he Trial of Romeo Oscar by Alan Ayckbourn

 

The Trial of Romeo Oscar by Alan Ayckbourn

This play examines our relationship with robots and artificial intelligence and also poses questions about the function of the arts.

 At the beginning of the play we have to suspend our disbelief as the auditorium is plunged into darkness and we are dragged to an underground venue several storeys below the surface. And we are warned we cannot use mobile devices down there. What a pity the audience participation couldn't have been extended and couldn't we have been the jury?Maybe then the outcome may have been very different or maybe the play should just have ended on 'Jury what is your verdict- guilty or not guilty?

Much of the script is already written for Ayckbourn, lifted verbatim from William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

 It is still Ayckbourn There's much to make you titter: the robot Romeo Oscar keeps singing nursery rhymes and also gives instructions about how to make up a bottle of formula for a baby. He has looked after Juliet since just after her birth as her parents took their own lives. Engineer Devaney Ddyer uses some colourful language which delights the assistant arbiter. Arbiter Jeffries remembers snatches of classical music but cannot name them. He blames his age.

 Ironically in world now devoid of the classics it is the droids who keep them alive; both Romeo Oscar and the assistant arbiter have access to them in their memories. Droid  Hermione Quinque learns the whole of the part of Juliet.

 The classics have been abandoned because they're considered too territorial because of a great war that tore humanity part. This war has a strong resemblance to some of the present conflicts

 It was goodd to be in the Victoria Wood theatre. We have a connection with her. We now live in Buryand I walk past her statue several times   a week. And we were at Birmingham University at the same time as she was. The school reports from Bury Grammar School are remarkably similar to the ones we had at West Bromwich Grammar School.

 We went for the matinee lunch deal – the ticket included a soup and sandwich lunch before the show. However this was not the best pre theatre dining I have ever experienced. The waitress can only be described as surly. She could hardly be bothered to recognise our presence when we arrived and then did not serve the guests in order of arrival. The food was adequate but no more.

Allison Symes - Seeing The Other Side

 

1. Can you tell us how you became a flash fiction writer?  What have you enjoyed most about putting this collection together?

I hadn’t realised flash fiction was a “thing” when I started writing seriously for publication. I’d been writing short stories for a while and having some of them published on CafeLit when they issued their famous 100 words challenge.

My first thought was you have to be kidding me, you can’t tell a proper story with a proper beginning, middle and end in that tight a word count. My second thought was CafeLit wouldn’t have ssued that challenge if it really was impossible.

I went with my second thought and three flash fiction collections with Chapeltown Books later (and many flash pieces published elsewhere too), I am glad I went that way! 

 

I’ll always be grateful to CafeLit for introducing me to a wonderful format to read and write in. It is my great hope flash fiction could tempt in the more reluctant reader given it isn’t asking folk to commit to too much in one go. And once you get them reading flash, maybe they’ll read more and then longer works etc.

As for putting Seeing The Other Side Together, I loved how the stories flow seamlessly into each other. I especially liked my linked flash fiction where the same character and/or setting turns up in more than one flash story. It was good to experiment with that. I love the mixture of funny, thoughtful and darker pieces. It’s a good reflection of my writing style.

 

2. Do you have a personal favorite in this collection?

This is always a tough question. I am very fond of Time For A Change where a super intelligent dragon comes across an unusual type of human. The story is also a kind of tribute to a well known person too.

I read this story at The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick in 2025 when I knew the book would be coming out. They hold an Open Prose Mic Night and I try to take part in it most years. I read the story to test how it would go down well with the audience. They loved it and I received some smashing comments about it afterwards too. So I think I’ll pick this one.

 

3. Can you tell us something about the cover?

I’ve always loved the square nature of the Chapeltown flash collections. They make the books stand out. The framed front cover is fabulous and I deeply appreciate having some input with the choice of the picture which goes into that square frame. Not every author gets the chance to have that input.

Over the years with the three books I now have out with Chapeltown, I’ve received many lovely comments about the square books and the frame on the front. It is excellent branding. It is also fun picking a suitable picture to go with the nature of the book.

 

 4. What advice would you give to writers who want to write flash fiction?

Get your story down first and worry about the word count later. As the saying goes, you can’t edit a blank page. Focus on the character. The shorter the word count the less room you have for manoeuvre so focus on them - one character, one important moment in time for them. Everything has to serve the story and its “star”.

Once you’ve got the story down, rest it for a while and then come back for editing. With the break away, you can then spot more easily things you could express better, for example. During that break you can draft another story of course. This is what I do.

 

5. Do you have a favourite writer yourself?

I have many favourite writers but I think I will have to pick the late, much missed Sir Terry Pratchett for introducing me to humorous fantasy. His Discworld series is excellent and makes fantasy fiction relatable too, I think.

 

6. What other genre do you write in?  What’s next?  Do you have another project planned?

I write standard length short stories too. I also write non-fiction articles for online magazines, Chandler’s Ford Today, where I have a weekly column, and Writers’ Narrative, which comes out monthly. I have another flash collection to work on and I also have ideas for non-fiction books. Now for the time to get them done!

 

7. Do you have any book events planned?

I’m pleased to say I have had two for Seeing The Other Side so far. One was at The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick, where delegates are allowed to have launches for their books in the year of first publication as long as they’re at the school. That was a huge success. I sold out my copies of Seeing The Other Side there.

 I’ve also had a good event at Salisbury URC. They run a monthly bookstall to raise funds and, as I have connections there, they invited me to join in with that. They’ve also invited me back to take part in their Christmas Fayre which I will do in November. I hope there will be more events too.

 

 

Many thanks, Gill, for inviting me on to your blog. 

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Celebration event.

 

Celebration event.

 

It's that time of year again. We're planning our annual celebration event at the Theodor Bullfrog hopu, Chring Cross, London Here's the  invite. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/annual-celebration-event-tickets-1999936523980?aff=oddtdtcreator&_gl=1*c4xwzm*_up*MQ..*_ga*MTMyMzc0MDY0NC4xNzg5MTE0OTcw*_ga_TQVES5V6SH*czE3ODkxMTQ5NjkkbzEkZzEkdDE3ODkxMTQ5NjkkajYwJGwwJGgw&keep_tld=true

See details of last year's event: https://apublishersperspective.blogspot.com/2025/12/our-celebraiton-event-6-december-2025.html  

James Ulmer Interview

 

 

1. Can you tell us how you became a short story writer?  What have you enjoyed most about putting this collection together?

 

I spent a lot of my younger years writing and publishing poetry.  My work in that regard became more narrative over time, and it became clear to me that stories are a powerful means of understanding our lives.  So I guess the move to the short story was natural.  Short fiction requires much of same control and compression that lyric poetry does, though I had some new things to learn, as well.

 

Robert Forst once wrote that if a book of poems has twenty-eight poems, the book itself is the twenty-nine poem.  I think this applies to a collection of short stories, as well.  The thing that excited me the most in putting this new collection together is the way the stories stand on their own but still manage to come together as a whole.

 

2. Do you have a personal favorite in this collection?

For me, it would be a toss-up between the title story (“The Highway That Leads Beyond the World”) and “Tucker’s Story”.  Both stories connect with the landscape and history of the American South in, I hope, complex and rich ways. In both pieces, the supernatural element of the tale, in my opinion, is unpredictable and well handled.

 

3. Can you tell us something about the cover?

 

That’s an interesting story.  The cover photo shows the Maude Crawford house in Camden, Arkansas.  One evening in 1957, Maude Crawford, a prominent lawyer in the state, disappeared from the house without a trace.  Her car was in the garage.  Her clothes were in the closet, but she was gone.  Her dalmatian, who was apparently very protective of her, was sleeping peacefully on the hearth, and there were no signs of violence.  She was declared legally dead by the courts in the early 1970s, but the mystery of what happened to her has never been solved.

The house and what happened there (with some poetic license on my part) provide the setting and back story for “Dietrich’s Witness”, one of the stories in the collection.

 

4. What advice would you give to writers who want to write short stories?

 

I would recommend, first of all, that they do a close reading of some the writers who were particularly good at short fiction: Chekhov, Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, etc.  Learn as much as you can from the masters.  You need to have a good story to tell, but how you tell it is, if 

anything, even more important.  I mean the choice and handling of point of view, narrative structure and how/where to enter the story, the handling of dialogue, etc.

 

I would add that writing short stories is a labor of love.  It’s a great way to learn about the craft of fiction writing, but it’s not likely to make you scads of money!

 

5. Do you have a favorite writer yourself?

 

I’ve been revisiting a lot of Graham Greene lately.  I also particularly like Conrad and Faulkner.  As far as genre writers go, I think Algernon Blackwood is tremendous.  He deserves to be more widely read than he is.  Lovecraft is currently experiencing a renaissance (at least in America), and I think Blackwood deserves the same.

 

 

6. What other genre do you write in?  What’s next?  Do you have another project planned?

 

As mentioned earlier, I have written poetry in the past, but the short story is taking all my time and attention at the moment.  I’m currently working on a new collection, tentatively entitled The Long Passages of Glass. Stories from this evolving collection have already appeared or are upcoming in The Arkansas Review, The Louisville Review, Penumbra, and an anthology published by The Saturday Evening Post.

 

7. Do you have any book events planned?

 

I am hoping to set up a reading at Southern Arkansas University.  Nine of the eleven stories in Highway are specifically set in Arkansas, so I think there would be some interest in the work and subject matter.  Arkansas is full of ghosts, and I think anyone who has ever lived there knows it!

I also want to mention that there is a review upcoming in the Fall issue of The Louisville Review that locates the book in the Southern Gothic tradition.  S. T Joshi has also indicated to me that he intends to review the collection.  Mr. Joshi is a distinguished critic and scholar of weird fiction who has edited and written introductions for collections by Lovecraft, Blackwood, Machen, and others for Oxford University Press and Penguin.  Obviously, some attention from him would be very welcome.   

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