I've spent the last few weeks since finishing the sonnets grappling in a desultory way with my next project. A Bad Poet & Worse Neighbours is envisaged as a five scene five part play in iambic pentameter. It's going to be pretty dark and at the same time humorous and hopefully witty. It seems to defy identification with any particular genre. I guess the iambic pentameter format will give it an Elizabethan or Jacobean feel, whereas the grotesquerie could be of those ages but could easily be of later provenance - Hogarthian, perhaps, or more contemporary. The small size of the cast is certainly of a piece with modern theatre.
Progress with the Bad Poet & Worse Neighbours has been rather slow, as it always is at the beginning of a project. So far, I've written about two thirds of the first scene. I've also been reading a few plays - Chekhov and Marlowe so far (bizarre juxtaposition, I realise) although I've just taken delivery of a bunch of Restoration & 18th century stuff + Ibsen. I should have done this before of course. I'm really happy with the way The Senseless Counterfeit happened. All the same, writing a Jacobean revenge tragedy without having read very widely at all in drama smacks of foolishness, even though I got lucky.
I'll elaborate on the Bad Poet at further length once I've made a bit more progress with it
