Amelie and Luke

Amelie is on the shelf. Luke is on the shelf. Amelie is trapped. She is stuck as a character in a romantic novel. She doesn’t want ‘romance’. She wants to live in reality. Luke is stuck. He is someone’s character in a war novel but Luke is a gentle person. He wants to live peacefully, have a simple life, get along with people. Amelie is in a paperback. Her cover is wearing thin. Luke has a hard cover. He doesn’t like it. It’s closing him in.


Fleur and Clive are the guest presenters at the book festival in a small town. Fleur writes Romantic Fiction while Clive’s books are concerned with military and war
matters. Fleur arranged to meet her publisher, Donald, at the library as she knew he would be attending the Book festival where she and Clive would be speaking about their work. She had promised to bring along the first draft of her new book ‘Cherish’ to show Donald, but in her haste to catch up with him across the room she collides with Clive who, having finished answering questions from the audience, is on his way to the book signing table. She drops her book. The flimsy cover comes off. Pages fall on the floor. Copies of Clive’s book, ‘The Combat Zone’ are knocked off the table. The cheap binding on them means that they too fall apart and pages scatter on the carpet. The scattered pages allow Amelie and Luke to escape. They are released and their stories become interwoven. They are freed from playing the characters in the books. Amelie can be her true self. Luke finds another part of himself in meeting Amelie.
When the Book Festival comes to a close the festival goers leave the library to go off to the ‘Shakespeare and Sonnet’, a local pub, popular with writers and students. The librarian, Miss Glowery, is left in a bit of a guddle. She has to leave the library for her eye test so she doesn’t have time to clear it all up before Monday.
The story is basically about scripts and concepts of identity, and how relationships are interwoven with these, how people interact according to stories, their own and those of others. It’s a story about stories. What might happen without scripts? What happens when a person does not follow the script?