Hopelessly Devoted to You

A chance to meet up last night with some of the Jerwood/Arvon mentees who turned out for the London performance – gearing up for Edinburgh – of the short play by German Munoz ‘Hopelessly Devoted to You’. Four short plays, all in an hour. The four writers were given a simple task: to write a short play without specifying gender for any of the characters. German’s 15 minutes took you a long way, to places and ideas you’d never considered – without giving it away, there was a camera phone, a wheelchair, a radio announcer, a blade. Provocative and humorous writing and some excellent acting by a young team of seven who acted in all the pieces.

Theatre503 is a tiny little theatre above The Latchmere pub at 503 Battersea Park Road. It receives no public subsidy and The Guardian called it ‘Arguably the most important theatre in Britain today’. Sundays they run a ‘Pay what you can’ entry policy. It was sweltering in the little black auditorium, so we took refuge in the pub garden, then ventured indoors, catching up with novelist, Stephanie Scott, and playwright, Yvonne Smith, to hear about what they have been up to since our week in Totleigh Barton back in February, and how their various writing projects are progressing through the mentoring process.