Friendship drama Salt comes to Exchange Studio
WELL over 1,000 scripts were entered for the Royal Exchange’s prestigious Bruntwood competition and Fiona Peek’s play Salt, which has its World Premiere at the Exchange Studio next week, was one of the four winners.
Set over the course of five dinner parties in a plush London basement kitchen, the play explores four 30-somethings’ recipe for life, love, friendship and disaster.
Amy and Simon have the children and money that life has so far denied Nick and Rachel, so when a simple act of charity enables their friends to hold onto their dreams, it’s not long before food, fertility and finances reach boiling point and brings everything bubbling to the surface.
The Exchange production is directed by Exchange Associate Director Jo Combes, who also co-directed another Bruntwood winner, Ben Musgrave’s Pretend You Have Big Buildings.
In fact, Musgrave indirectly inspired Fiona to enter the competition, she tells me.
“I read a blog from Ben just before the Bruntwood’s 2008 closing date, where he remembered entering the competition at the very last minute, pulling his play out of a drawer and sending it off.
"He talked too about the positive effect that winning it had had on him. So that inspired me to enter this play, which in fact I thought I’d finished a good while before.
'Coincidental'
“Now,” she admits, “I wouldn’t regard that version of it as a finished play but that’s the good thing about the Bruntwood, the way the judges seem to be able to recognise potential and the Exchange are willing to put in the work to bring it up to scratch.”
At the time, Fiona had recently completed an MA in Dramatic Writing at the University of Sussex in Brighton, after working for 10 years in Ireland, firstly as an actress and subsequently as director and producer.
During that time she’d written some short pieces for the theatre, but then became a professional events organiser before she decided that she wanted to get back into theatre, but this time as a writer.
Salt was her first full-length play.
It was inspired, she remembers, ‘by a desire to write about our contemporary relationship with money but it pre-dated the credit crunch’.
“That might make me look very prescient but I’m afraid it’s coincidental! It is set from July 2007 until March 2008 and approximately spans the run on Northern Rock.”
Developing the play and working with Jo and the actors has been quite an eye-opener, she admits.
“Rather naively, I’d had no real idea of people performing it,” she laughs, “so I’d put in all sorts of really difficult things to achieve on stage, such as people having to cook four food courses!”
Salt is at the Royal Exchange Studio from February 3 to 20, 2010.
Published: Fri, 29 January, 2010
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