Escargots

A long time ago I wrote a short story called "Escargots". It was about a retired Welsh miner hesitating to phone his daughter because the last time they met he had committed a faux pas for which he felt he would not yet, if ever, be forgiven. His daughter had married posh and she too was now posh. So when she and her husband took her father to a posh restaurant and ordered escargots he was sick - over the waiter. These are snails, he announced. I hate them, he said.
Since I was unable to sell the story I turned it into a short play and sold it to a company that was not well known and so it wasn't performed many times (though it was done by an Irish amateur company and they, in a competition in Dublin, won an award for acting (the waiter who cooks the snails) and for choice of play, which I was pleased with.
I have used the story at some writers' groups as an exercise in "turning a story into a play" and it always produces an eager reaction, not to do with the quality of the story so much as for the memories it brings to mind by the writers most of whom are middle-aged ior old. Without fail they always say that a similar thing has happened to them: their daughter went off to university and lost touch with them or their son brought some friends home and "I was treated like some kind of slave". It seems to bring out a feature of family life that has been unconciously buried in the pressures of everyday life.
I did this exercise at one of those writers' weekends which was attended by some well klnown writers and literary agents. One of the Pollinger agents insisted on coming to my talk and took a back seat. I read the story, then got some of them to act the play. I proceeded to say that in writing a short story you focussed usually on one person and looked at what goes on from his point of view; with a play there are more than one points of view. I then asked them to start a story from the point of view of one of the characters in the same story apart from the old man. After about 20 minutes I asked them to read out what they'd written. I tried to ignore Mr Pollinger waving his arms about in the back indicating his desire to read but eventually I couldn't ignore him any more and asked for his effort. He had written, a superbly dramatic and immensely amusing story.... wait for it.... from the point of view of the snail.