reading Service which sends professional actors into hospitals to read to groups of stroke patients. This service employs 100 actors working in London hospitals and is currently being rolled out countrywide. Pete has written 36 short stories for the service. 'Out Loud: 36 Twisted Tales' is now available for the Kindle on Amazon.

Pete retired in 2007 to write full time. Since then he has written three full length plays and twelve children's book - the first two 'Tich Vampire Hunter' and 'Tich Dragonslayer' have been published with more on the way.

Edwin Preece

Edwin Preece started writing five years ago, under the direction of Joyce Branagh, at the Palace Theatre Watford's Playwriting group. His first play 'The Cell' was short listed for the Verity Bathgate Award and that was followed by 'Da', one of only four plays to be showcased at the International Playwriting Festival run by the Warehouse Theatre in Croydon in March 2010.

His one act play 'Cleaning Agents' has had a successful run at the Lion and the Unicorn Theatre in Kentish Town. Another 'Suffer The Little Children' was recently performed at The Space in East London.

In April 2013 his play 'To The End Of Love' had a sell out run at the Tristan Bates Theatre in London and later this year another full length play '6 by 9' will be staged at venues along the south coast.

Lucy Flannery

Lucy Flannery is a member of Bench Theatre. She lives in Havant and has been a professional writer for over 20 years.

Her recent credits include an adaptation of Thank You, Jeeves for Wemsfest's Wodehouse Festival, a collaboration with SOOP Theatre on A Viking Tale and Like A Daughter with Alison Steadman and Roy Hudd, broadcast in 2012 on BBC Radio 4.

In 2013 she was one of the core writers on the Arts Council-funded You Me and Everyone, a work of literary art projected on to Portsmouth Guildhall on the evenings of 25 and 26 October. In 2014/15 she will be a Royal Literary Fellow, working two days a week at a south coast university, supporting undergraduates with their written English.

Lucy's play, Computer Dating in Supernova 5 was her first play with Bench Theatre and was so popular that Bench took it to the All England Theatre Festival in Totton where Lucy won the award for "Best Original Script".

Corinne Foster

Corinne wrote her first book aged 12 on a spiral-bound shorthand notebook, and has been writing intermittently ever since (work and motherhood causing temporary lulls in output). The results of this are numerous books, screenplays and theatre productions, most of which have stayed in a cupboard.

Her epiphany came relatively recently when she realised that completing the first draft is the beginning rather than the end - previously her credo was "good, I've got to the end of that one, I can start the next one now." Inspired by a television documentary on the Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin (and a quote from Ernest Hemingway*), she has found that embracing the concept of spending five times as much on re-writing as doing the first draft made a huge improvement to the quality of her work.

She has written a short film 'Peel and the Broken Boy', which was released in January 2014 and her first e-novel 'Secret of the Phoon' was published in November 2013. She also wrote a spoof management self-help book 'The Real Office: An Uncharacteristic Gesture of Magnanimity' under the pseudonym Hilary Wilson-Savage, which was published in 2007.

Corinne lives in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire and this is her first production with Bench Theatre.

* Oh... and that Hemingway quote? "The first draft of anything is shit."

Phillip Gething

Phillip, born in 1929, is a retired scientist living in Fleet, where he belongs to Rushmoor Writers and the Creative Writng Group of Fleet U3A. He and his wife lived in Waterlooville for several years, where he was a member of the Portsdown Writers Circle. He has had a number of short stories and articles published, plus a few poems and one technical book, but has concentrated on plays in recent years.

He has won prizes in various competitions and has had the pleasure of seeing three of his plays performed in public; this will be his fourth opportunity and he intends to be there! He likes to amuse if possible, and aims to have some action on the stage.

The words flow best at about morning coffee time, but still need several revisions. When not writing Phillip is a keen chess player, taking part frequently in team matches at local and county level.