Bookshop

 

click on image to see trailer

 

 

I love Work in Progress (unless its mine).  If a new play takes the time it should to write, there are jewels and nuggets along the way that can be stitched into the final tapestry – like a meandering river forming oxbow lakes.   Some sequences of language make stand-alone pieces – or even short films.  Bookshop is from the play-script of Lynton, Richard Bradbury’s new play about the poet Shelley.  Bookshop, directed by actor/filmmaker Aidan Casey, gives us an 1812 flashback as Elizabeth Hitchener muses on her early love of books, despite her poor background in Lewes.  She is to join Shelley later in Lynton, Devon, where their relationship becomes profound.  This lovely moving montage of shirt-lace, voice, fingers (turning up a Shelley) and old books beautifully evokes love for literature and ideas in a girl who wasn’t expected to have any. I asked Aidan about the filming, and was there a fixed story board?   There wasn’t, but he’d known the bookshop of the film in Topsham Devon since he was small child, and could navigate his way around it in his head.  That lovely old-school bell is a nice touch and could almost be experienced as an inciting incident as the actor crosses the threshold into the world of books.  I liked it that we couldn’t see her face, and asked why.  ‘Because the original Elizabeth (Elizabeth the 1st) was in London when we needed to shoot more, and so she is played by Celeste de Veazey and Bérengère Ariaudo de Castelli.’  

  ‘Was there a budget?”

  ‘No, it’s surprising what you can do with no money when you have a great creative team to work with.’