Since I was young, I have always been writing short stories and had ideas for novels, but it has only been at university that I have explored writing play scripts. The first play I wrote was for a module called Off The Page, and it was called If Tomorrow Never Comes, which explores a post-apocalyptic world. This play was vastly different than the one I wrote for Twisted Ivy, and I found the process quite daunting, especially as I had never written anything this long before either. One of the most difficult things I experienced was that we would have a good solid foundation for our ideas, but they would get more complicated and we would lose the foundations of what we wanted to do. Therefore, we had to keep going back to the drawing board and finding the core story that we wanted to portray. Each time this was that we wanted the stage to be set as a forest which represented Cinderella’s mind. This is where I thought that monologues between scenes could be used to not only move the story along, going into detail about the surroundings so that hopefully the audience could picture it in their minds, which we thought was more powerful than actually showing them with set, but also showing the inner turmoil within Cinderella’s mind.  We also wanted the Fairy Godmother to be the ‘voice’  of reason inside Cinderella’s mind, that would try to reach her and make her understand that what she is doing is wrong. This would appear fragmented as though she was on a phone and didn’t have a good connection.

For example this is the one we used to introduce the Horror scene and was the breaking point for Cinderella.

Fairy godmother: Cinderella…. Please.

Cinderella: Hello? I can’t understand you.

Fairy Godmother: Please…. Don’t.

Cinderella: Don’t what?

Fairy Godmother: this …. You …. Cinderella.

Cinderella: What? You’re not making any sense. It doesn’t matter, I can see the sisters running towards the horizon celebrating that they got away. On and on they run, tired and sore but the need to get away is stronger than their exhaustion. But I follow, swiftly chasing them. Sweat, tears, blood, nothing will stop me. Come to me! I will follow you! I will make you pay… I will draw blood … I will drink it and celebrate in front of your lifeless bodies. I will dance on your graves. Laugh and cheer and sing as you scream and cry and beg, yes you will beg as I punish and tear and stab and rip your flesh from your very bones. I’ll grind your bones to dust and mash your flash till there’s nothing left of you. I will place your eye balls on a shelf so you will witness everything and then I will eat them.

(Kay Moseley, 2016)

This monologue clearly shows that Cinderella has completely lost who she is and has become caught up in the need to get revenge on her sisters. We recorded these monologues so that it would seem even more fragmented as Cinderella would be on stage confused as to what is happening and reacting to what is being said as though it really is the voice in her head.

One thing we struggled with the monologues was whether they were too long. This was hard thing for me to grasp throughout the process, as through different scenes we didn’t know whether to cut lines or not. I found this hard as I try to put meaning into all the lines, as I always think why say something if there isn’t a point, even if that point isn’t immediately obvious at that point in the play. This was something I had to keep explaining to the rest of the Theatre Company, as they might not have always understood why some things were said at a certain point or in a certain way. The miscommunication was something I also found difficult, like when they would cut something but didn’t check with me first, but I have since learnt that everyone interprets things in different ways and just because I write something a certain way doesn’t mean everyone is going to interpret it that way.

I feel like my writing has come a long way since the beginning of this process, and I am proud that I wrote a full length play, as this was something I was adamant that would never happen when I was younger as I prefer descriptive writing like in books compared to the almost bare writing of a script. The one thing I have definitely learnt though is not to feel completely insecure about my writing, as there will always be people who won’t like my writing, and to stand my ground when I feel things should definitely not be changed. But I am definitely proud of this play.