It’s For The Best

During the pandemic, my old mate Sean McLevy (a professional actor and musician I’ve known since our time together in the Crucible Youth Theatre back in the 1980s), in an effort to not go completely bonkers in lockdown, decided to write a play. He’d never written one before (he’d acted in plenty, and directed many), so this was a new experience for him.

After spending a few years tussling with it, he gave me a call and asked me to help. I was happy to. We had some very productive video meetings on WhatsApp, quite a lot of email tennis - at one point he came over to Portugal for a week, and we knocked the play into shape.

This is how the story goes (but not necessarily in this order):

In the nineteen seventies, a couple of misfit kids in a northern English town get themselves into the sort of trouble that the parents think they can resolve. It doesn’t work out well for either of them. Twenty years later, at the latter end of The Troubles, a young soldier falls in love, quite unexpectedly, with a young woman. The consequences of this romance will haunt all four of them.

One of these four characters becomes a poet (this may have been my idea) while she’s locked away in a detention centre - which gave me an opportunity to do a Fernando Pessoa and write some poems using a different persona. So here they are - six poems by June Flynn.

Incidentally, you can find the songs and music that Sean has written for the play on Spotify and Apple Music. They’re really good.

The play’s out in the wild right now, looking for a home - it was highly commended by the National Theatre’s New Work Department, which is nice, and had a public readthrough at The Printers Playhouse, Eastbourne, which went awfully well, so things are happening slowly but surely. There’s even talk of it being produced as a TV show, so we’re working on that, too.

I know this is a bit of a stretch, but if you’re running a theatre and you happen to read this, and like the sound of It’s For The Best, by all means, please get in touch.