Christopher Tester

In August 2005 I submitted a draft of my first attempt at a playscript to the Royal Court.  Then entitled The First of the Next, it was subsequently workshoped by a group of professional actors and various drafts have undergone rehearsed readings courtesy of Offstage Bookshop, Sourfest Theatre, Brixton and at the Central School of Speech and Drama.  I write in the hope, eventually, of creating material that I would want to work on myself.  I adhere to the adage that If the stuff you want to do isn't out there, make it.  What follows are fragments I am happy to throw into the public domain.  Feel free to venture any comments!

I have also included my dissertation (other essays also forthcoming) from my English and Theatre Studies degree at the University of Warwick, where I managed to graduate with a 1st.  All of them are about plays, films and/or practitioners, so might be of some interest.

 

 

 

He remembers a woman.

 

A girl. 

 

A woman - who took him to her bedroom and asked him to colour her in.

 

He remembers a night of paint, oil, and when they ran out, crayon.

He remembers the rouge he put in her cheeks, the green on her eyelids,

the violet streak of her backbone, the orange on her breast and the light blue of her belly.

He remembers waking up surrounded by tubes of paint, brushes and canvas.

He remembers the bird song of early morning and light filtered through blinds.

He remembers the silence. 

 

No. 

 

Yes.

 

He remembers the silence.

 

Inspired by the work of Joe Brack

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once upon a time there was a boy called Tommy. He loved to ice skate over lakes. But Tommy was sadly not very bright and often ended up nearly drowning in his heavy-duty ice skates, having not realised that the lake he was attempting to skate on was not frozen yet. His mommy always warned him, ‘Tommy, don’t go trying to skate over unfrozen lakes now, d’you hear? And stop playing with yourself while I’m speaking to you. Shoo shoo. Or I’ll bring out Mr Spanky again, and we’ll have to pay a hard violent visit to under-the-stairs-land.’

 

But Tommy continued to fondle, with the result that his mother had no choice but to inflict great corrective pain upon him.  

 

One day when Tommy was busily skating over a lake, luckily a frozen one, a large cat came up to him. ‘Hello Cat’ said Tommy, still nursing his swollen penis. ‘Tommy, stop playing with yourself’ said the cat. ‘How come you can talk, Mr cat?’ said Tommy. ‘And how do you know my name?’ ‘I know all’ said the cat cryptically. ‘And I can make you an international lake skating star, and rid you of your dick-whipping mother.’ But Tommy couldn’t be bothered and ate the cat right there in the middle of the lake.  Unfortunately the energy his system received from the cat raised his body temperature, causing the ice to melt and sending him plunging into the depths of the frozen water, where, until this day he lies bloated, his forehead rotting, his swollen and misshapen penis a testament to a young boy skater’s frustration. And the moral of this story is…

Don’t eat pussy or you might drown

Note: All work will open as Microsoft Word documents.  Some are also quite large files, so they might take a while to download depending on your connection speed.

Dissertation: The dramatisation of the divided-self in the plays of Sarah Kane.  (12.4 MB) 

Reading Coriolanus in performance - a comparison of Hands and Thacker.

Ibsen and Strindberg.

Three Phaedra's - different representations by Seneca, Euripides and Kane.

Justice and punishment in Euripides' The Bacchae and Sophocles' Antigone.

Voyeurism and the role of gender in Michael Haneke's Funny Games and The Piano Teacher.