CLONONY CASTLE WRITER'S SERVICES
This website offers a variety of services to writers: experienced assessments of manuscripts, fiction, nonfiction, and drama, thoroughly professional editing of full-length books, and ghost-writing to help beginning authors with a story they need to tell.
Please send an e-mail if you'd like more information, and visit Clonony Castle.
AND THEY USED TO STAR IN MOVIES
AND THEY USED TO STAR IN MOVIES, a surreal one-act comedy that stars Mickey Mouse, Minnie, and Donald Duck, in the setting of an LA bar in the 1970s, was first performed in London in 1974. Since then it has been performed many times throughout the world.
This play is suited to theatrical groups of all sizes, amateur as well as professional, and if anyone is interested in acquiring production rights, and needs a copy of the play, please contact me.
Dublin Fringe Fest reviews September 2006
And They Used to Star in Movies, one act play by Campbell Black
'Campbell Black's darkly witty little oddity contains some solid laughs…Poignantly funny, ebulliently performed. A lunchtime treat.' - Irish Times
'A deliciously dark comedy full of fast witty dialogue, this is a play guaranteed to make you giggle. The dialogue is strong, and flawless'. - Metro
'A short but very funny satire. The great thing about this play is it's played dead straight, the actors are not overburdened with cartoon costumes, and they certainly don't regard themselves as cartoons. The invective is nasty and very human. It's rather like the Big Brother house, only with real people.' - Irish Daily Mail
The Trial of Mr Punch - The performance
Sept. 2, 2008 - It’s an amazing moment, a surreal swivel of time, when a play finally opens. Suddenly all the rehearsals are behind you, the costumes made, the makeup applied, and the actors ready to strut their stuff…I make little mention here of myself, as author and director, sitting in a high place at the back of the theatre, frazzled, worried, suspended in a zone of hope, concerned that gags will not fall flat, that the lighting will be just so, and the actors totally prepared for performance. You cease to exist as anyone with an iota of control over your own creation – it’s all, so to speak, in the unpredictable lap of Gods.
But from the first moment when the stage is lit, and the senile judge rises to take his seat, and the Police Constable declares All Rise – meaning the audience which, surprised to be cast as participants, gets to its feet – and the prosecutor utters her case against Mr Punch, some strange magic bedazzles, and suddenly you are neither writer nor director, but a certain kind of spectator who knows what is coming next, and what comes afters that, and who listens as much to the antic speeches of Mr Punch as he listens for audience response. Will the ticket-buyers miss something? will a gag turn out truly badly? and if so, why didn’t I know beforehand? ... continue reading >>
BUTCHER - by Campbell Armstrong
Reviews of BUTCHER, published July 2006 by Alison & Busby, London.
Lou Perlman is a Glasgow Jew who gets twitchy if he strays too far form his native city. If you like British TV cop show Taggart ("ah'm gonnae get him fur mairrrrder!"), you'll lap up Campbell Armstrong's BUTCHER.
Perlman's a rumpled cop who's currently on sick leave after stopping a bullet in a previous book (this is the third in the series and on this evidence the other two are well worth searching out). But he's in disgrace after speaking up in court in favour of his sister-in-law Miriam, and won't be welcomed back with open arms.
Miriam, meanwhile, has gone swanning off round Europe, leaving Lou uncertain as to where they stand romantically -- and he starts to worry when her postcards suddenly stop. His aunts are clucking around solicitously, and send over a cleaning lady to help him get his shambolic home into some sort of shape.
But when he and hippy cleaner Betty McLatchie make a gruesome discovery in his tip of a bedroom, things aren't looking too hot for Lou.
Add together Betty's missing son, a New Age gangster with a guru and big ideas, a mad 'surgeon', a recluse and his pet ferret, and you have one hell of a good read.
Lou's a wonderfully lugubrious character -- the kind you can imagine Ken Stott playing. And around him Campbell has created a memorable supporting cast, with all sorts of cops and lowlives popping in and out for neat cameos. Reuben Chuck, the gangster with some contradictory values in his private life, is a decidedly nasty bit of work.
The fact that Chuck is trying to grab the top position in Glasgow's underworld is giving police plenty to think about. A trail of body parts around the city, thanks to this mysterious 'surgeon' isn't helping either.
This is the Glasgow you see in Denise Mina's books -- dark, dingy, violent and with people barely existing. The best scenes are those in Dorcus's house, with the creepy Nurse Payne (and the faintest hint of woo-woo which had me looking over my shoulder when the lights flickered), and those in Tarkatower's squat.
Armstrong is a masterful writer, with a gift for storytelling and pacing, and an eye for detail -- the little ferret with his shampooed coat was my personal favourite. BUTCHER is a must-read if you like tough, gritty crime fiction with a memorable hero.
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, July 2006; reviewingtheevidence.com/.
Campbell Armstrong- the literary equivalent of an AK47
Campbell Armstrong- the literary equivalent of an AK47-is back with another high octane magnificent grit-fest that sprays out plot strands like bullets. Several dead bodies,a crimeworld coup,a missing person,an absent love interest,a hand that seems to have misplaced the rest of its body and a headless corpse in a clown suit. And thats just in the first 50 pages. Not to mention an endearingly carnaptious detective who makes Mark McManus's Taggart look chipper. Lou Perlman doesn't do romance.He doesn't do authority.He definitely doesn't do housework.But he is in a class of his own.
Review by Shari Lowe, Daily Record (Glasgow).
contents©2006 Campbell Armstrong
ReadWebCo.com:
Berkshires web design + marketing