Halesowen Stephen Moran playwright is our am dram star of the week
Am dram stars can come from all walks of life. This week’s star is a person without whom, there would be no plays to perform.
When Stephen Moran was a young man, he had ambitions to be everything from a racing drive to a rock guitarist. Instead, he settled for being a dispensing optician from Halesowen and a part-time playwright.
The award-winning writer started his theatrical career back in 1992 in a local amateur production of Grease the Musical and before long was hooked.
He’s a co-founder of Mayhem Theatre Group, but over the years has found some of the material available for amateurs rather dated and so decided to re-write the scripts and eventually write his own plays, in a similar format to that of the Tales of the Unexpected TV series.
Stephen says: “My first play was The Final 45 with Frank Farmer, which an adjudicator at the All England Theatre Festival likened to a work by Samuel Beckett!”
At the time, Stephen had no idea who Beckett was, but those words inspired him to continue to write.
Local am dram group, the New Kinver Players will be taking another of Stephen’s plays, A Librarian to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this August.
Stephen says: “The ideas of many of my plays come from dreams and this is exactly what happened with A Librarian.
“In my dream I was watching an expensive sports car flashing past a speed camera. It stopped outside my house and a young woman was driving. There was an older man in the passenger seat and they were arguing. Who are they? Boss and secretary? The idea developed from there.”
He continues: “When I start writing I always use people I know as the characters. It makes it much easier. Sometimes they may be people I have not seen for years; sometimes I tell them, and sometimes I don’t. It depends on the type of character depicted in the play. I don’t think I’ve told the people who are the inspiration for the A Librarian. Perhaps I will if the play does well at the Edinburgh festival!”
He adds: “I find it so much easier to write a script as opposed to a story. People say amusing things in general life and you can use this to add humour to a script even if the play is not particularly comedic.”
Stephen is inspired by Alan Ayckbourn, David Tristram and Roald Dahl.
“When we take A Librarian to Edinburgh, if there is a TV producer in the audience who is looking for a writer, that will suit me,” he concludes.
l For more information on New Kinver Players visit www.nkp.org.uk
