We won a writing award for Past Tents! But do we deserve it…?

We won a writing award!? This our first writing award as playwrights – our play PAST TENTS continues to punch well above its weight. ?How did we manage to win against such fearsome competition?? It’s hard to say, because we don’t actually believe it yet.? Maybe we are conditioned not to.

You see in life, never-mind as writers, Seth and I are utterly devoid of self-belief.? We always assume the worst, find praise impossible to take and always expect bad news.? In this article I will examine this further – peel back the onion that is my head and try to look inside at the murky mess that is me, then make sense of things.? I’ll explore the odds set against us – also, I’ll try and dissect how it’s possible to find success, because if we can be nominated for and even win awards, maybe there’s a lesson in here somewhere? ?For us? ?For fellow creatives? ?Or just for those who have to fight against the impossible odds to get their art, hard work and vision out there.

Even writing this article feels self-indulgent.? Neither Seth nor I are programmed to enjoy success or accept praise. ?I often talk about the life of working-class actors and why it is so hard for us as a group, to achieve things – but even when we do, we often somehow struggle to celebrate it – always feeling like frauds, like we’ll be found out – imposter syndrome rules our thinking; holds us back; limits us.? The lack of a financial safety net, the lack of parent-imbued confidence.? Childhood trauma?? The deeper I dig into my brain, the more excuses I find.

Maybe I am making too much of this?? Perhaps it is the neuro-divergences in both of us that make us feel less worthy?? Maybe all that’s happened is, we’ve won another fight; got away with it – but there’s still guaranteed failure looming behind the corner?? Seth’s character in Past Tents, Alan, describes something similar in the play – it’s like a monster whispering promises of ‘you’re not good enough’, ‘you don’t deserve this’, ‘you will fail’.? That’s how we both often felt at school – we weren’t academics; we were constantly told we ‘weren’t good enough’; ‘try harder’; ‘stop failing’.?

We expect to fail.? All this makes any measure of success so hard to take. ?But don’t worry – disaster probably awaits around the corner –?we’ll be okay –?back down to Earth we will come with a crash, no doubt.?

Yet, what is most astonishing about the nominations, never-mind the wins, is that we had to entirely self-fund the play’s tour in 2023 (at a substantial loss) because we were refused funding.? Twice.? Of course we were – we don’t deserve funding,do we?? So despite spending days on a meticulous lottery funding form, on a system so hard to use (seriously, try doing it with ADHD – if my laptop accuses me of assault, I have no defence – it took a pounding, bless it), we didn’t get the funding.? Once again, our faces don’t fit and that is exactly what we expected.?

I have just (through gritted teeth and lots of swearing at said laptop) applied for two lots of funding for 2024, so we can spread the word about men’s mental health with the play, but both of theses are, of course, doomed to failure.? Even if we knew rich people who would support us (we don’t) we’d be too afraid to ask for help for fear of rejection.? I hate that this our default.? I hate that I am not more confident.? I hate that I hate myself for this stuff. I could go on.

I make us sound like whining victims, right?? Probably – but try living in our heads for a while and you’ll see the complicated mess we have to deal with up there, and how hard it is to try and stave off the dark thoughts and depression – the play after all, was born from that. ?Mental health has never been something we’ve found easy – those who watched that play will see we put it all in there – it’s raw, real and hurts and I’m writing a follow up article that explores it in more detail later, so enough on that.?

Perhaps our lack of self-belief is a shield we use to stave off any thought we might actually have done a good job?? It’s hard to accept any level of success, so I’m ashamed to say, when we won the award, we cried like babies.? Failure comes more easily for us.

Let’s add some light to proceedings.? The shows we were up against in eight categories, were almost entirely well-funded – some of them to incredible levels.? We are talking hundreds of thousands of pounds or more in some cases. ?Here are some of them:

The 39 Steps, The King & I, The Little Shop Of Horrors, 42nd Steet, Heathers, The Lord of The Rings, Edward Scissorhands, The Ocean At Th End Of The Lane, The Bee-Keeper op Aleppo, The Mousetrap, The Sponge-Bob Musical, The Hound Of The Baskervilles and others. We don’t begrudge any of them their success or funding, after all, they deserve it, we don’t, right? Wrong.

Our little self-funded play was amongst some crazy big names – and Seth also won BEST ACTOR 2023 too for his performance as Alan (Mark Keegan was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor as Virgil and me for Best Actor as Justin’).? It’s amazing to think we were even in with a shout, never mind having any chance of winning.? We are still making sense of it.? You may have picked up on that.

Without funding, we couldn’t afford to hire a Stage Manager, ASM or a permanent tech.? Some theatres helped with some of this, but we made every prop ourselves (there are hundreds – I spent an entire day in my garage building a realistic looking sheep poo, for example. I was so proud), did the set design, costumes, did all our own PR, liaised with all the theatres, the get-ins, the get-outs, marketing, posters, delivered leaflets at every venue, press releases, invited reviewers, social media awareness campaigns, managed the accounts, designed lighting, sound, a video and of course we wrote it, rewrote, rewrote it, rewrote then rewrote it again, all whilst suffering from crippling self-doubt. ??

Despite learning to do all those other jobs, it is as writers we truly value the award most.? We were up against the likes of Neil Gaiman & Joel Horwood – people we worship as writers; we are blessed and slightly bemused to have come out on top.? Obviously it was a mistake – Cormac Richards pressed the wrong button on his computer and gave us an award by mistake.? Yeah, that’s it!? We checked – we did win apparently.? Damn!? ??

So let me assume for a moment that we actually deserved it.? How did we do it?? Firstly, it is important for creatives to make their own work – sitting at home waiting for auditions, hoping for success doesn’t work. You need to find a way to get work out there, whatever the cost.? That takes a lot of self-belief – which is always our first stumbling block – but by writing together we manage to convince ourselves, for just about long enough, to have a go.? So we took the plunge and Seth and I have sacrificed a lot emotionally and financially to bring the play to audiences – suffered successes and disappointments along the way – but ultimately we both knew we needed to make those huge sacrifices to get our work seen.?

We also wanted to ensure anyone else who worked on Past Tents got paid – it’s important not to expect people to work for free (even though we weren’t ourselves paid penny for 20 plus performances).? This was our dream and we would do it properly – professionally.? Who the hell did we think we were?

We also had extra motivation. It would be wrong not to mention Seth’s friend Sean Smith, a fellow writer/actor who took his own life just over a year ago.? Sean’s loss deeply affected Seth and we wanted to ensure we used the pain and the grief to talk about mental health in men within the play – an attempt to raise awareness and get people talking about suicide – one of the biggest killers of men in the UK.? It’s fair to say the play was written from the heart and some of its darkest moments are very close to the truth – but we wanted to validate them with a number of Mental Health charities including Manup?, who read the play and gave us reassurances we had dealt with the issue in the right way. ?

Perhaps that why it resonates with so many people?? Maybe that is a lesson? ?Write what is real – no matter the premise or genre of the writing, make the characters real people you can empathise with, really understand what motivates and demotivates them and spend a lot of time trying to get inside their heads, before unleashing them on an audience.? Sounds easy right? It nearly killed us.

We also mix utterly ridiculous comedy in with the darkness.? Laughing at the despair feels like a very British thing to do – there’s nothing like a little self-deprecating comedy and I think we got the balance right.? Big laughs offer relief from the hard bits – the hard bits shock the audience expecting the laughs: it’s a potent mix if done well.

The thing we learned most through this process, was to leave everything we had on stage every night – some nights were better than others of course, but we never gave less than our best to each performance.? Mark Keegan, our third wheel in the play, was a superb choice; he instantly understood his character and is the best compliment to us we could ever ask for.? He also tolerates all our nonsense which is helpful – thanks Mark – you are definitely the show-stealing comedy performance we needed.?

It is also important to be meticulous and brutal in the writing.? Seth and I spent days looking specifically at every line.? Is it a clue?? Does is build upon the character?? Does it make people laugh?? If none of those three, we deleted it or?rewrote it.? We analyse every line through our audiences.? What is landing, what isn’t?? Where can we find the silence in the noise?? Is anything causing a drag in the pace? Where can we hurt people? How can we make them laugh more?? Our process is meticulous – the attention to detail is insane and often results in writing room clashes as Seth and I argue things out.? We are brutal – even if we love something, we’ll remove it if it doesn’t land.? We are constantly trying to improve and never take out audiences for granted.

We are also constantly upgrading the props and costumes, making them better, more interesting, more relevant, more… bizarre. ?We constantly strive for a perfection we’ll never find; but keep aiming for it anyway.

It isn’t easy to bare your soul on stage.? To expose audiences to your writing, acting, directing, producing, set design, costume design etc… What if people hate it?? What it’s not funny? ?What if we fail?? What if we aren’t good enough? Damn that Imposter syndrome.

I think it’s about time we started to believe in ourselves, isn’t it?? About time we started to accept that we’re actually quite good. ?But if we do that, maybe we’ll stop trying so hard to prove to the world we are good enough.??We may have won a few awards, but maybe we’ll never win this battle with ourselves, will we?? Maybe that’s our secret – the things we perceive as our weaknesses may actually be the driving forces behind our success?

Whatever the truth, we want to thank Cormac Richards and everyone else who has given us great reviews, nominated us for awards or told us how much the play matters to them. ?We love every bit of feedback, constructive, complimentary or otherwise and we hope we keep touching people’s hearts and laughing bones, in the way we have.

We are currently planning a scary three-week stint at a (soon to be announced) small theatre in London this September to get the play launched to a new level – as well as performances in Eastleigh in May and Leicester in July (with others hopefully soon to be announced). ??We hope you can come and see it and judge for yourself – after all, we have nearly 40 ‘5 star’ Facebook reviews from audience members who seem to like it.? Hopefully you will too – I promise we guarantee we won’t take that for granted.

I am about to post this article on my website now and await the inevitable crippling anxiety caused by it (of course).? Don’t judge me, it’s how I am. It’s how we are. ?

After all, we are award winning writers, aren’t we??

Aren’t we?

David J Keogh 29/01/24

Past Tents website: https://www.pasttentsplay.com

Past tents Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pasttentsplay/reviews

Cormac Richards 2023 Awards: https://theatreplays.uk/cormac-richards-theatre-awards-2023-the-winners/

Current Tour Dates: https://www.pasttentsplay.com/box-office-tour-dates