Dear clever city planners who I was lucky enough to meet three weeks ago,

a play is forming!  Like the cities that we drew on butcher's paper, 'BigSmoke' the show is beginning to take shape.  And like with everything, it has to start very simply.  So the first piece of writing for the show is a poem: about two kids - a boy and a girl - who live side by side, on a street, beneath a bridge, in the middle of a giant city.

I think the next thing to do is find out who these kids are, and then find out what might be going on in that city, and then discover how Jimmy and Bethany - which are their names - might fit into it all. 

It feels a bit like that moment when we had lots of words on a blank page, and then slowly we drew lines between them, and saw that what we had were streets, and roundabouts, and traffic lights, and apartment blocks, and a whole city's worth of stuff waiting to be built. 

So I'm putting on my inventing hat and sitting down at my computer - and am ready to start making.  I'll let you know how I go!

Fin




BigSmoke

This is a street.  It’s called Cloveny Street.
It holds smells that you smell.  It holds food that you eat.
It holds the fire station (giant), and the toyshop (petite).

On Cloveny Street, lives young Jimmy McCourt.
His hair is not long – no his hair is quite short.
He is great at collecting.  He is average at sport.

And beside him lives Bethany Bishop, a child.
Her hair is not short – no her hair is quite wild.
Her mum asked her to cut it.  But Bethany just smiled.

And the pair live on Cloveny Street, a street which,
Sits rather snugly beneath a great bridge.

And the bridge roars with traffic all day and all night.
And the day, has no darkness – the night, has no light.

It’s not wrong or right, it just is how it is.
When you live on a street, that sits under a bridge.

And Cloveny Street is surrounded by a million
More streets, and more stations, more bridges, more children.

Every smell, every sound, every sight, every taste,
They all come together in this everything place.

It’s a city of course, and it’s fairly well known.
Over hundreds of years, it has bulged, it has grown.
And to Bethany and Jimmy it is simply home.

If these two children you happen to meet,
And asked: ‘where do you live?’ they say something quite neat.
They do not say a city.  They say:

‘Cloveny Street.  I live the under the bridge, here on