The Leeds Savage Club

Those who were present at the writers meeting last Wednesday night were treated to a series of quite extraordinary performances.
It was the Savage Club Script Night, and the members were asked to submit scripts of 1000 words to be performed on the night by the Savages themselves. There was a good turn out on the night that was happily bolstered by a visit from a few of our wonderful artists, and the atmosphere felt slightly more electric than usual, more excited.
The long table was littered with sheaves of paper and pint pots, and in a jumble of organised chaos we decided who would read what and which parts we preferred to play. I had presumed we would need half an hour to try the scripts out, but no. The Savages were keener than the gee-gees at this year’s Grand National! We just steamed in.
What followed was nothing short of brilliant. The dazzling writing was only matched by the quality of the reading as script after script was performed with a skill that took me by surprise. Each performance was compelling and convincing, and the readers squeezed every last nuance from scripts they had only seen for the first time moments earlier.
In those few short hours there was fear, laughter, sadness, excitement and even a bit of sex! Aside from it being a brilliant display of our small group’s great talent, it was a first class entertainment.
It also gave me food for thought.
I realised that as a writer it is very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to be objective about our own writing. Our view can be skewed by the knowledge of the effort that has gone into creating a piece, perhaps causing us to be rather precious about our work, or sometimes, because we know how a piece was constructed – how it ticks, so to speak – we don’t really recognise the piece’s true worth. As such, when we read our own work out in the meetings we are doing so with that weight of knowledge on our shoulders, presenting something that we might perceive as being too fragile, too precious, not good enough, perhaps even amateurish.
Last Wednesday’s meeting blew all these thoughts out of the water.
The unbiased delivery of the scripts by impartial readers gave the work an incredible freshness and vitality, allowing us to be objective about our own writing at last.
As such, I can honestly say that every single script was first rate, of a quality I would gladly pay to see on a stage. In my opinion, these performances allowed us to recognise our writing’s true qualities and future potential, while also shedding new light on the work of our fellow members, offering a fresh perspective that a writer might not be able put into his or her own work by reading it out themselves.
This isn’t the last we’ll see of Savage Scripts on a Wednesday night – I hope they will become a regular feature on our writing calendar. Well done everyone!