Two frogs meet Three Billy Goats Gruff
Tiny Time Tales
Stephen Joseph Theatre Scarborough

WELCOME!

Hi there.

Welcome to the website of Deborah Catesby - professional playwright living and working in the West Midlands.

Please feel free to take a look around and come back any time.


MOST RECENT WORK

We put 3 monologues from Fifteen Minutes on Passion up in front of an audience in Feb 2008 at the mac Hexagon Theatre in Birmingham. Alison Carney performed and Peter Leslie Wild was the director. It worked well, and the plan is to find a way of touring all 5 pieces to small venues.

Fifteen Minutes on Passion is a series of 5 short dramatic monologues by women of different ages. Each piece is based around a different painting. The five monologues are meant to be performed either as a one woman show for stage or as a series for radio by different actors.

You can hear Ali Carney in Samson and Delilah, a finalist in the Script monologue competition, either by visiting Script or by clicking on the link in the Read Extracts page of this website.

Full of Noises was commissioned by Robert Petty for pupils in Year 8 (ages 12-13) at William Brookes School in Much Wenlock and was performed in November 2007. Based very loosely on four stories from different Shakespeare plays, Full of Noises uses TV reality show formats in a light-hearted way to deal with subjects relevant to the age group - ambition, family break up, love - and growing up. Comments from audience members (mainly parents) were very positive - 'pleased that their child was in a play that was about something, that gave them genuine acting opportunities, that what started out as a duty night out ended up an enjoyable one!' A member of staff said 'it was far and away the most intelligent and intelligible piece of drama we've done with that age group ...'

We're still working on Sleeper, a script for a 10 minute short to be filmed on the London to Penzance train this year with film-maker Christopher Nuttall of IC125. Sleeper will feature Kit Harington.

Summer 2006 was the year when Scarborough's Stephen Joseph Theatre showed my series of 11 plays each Saturday to an audience of 0 to 6 year olds and their families. The plays, directed by Cheryl Govan, were based on traditional stories and performed by 2 actors. The children joined in all the way through and our audience increased each week.

Earlier in 2006 Greenwich Theatre in London commissioned me to write the book for Taking Stock, a 30 minute musical to be performed by young people from the theatre's Musical Academy. Robin Spencer wrote the lyrics and Francis Goodhand wrote the music.



BOARD MEMBERSHIP

I am a member of the board of Pentabus Theatre Company.

I was previously chair of Stagecoach, the new writing organisation of the West Midlands. This is now Script.




Deborah Catesby






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