Your William Shakespeare crafted clever lines with hidden meanings, like, “All the world’s a stage.” It’s as if he had insight into my five-act play on my pet subject, humanity.

Act One (The Exposition): Earth is a Garden of Eden. An unremarkable troop of apes descends from the trees and totters about on two legs, foraging on the African savannah. 

These are the opening paragraphs from A Five-Act Play on Humanity, a short story I shared on the Tall And True writers’ website in October 2024.

Please note: The Story Insight below contains spoilers.

Story Insight

I wrote A Five-Act Play on Humanity for the October 2024 Furious Fiction, run by the Australian Writers’ Centre. The brief was your story must:

• Take place in some kind of THEATRE.
• Include somebody SHOUTING.
• Contain the words UNCOMFORTABLE, RECORD and SHRINK.

Under the heading “All the World’s a Stage”, the Writers’ Centre further explained:

This month, we’re asking you to set your story in a specific location — a theatre! The word literally means a “place for viewing” — making it ideal for telling a visual story for your reader. 

An Omnipotent Playwright

As soon as I read “All the World’s a Stage”, I thought of Shakespeare’s immortal line and how the world could be the literal theatre or “place for viewing” in my story. In that case, I needed an omnipotent playwright and director and a structure for the play/story.

A traditional three-act play with a beginning, middle and end seemed too short, even for a 500-word Furious Fiction story. Then I read about five-act plays on the MasterClass website and knew I had my stage, narrator, characters, structure and story!

Share Your Writing on Tall And True

The Stage is Ours

I enjoyed spending the weekend writing A Five-Act Play on Humanity and was pleased to learn the Furious Fiction judges longlisted it for October. 

I tried expanding it for another writing competition, where the stories could be between 1500 and 3000 words.

However, partway into the rewrite, I realised that the extra words diluted the story and its message. So, instead, I made a few post-Furious Fiction edits (as I always do with my stories), respecting the original brief and word count limit, before sharing it on Tall And True.

I hope you like A Five-Act Play on Humanity. Remember, if it makes you feel uncomfortable, the stage is ours!

© 2024 Robert Fairhead

Thanks to Siggy Nowak for sharing the image of the amphitheatre on Pixabay.

N.B. You might like to read another of my omnipresent narrated stories, which I wrote for April 2024’s Not Quite Write Prize, You Have Been Warned.