Hi there! Pomp here for a review.
I'll be reviewing as I read, with a general summation of my thoughts on this at the end. Please bear with me.
On the beginning: is the first scene set in the kitchen? I assume it is, because of the choice in furniture, but it's good to specify the setting in a playscript--if only for the actors' sakes than anyone else's.
...as she reads a newspaper with the headlines: Pieces of Roofs Going Missing and Culprit Still on the Loose.
~ Uh, that's an odd headline. Normally, headlines are full of jazz; they tend to be pretty concise and snappy. I don't see how missing ... shingles? tiles? (what do you mean by 'pieces of roofs'?) would make the headlines, honestly, unless the town the characters live in is terribly boring and small. The nature of this town remains unmentioned so far, and it's not a very convincing entry into the play, as a whole. Stealing roof shingles is a crime, yes, albeit a petty one. But is it one that would be on the front page? I sincerely doubt it. I think this might be more convincing if the character (Mom) was mumbling bits of the passage out to herself, or even ranting to her cat or whatever. As it is, Mom has very little character-development, and her interacting with her surroundings might help flesh her out some more.*
*By 'interacting with surroundings', I am, by no means, encouraging a whole load of stage directions, although these, too, are extremely helpful if done well. (An example is Ayckbourn's /Absurd Person Singular/, in which one of the characters has absolutely no dialogue but is the centre of attention--this, due to the way she interacts with her surroundings.)
Also, I find the way Thomas presents his mother + her actual actions to be at odds with one another. She is first presented as uncaring and cold, yet she appears to have an intense interest in what her son is hiding in his room. Why is she so strict with her kid if she doesn't care for him? Wouldn't she be far more likely to let him roam about as he pleases, if she's so lax and inattentive towards him? And, if she is as strict as she's made out to be, grounding him for a year-and-a-half as she has, wouldn't she also keep tabs on if he's abiding to the punishment? Wouldn't she have come across his collection of shingles sooner? I'm finding it really hard to understand what's going on here, mostly because the way everything's been played out is so utterly unconvincing. Thomas' mum does not come across as uncaring in the slightest, from what you've portrayed of her. She's simply reading the paper. Heck, she even answers Thomas in the affirmative when he asks her if his friend can come over. You want to show me a mother who doesn't care for her kid? Expand on scene one. Give us a situation to work with. Give us harsher dialogue and actual referral to past events to connect to. Convince me of his mum's nonchalance--because your climax is going to remain a flat tyre until you do the aforementioned successfully.
I can say the same for the rest of the play. Laney is just a stock character, and Yousef has a potentially-enlightening-but-what-fails-to-be-enlightening conversation with Thomas. I actually like Yousef best, because he is acting in a believable way. I mean, who wouldn't run from a friend if he was talking to you like that, am I right?
Another thing--if Thomas is eleven years old, why is he accusing his mum for not feeding them or taking them to, er, relieve themselves? His sister shows to signs of being neglected, and remember--the audience has to see the signs of abuse instead of hearing Thomas simply rant about them. Your stage directions is the juicy fillet in the sandwich; the dialogue is the marination and the props are the toasted French bread on the top. I don't want to be told things. I want them to be implied. Subtlety is an art.
I like how you integrate offstage action into what's happening onstage. It's very neat, and definitely something I forget a lot if I'm ever experimenting with scripts, mostly because it's hard to keep the audience in pace with the events that're going on behind the stage. In this case, it wasn't so much as offstage action as events taking place in sheer darkness, but I liked how you managed to pull that ending off.
What I was not a fan of was the resolution.
Re-work this. There's potential. Work on making your dialogue less blatant--take a look at this article that talks about how you can stuff your dialogue to the seams with characterisation and other such stuffs~ I'm keen on finding out WHY, exactly, Mom has issues with developing emotional attachments. A cause to the effect, no? I'd also suggest to work on the pacing; where the script stands, right now, things move a little too fast, and it's hard to develop any sympathies for the characters because we know them for such a little while.
'Script' is a category I don't really get to see much work in, so it's always a pleasure to pick something up from this area. Keep writing! Keep it up!
I hope this helped. Holler if you have any questions~
~Pomp
Points: 27
Reviews: 396
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