Plays
'Rab, Rab, ye should hae had twa wives.'
Donald Pirie and Clare Waugh
as Robert Burns and Jean Armour.
'The sea's in my head.'
Paul Morrow as ex-fisherman, Rab.
'The seventh son of a seventh son.'
Liam Brennan as Robert Kirk.
I've been writing plays for many years, mostly for BBC Radio 4, with a few sorties into television. You can watch one of my early television dramas, Shadow of the Stone, on YouTube with a young cast including Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson, before they became really famous!
My first full length stage play, Wormwood, was about the Chernobyl disaster. It was produced to critical acclaim at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, and is now a set text for Scottish Higher Drama. You can read it in the anthology Scotland Plays, edited by Philip Howard.
Next came a play called Quartz, soon to be published on Kindle. Writing in the Independent, Sue Wilson said: 'Catherine Czerkawska's new play offers a moving, poetic and quietly provocative meditation on contrasting values and belief systems, and on the destructive potential of love, while keeping its feet firmly on the ground in terms of attention to plot, character and dialogue.'
The Price of a Fish Supper was written for the Oran Mor in Glasgow, later staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, with Paul Morrow, who gave a profoundly moving solo performance as Rab. It has been published by Nick Hern Books, in an anthology called Scottish Shorts.
Also staged at the Oran Mor (and now available in eBook form): Burns on the Solway. This is a play about the last few weeks in the life of Robert Burns with Donald Pirie and Clare Waugh as Robert and Jean and Celine Donoghue as the musician. 'Donald Pirie is a mercurial and unhinged Burns, all puppydog eyes and impulsive gestures. Clare Waugh, meanwhile, invests Jean with feistiness and passion.' Neil Cooper, The Herald.
Directed by Jen Hainey for Glasgow's Oran Mor, The Secret Commonwealth, is a lyrical and moving play about the seventeenth century minister of Aberfoyle in Scotland, who communicated with the supernatural world, wrote a treatise about the fairies - and was finally carried off by them.
'We pass many an hour out on this hillside, and share tales of caverns deep inside, for we all know this hill to be hollow, as surely as we know our own names, and that the sun will rise and spring will nip at winter's heels.'
'Between them, Czerkawska and Brennan come close to making (Kirk) a real hero for our times.' Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman.
Remember that if you don’t have a Kindle, you can always download these books to your iPad or laptop.
