Writing Wild Fruit

Bedsit memories

Wild Fruit was written in 2004/5 but is based on my memories of Brighton ten years previously. The town has changed since then. It was more of a backwater in those days, cruddy and run-down and faded, which I liked. The middle classes had abandoned it and the millennium yuppies had yet to descend. Now it’s all Starbucks and Costas. They say the bohemians are moving to Eastbourne, although I find that hard to believe.

I lived in a bedsit in a shared house in Waterloo Street. The street runs down to the sea-front and demarcates the boundary between the flesh-pots of Brighton and the pet-shops of Hove. Every now and then there would be a murder. I became part of a flotsam-and-jetsam kind of family. My room had a shower, a sink and a Baby Belling stove. Eventually I received a phone-call from Los Angeles on the communal pay-phone on the stairs, and was air-lifted out of what a friend now refers to as “our Waterloo Street hell.”

My first attempt to tell my Waterloo Street story was a screenplay farce, featuring a handsome corpse, a mad dog and a plumber in hot-pants. When I next tried, years later, I was in no mood for farce. I had been in Brighton ten years and I was ready to leave. I was feeling exhausted, heartbroken and washed-up – a wholly appropriate state of mind in which to write the play.

I like the bit in the Rocky Horror Show where Patricia Quinn says, “I ask for nothing, Master!” and Tim Curry snaps back, “And you shall receive it – in abundance!” It sums up what it was like to live on Waterloo Street – to be wild fruit.

(Top: Robert Forknall in Wild Fruit. Bottom: Peter Stenson and Jonathan Hooley in Wild Fruit. Photos by Sean Patterson.)