Picaresque

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Description In 2000, Morrison first performed his play for voices, Picaresque, which was based on his - mainly bitter - experiences working in a Brighton night shelter that same year. The piece took its stylistic inspiration from Dylan Thomas's play for voices, Under Milk Wood, as well as from TS Eliot's modernist epic, The Wasteland. The play juxtaposed the residents of the homeless shelter with piratical alter egos whose names were based loosely on those of characters from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. The original piece was written as an epic narrative with the ubiquitous Midshipman describing the various homeless inmates he worked for. But by its second public performance, the piece had evolved into a proper play for voices, the various characters being brought more to life through voicing their own stories in monologues and through dialogue. Picaresque has gone on to endure through the years, having been performed a total of eight times to date, as well as an excerpt being broadcast on London's Resonance fm. It has collected much critical acclaim along its course, and was also given notice in an article in the Guardian Review supplement in 2005. About the Author Alan Morrison was born in Brighton 1974. He grew up in Sussex and then Cornwall, where he started writing stories, plays, and in particular, poetry, partly as a creative response to the harsh policies of the Thatcher period - which had indirectly kept his parents in the poverty trap for the entire late Eighties. During this difficult period in his life, Morrison developed nervous problems vaguely labelled as 'intrusive thoughts' by a child psychiatrist he was taken to for problems attending school. It was advised by the psychiatrist to keep him off school for several months due to the extreme stress it seemed to cause him which exacerbated his neuroses. Subsequently Morrison missed virtually his entire first year in secondary education, but was eventually forced back to attending through pressure from the school inspectorate. His attendance at school was never considered fully satisfactory thereafter, but was just enough to escape being sent to a special school away from his family. Deciding writing, particularly poetry, was his most enduring passion in life, Morrison embarked on a series of unsuitable day jobs in order to survive in his re-adopted home of Brighton, while he pursued his creative work in his spare time. Around this time (1998), he was chosen as one of five poetry winners in the Asham Literary Trust's First Edition competition, the prize of which was a week long stay at the Ty Newyd writing school in Wales and publication in an anthology, Don't Think of Tigers (2001). It was around this time he had a poem accepted by the local journal Eratica, edited by Dr Simon Jenner, who soon became Morrison's poetry mentor for a number of years in his development.