“Since then my feet have barely hit the ground, going from one project to the next!”
Thinking about entering the Funny Women Shorts Award? We caught up with last year’s winner Rachel Marwood to hear about her exciting upcoming projects…
Last summer I wrote and made Defrosted, a silly and surreal short which won me the 2015 Funny Women Comedy Shorts Award (Whoop!). Since then my feet have barely hit the ground, going from one project to the next! Although I haven’t filmed it yet, I’ve written the next short and I’m dying to find the time to get this one in the can! Lynne Parker and the Funny Women team have been so supportive of me. They really are like a family of fierce sisters and I’m so glad to be one of them. Winning the award has not only opened doors for me, but most importantly has given me the confidence as a comic actress and writer to grab opportunities with both hands. I’m looking forward to meeting the next generation of sisters to come from the 2016 awards!
My main project at the moment is a TV pilot I’ve written with fellow actress, Amy Booth Steel about two sisters and what happens when one of them gets cancer. Doesn’t exactly sound like a barrel of laughs, I know… But in a very different style to Defrosted, the pilot of Skin & Blisters is a comedy drama with a lot of heart. Inspired by Amy’s real life experience, it’s a story we feel that needs to be told. There’s a lot of shows out there that deal with the tragedies and losses of cancer and they can be very hard to watch. We deal with the inconveniences, the silly situations and impossible conversations.
The beauty of comedy is that you can bring an audience in with laughs and then introduce broader and more serious issues. Sharon Horgan does this beautifully in Catastrophe and she’s a huge inspiration to me. Lena Dunham also demonstrates this wonderfully with the OCD storyline in Girls that pulls the rug out from under you half way through the series. It was important to us to write something female driven, a love story but not in the traditional sense. This is about the love between siblings and how they’ve got each other’s back even though neither of them knows what they’re doing.
Writing can be very lonely but working with Amy has been a dream. We’re able to spur each other on when one of us has a block, and as we’re both actresses, we improvise scenes when we’re stuck with dialogue. I’m still learning as I go, but my main piece of advice I’d give to new writers would be to carry a notebook and pen with you at all times! You never know when that idea or scene is going to pop into your head! I used to have full scenes play out in my head when I was on the bus or paying for something in a shop and by the time I got home it had gone! It can be quite awkward if I’m in the middle of a row with my husband and I bring out the notebook though… ah well, write what you know!
As an actress, I’m currently in rehearsals for Happy To Help, a new comedy at the Park Theatre set in a northern supermarket. We open on 14th June and run until 9th July and the (almost all female!) creative team would like to offer the Funny Women a discount on Friday 17th June if you quote FUNNYWOMEN12.
I hope to see you all there!
Thinking about entering the Comedy Shorts Award 2016? Find out more here!
Happy to Help at the Park Theatre from the 14th June to the 9th July. You can get tickets here.
