Ann Marie Di Mambro teaches on a television writing course at Glasgow Caledonian University. She gives her students one crucial piece of advice. As she sees it, what matters above all else is the emotional relationship of your characters.
“Drama is what happens between people emotionally,” she says. Unless you get that right then everything else – the themes, the politics, the clever ideas – will struggle to land.
It is why when she looks back at her play Tally’s Blood, which premiered at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in 1990, she talks of it as much in terms of the characters who brought it to life as the questions of immigration, internment and integration that it provokes. Drawing on her own family story, the play follows the lives of Italian immigrants before, during and after the Second World War through the lens of a “Tally café”. [READ MORE]