The Verb have done a wonderful job of my short play, The Coming of the Wopoli, available online for the next 6 days, broadcast on Radio 3 last night.
I’ve always thought I loved sci-fi until I was asked to do this programme.
Then I realized that, like one of the other guests, Francis Spufford, that I loved sci-fi as a child, watching it on TV and at the movies, and it helped me to learn to read, going through lots and lots of Dr Who novelisations from Target, comics, and some attempts at other written sci-fi.
But, unlike Francis Spufford, I never went on to read it much as an adult - I just always wanted to write sci-fi scripts. I’ve never liked prose, to read or write, much - because I’ve always skipped descriptive passages - yet I love the feeling of doing a lot with a few words, common to drama and poetry.
(For sci-fi poetry, Google “Andrew Joron” and “Alterran Poetry Assemblage” would be my recommendation, after trying to find poetry for the programme that I liked as poetry, and liked as sci-fi.)
So a dream come true to have a sci-fi script performed, and done really well, briskly, and full of fun. And enigma.
Here is a note from my script:
“Wopoli” is pronounced to rhyme with “properly”. Wopoli is a joke on the French Oulipo movement. Oulipo stands for Ouvrier de literature potential, so I have made this into Workshop of Potential Literature and made a new acronym. Oulipo had a lot of writers eg Perec, who lost family in the holocaust. There is a kind of sombre gameplaying to the Wopoli.
Saturday, 5 May 2007
