Monologues written by Marie Cooper. The first is ‘Six’. A dramatic monologue for a female character on the subject of bereavement, grief, guilt, motherhood, and police shooting.
Six
Six is a monologue created by Marie Cooper, written during the inital 2020 pandemic lockdown. It is written for a female performer and reads at about four to four and a half minutes. The monologue can be read over on the New Play Exchange.
Synopsis
A grieving mother agonizes over how she is ever going to tell her little girl that her daddy will never be coming home.
Please do credit me if you use my monologue.
Recommended by Rachel Feeny-Williams on New Play Exchange
“ A beautifully sad piece where anyone would struggle not to shed a tear. Death can be a cliched subject to explore but I believe the phrasing here brings something new and gives the character a unique voice. It would be a powerful piece for an audition. ” – Rachel Feeny-Williams
Conception
I originally conceived the initial idea for ‘Six’ during an online playwriting workshop run by Rosa Torr on 8th July 2020 with South East Creatives.
The workshop was a fantastic twelve step process over the course of two hours that guided writers through exercises to stimulate ideas. From freewriting, prompts, questions and lists, progressing on to developing those ideas into monologues and dialogue and dropping random ideas into existing work.
It was a brilliant workshop and by the end I had pages of potential ideas, snippets of monologues and dialogue. One of the exercises had encouraged us to envision and create a location that could be set up and recorded from home in the new post-pandemic world of lockdowns and Zoom. This was particulary exciting for me as I was considering writing a monologue but had been stuck for ideas. During the exercise I created an entire list of setups. One of which was “Home in bed”.
At the time I had established a regular, daily writing routine thanks to London Writers’ Hour which I woke for, every morning, at 7am. I worked towards finishing my first play and exploring creating new work. During Writers’ Hour I took the dialogue I’d scribbled and rewrote it as a monolgoue. I then put the monologue aside as I worked on completing my full play.
I dipped back into the monologue every now and again to edit, add bits, remove bits. It was good to not look at it for a while and ocassionally revisit and read with fresh eyes.
I do keep meaning to learn it and record it, but still haven’t got round to it. But one of our lovely local actors, Helen Fullerton, very kindly read and made a recording of it so that I could hear my monologue with a voice other than my own or that inside my head.
Hearing Helen bring it alive and give good feedback on it, I felt more confident that the monologue worked well, so I posted it up on the New Play Exchange. I was surprised and happy to receive a recommendation from another NPX member (see recommendation above).
