BRIGHTON: what happened, and what’s happening NEXT.
DECEMBER 13TH 2018 EDIT: A lot has happened since this post was originally published! After further discussion, there is no longer a production of Mission Creep going forward to Brighton Fringe 2019. But the scratch night was still a great experience, and I don’t want to delete a whole post about something happy!
I meant to have this post out last week, but then got smacked with the weirdest cold/laryngitis/thing. Stay indoors, it’s dangerous out there…
I took the train to Brighton for the final night of the Brighton Scratch Night on October 25th knowing that Mission Creep had won the audience vote for the event's first evening of new plays on the 23rd. Lots of people I’d met never or once had tagged me in some nice tweets and said nice things. So going in, I was reasonably confident that we’d all have a good time.
By the end of the night, the Mission Creep team and I were standing with multiple prosecco bottle-trophies in a room flooded with praise and questions about what we were going to do next.
Christine Kempell—the latest and quite possibly maddest incarnation of Mary—won audience vote for Best Performance.
Mission Creep won audience pick for Tuesday AND Thursday night’s performances, and so won the audience vote for the event overall.
And then Sussex Playwrights and Fringe Review wrote really nice things about us!
It was great. That’s an understatement.
All in all, Unmasked Theatre’s scratch event was really flipping cool. Other reviewers have said it better, but it’s exciting to see shared themes come out in a new writing event. You learn what everyone is worried about, and how they’re processing it. Turns out everyone at Brighton Scratch Night is worried about authority, and we’re processing it by resetting ourselves in the most bizarre narratives possible—alternate universes where immigration challenges are flipped, Pinter-esque housing nightmares…and then Mission Creep, where aliens arrive and everybody says great, let’s get the fuck off this planet.
And special thanks to Pip O’Neill of Unmasked Theatre—-Bossy ladies get shit done!