Honor Flaherty LEICESTER WRITER Creative Work | Reflection | Publications

Profile Honor Flaherty is a playwright. She was born in Leicester, of Irish heritage. As a good Catholic girl gone wrong, she walked out of school with nothing but naked ambition and some big raucous stories to tell. As a child her ambition was to be a playwright, so at sixteen she went to work at the Leicester Haymarket Theatre. She began her career there making fabulous gut-busting sandwiches in the Green Room before moving to Stage-door Keeper to crew to Youth Theatre director, finally ending up as Production Administrator by day and House Manager by night. She co-wrote various stage works for Spine Chillers and Youth Theatre productions at the Haymarket Theatre, which she left to dabble in radio as a presenter and producer for a number of years. Eventually she got her act together, went back to college and gained a Masters degree in TV Scriptwriting from De Montfort University, Leicester.

Creative Work Excerpt from She's the King. Set Up It’s the finale of the “Quest for the Crown” to find the worlds best Elvis impersonator. Our heroine, Lisa-Marie has been clandestinely masquerading as a male Elvis impersonator called Lee O’Rion, but her secret has just been discovered by Harry. But ladies' man Harry has also secretly been having “unusual and pink coloured feelings” for Lee. SCENE XX . DRESSING ROOM/BACKSTAGE/ORPHEUM THEATRE/MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE. NIGHT. A dimly-lit, seedy, tobacco-stained dressing room. LISA-MARIE (as LEE O’RION, dressed as black leather-clad biker ELVIS, 20 years old) enters the dressing room and is surprised to find HARRY waiting for her (late 40’s/dressed as Vegas bejewelled jump-suit Elvis/a little too over-weight/skin too bronzed /hair too black). Harry waves a bottle of whiskey in a congratulatory manner. HARRY Well lookie who we have here... The King! LISA-MARIE/LEE Ain’t it a little too early to be hitting the hard stuff? HARRY Oh, I is not a celebrating. I is a wallowing, like a pig in sh../ LISA-MARIE/LEE /Shut up Harry, it ain’t over ‘til... HARRY ... ‘Til what? ‘Til the big, fat, lying, conniving, downright scheming, lady sings? LISA-MARIE/LEE What in tarnation are you on about now? HARRY What am I on about? What...am...I...on... about? You tell me friend. ‘Cause we are friends, aren’t we? LISA-MARIE/LEE As tight as can be. HARRY And friends don’t lie to one ‘nother, do they? LISA-MARIE/LEE Jeez, I think you’ll be needin’ some serious black coffee pouring down your neck. HARRY You know something? Lee! It’s been twenty-six years. Twenty-six years I’ve been chasing this dream. And, oh, I’ve been close. Many times! So close I could almost taste the winning. But I… I… I’ve always been the bridesmaid, you know? Never the bride. But hey, you’d know a thing or two about that, wouldn’t you? LISA-MARIE/LEE Harry, you gotta straighten yourself out here. You can’t go back up on that stage all swimmy-headed like this. Come on, pull yourself together. Give me the bottle. Harry swings the bottle out of Lisa-Marie’s grasp. HARRY Why ever since I was an itty-bitty boy in short pants all I wanted to do... be... was something big in life. Why I was the quintessential small town boy with big time dreams. And you know what? There ain’t nothing bigger than being The King. So I said to myself, I said “Harry, if you can’t be THE King, well then maybe you could be just like him”. So I thought to myself if I just stood in his righteous shadow for long enough then maybe one day, just for one teeny-tiny moment, some of his glorious and heavenly light might shine down upon me. So I dreamed for it. I lived for it. And hell, I worked for it. And when I was done, I worked some more. LISA-MARIE/LEE Why you’re talking all kinds of stupid now. Come on and just give me the goddamn whiskey. You can do this. This is your year, Harry! HARRY Nah, nah, nah! Think I’ll be a needing this just a little while longer. As you well know, I is no great friend of sobriety and I am powerfully thirsty right now. Why you care anyways? LISA-MARIE/LEE You’re making a dang fool of yourself. HARRY A fool? Yep! I surely is. Hands up, I’m a, whoop-de-doo, natural born fool. Do you know what they’re calling me out there? “Last chance Harry”. They know I’m done. You know I’m done. I’m the only sorry, no-nothing hog of a fool who don’t get it. LISA-MARIE/LEE Harry... HARRY Now don’t you be feeling all sorry for me, you hear. I is used to it. Why ever since I put on this jump-suit, grew my burns and started dying my hair, why I’ve been the laughed at, ridiculed and insulted by better people than you. You know, Johnny Carson once said, “If life was fair, then Elvis would be alive and all impersonators dead.” You can’t argue with that, can you?

Reflection The excerpt above is from my new stage play called “She’s The King”. It’s about a young woman whose ambition is to win the world’s biggest Elvis impersonator contest. To do so she has to hide her gender. It’s sort of like a “Rock ‘n’ Roll Yentle”, if you will. It is a story about transformation, both physically and emotionally, and it’s about finding out who you truly are, whilst pretending to be someone else. When I was a little girl growing up in Belgrave, I used to say I was going to marry Elvis and live in Gracelands. What I didn’t know then was that Elvis had died before I was even born. But that didn’t deter me. I was still completely besotted with the man’s charisma, not to mention his music. Me and millions of other fans across the world. I saw my first Elvis impersonator at the opening of a new supermarket somewhere in Leicester. He was remarkably bad. I was gutted! This fake Elvis was absolutely dreadful. He didn’t look like Elvis, he didn’t sound like Elvis and he certainly couldn’t move like Elvis. In fact, I knew I could probably do a better impression than him. Then… Ta-dah! I asked myself why there were no female Elvis impersonators. Growing up at the Leicester Haymarket Theatre, I was no stranger to seeing men in frocks and make up, especially during Pantomime season. I knew how effective a vehicle the gender concept could be for storytelling. Even Shakespeare played around with it. Above all, though, it has been estimated that, by 2020, one in five Americans will be an Elvis impersonator. This was how my little play evolved. After the death of her Elvis impersonating father, Lisa-Marie embarks on the road-trip of a lifetime to become the best Elvis impersonator in America’s biggest competition. At first she’s mocked by the other impersonators for being a little girl in “the big man’s shoes”, so Lisa-Marie takes the decision to hide her gender and perform as ‘Lee O’Rion’. On her journey she meets Drag-Queen Busy Bea, who, ironically, shows her how to become a man. The one thing Lisa-Marie didn’t expect to find on this adventure was love. Enter Harry Cass – another Elvis Impersonator and renowned womanizer. Jaded Harry has been on the Elvis circuit for many years and this is his last chance to win the coveted prize of World Best Elvis ‘Illusionist’. The pair strike-up an unlikely bond and Harry begins to develop “strange and foreign” feelings for 'Lee'. Lisa-Marie also falls for Harry but hides her feelings to avoid blowing her cover, losing the contest and crushing her daddy’s dreams. It’s taken me a long time to admit that I am a writer. Show business doesn’t run in our family and in fact I still think some people are still waiting for me to grow out of this phase. For a long time writing was my dirty little secret. When people started to find out about my scribblings, I’d joke that I wanted to be a writer because it was the only other profession I knew where I could entertain strangers by working from bed in my pants and get paid handsomely for it. But it wasn’t until I went to evening writing classes at the Writers’ School at the Leicester Adult Education that I finally said, “Yes! I am a writer”. Now when people ask me why I write I say it’s because I have stories to tell. Big, raucous stories.

Publications 8.30. Outside Littlewoods, Three Cities mixed genre anthology, East Midlands The Greatest Pianist in the World, BBC7 A Room Without a View, Postcards series, BBC7 Orange Smarties Aren’t The Only Sweets, BBC Radio Leicester She’s The King, won a debut reading at The Curve, Leicester Contact and links Blog spot: www.eloquentnonsenseofacockishwench.blogspot.com http://twitter.com/Funny_Bird http://www.honors@hotmail.co.uk