What Made Lesley Pratchett so mad?

Cast: 4F, 4M (Option to double Emma/Vicki)

This Australian story is heading for a development with La boite theatre co and australian plays transformed. I’ll keep you all posted on my adventures. Many thanks to Tom Heath and the 2021 Diploma of Acting students from WAAPA who assisted to progress this script to the next draft.

What’s it about:

Fourteen-year-old Nix is an oddball, and new to a country town. At school, Nix puts everyone – including the meanest tomboy, Lesley Pratchett, offside with a series of spectacular faux pas. Lesley is already angry at the world – her Mum’s dating deadbeats and her grandmother, the only person who understood her, has died – so when the irritating Nix comes across her radar, she hits Peak Bully.

With help from sidekicks Neil and Troy, Lesley terrorises Nix until he's forced to flee where no sane local ever goes: down Wattle Lane, where, legend has it, Mad Old Frank Fernando lives. Nix is thrust into the path of the town’s legendary madman and suspected murderer who is seldom seen but widely feared and in Frank’s backyard, an improbable friendship develops – one a chatterbox, the other a brooding outcast. As Nix attempts to understand what made Lesley Pratchett so mad and why Frank frequents the graveyard at night, the urban legends and close held secrets of the town are blown wide open.