Something stirs beneath the ground. After a series of unexplained earthquakes, two scientists descend deep into a coalmine to discover the cause. What they find in the deeps – and about each other – is beyond their imagination. Revisit this free to stream or download full-cast audio drama by Little Wonder Radio Plays.
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE PLAY
Toby – Keith Crawford
Sid – Roger Surridge
Eric Barnes/The Sleeper – Joe Wilkins
Our First Original Play
Having experimented with a few relatively obscure out-of-copyright theatrical shorts, it was time to try our hand at an original play. I like writing to a brief, and this time my brief didn’t have much to do with story: mu objective was to try out some of the different sounds we could create with Audacity.
I wanted to learn how to give the impression that characters were moving from larger to smaller spaces, and how to make sounds see like they were farther and closers away. So, “Mine” was written specifically to let me play with sound effects.
Which doesn’t sound like a great pitch for a story. But funny things can happen on the way to the editing suite.
Sometimes good stories come from odd briefs
I wanted to write something set in a mine because I had been thinking about a relatively recent mining disaster, and I’m both from Nottingham while my family is from the North-East, so mining is in the family.
A mining disaster is good, juicy, and exciting: and mines give you an opportunity to move through lots of different spaces. So, great, mining disaster. That would meet the brief. But where was the story?
Writing Empathetic Characters that you Disagree with.
I knew I’d have two characters who would respond differently to being buried. At the time the whole Brexit palaver was kicking off, so I tried to create too characters with opposing views on Brexit. As I am very much pro-European, and as with many views I hold strongly, I find it interesting and worthwhile to create characters who think and believe differently to me while making their reasoning as strong and as empathetic as possible. I don’t know how successful it was (defending Brexit is pretty tough for me!) but I recommend this to all writers as a way to grow as a person and an author.
Look for Double Meaning
Then I started thinking about how the word “Mine” had another meaning – possession, ownership. Attitudes to romantic relationships provide super-fertile grounds for this sort of thing (I still struggle with the question as to whether and when it’s okay to date someone who was previously with a close friend – but by what right can I claim ownership over someone who I’m no longer with [or even that I’m currently with])
The result was a play that I’m proud of, a play that I believe has depth, emotional impact, and plenty of imagination, all starting from setting specific limits rather than aiming for depth (and yep, it was great fun for learning how to make interesting sounds.)
Use you Actors
I was enormously assisted by the performances of Joe Wilkins and Roger Surridge, as I would be in many plays to follow That does create one more tiny (and happy) problem for a writer – when your actors are sensational, how much of the play is down to the writing and how much to the performance? In the end, you can’t have one without the other, and the best thing to do is listen to the actors and be ready to make changes on the fly. Don’t waste good actors. They’re worth their weight in diamonds. Or I guess it should be coal, given the play…
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it! This play was an important steppingstone for Little Wonder and started us on the road to eventually producing many original plays by writers from all over the world. You never know where the best ideas will come from!
