Comedy, Class and a Week to Curtain
Becoming a Student Playwright by Lilly Ryan
A year ago, I started writing up ideas for a play called “The Devil Went Down to Parliament”, with a plan to eventually pitch it to the Sheffield University Theatre Company (SUTCo), if I ever managed to get it finished. Right now, it’s a week before show week, and I could not be prouder of how it’s turned out.
As a writer with a major preference for comedy (I’d get bored of writing a full-length work that didn’t have room for laughter), The Devil Went Down to Parliament is a political satire with absurd humour to contrast with a more serious sense of foreboding that begins to build.
Being from a working-class background and a low-income area of Doncaster, I wanted to explore themes of class and privilege. While writing the script, I had been listening to a lot of music with political themes such as that of Seb Lowe, who notably puts on different voices in his songs to create different personas (such as in “Terms and Conditions”, where an exaggeratedly upper-class persona counters his normal Mancunian accent). Inspired by this idea, I wanted to create characters for the play that put on different personas. For example, one character, Justus Morton, comes from a working-class background but shifts into an upper-class persona to impress his peers when making it in politics.
As the director, one of my absolute favourite parts of rehearsals so far has been working with actors to try out different accents and ways of presenting themselves in regard to switching the personas that their characters put on and take off.
During my first year as an English and Philosophy student at the University of Sheffield, I studied Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, and was inspired by the way absurdly humorous plot points (such as Faustus turning invisible and stealing food from the Pope) were purposely used to distract both the audience and Faustus from his hellish fate, which arrived by the end of the play, cutting straight through the light-hearted tone of its previous scenes.
I enjoyed this idea of contrast between silly, laugh-out-loud entertainment and more stark warnings, perhaps reflecting how political and societal issues are downplayed and ignored by those who are unaffected until it’s too late to do much about them. When I watch the news (and I’ve found recently that not watching the news seems to be great for my mental health) I find myself stuck between feeling helpless and defeated versus feeling that there is always something more that can be done. These are feelings I’ve tried to get across in the second act of the play to contrast the humour and gags of the first act.
Working with the cast and my assistant director has been such a brilliant experience so far and we’re all excitedly anticipating show week. Please come along if you’d like to experience the chaos for yourself.
The Devil Went Down to Parliament will be showing on the 12th, 13th and 14th of March at the University of Sheffield Drama Studio, Shearwood Rd, Broomhall, Sheffield S10 2TD. Tickets can be found here.
Lilly Ryan is a student at the University of Sheffield, an emerging writer and an alumnus of Doncaster Young Writers