THE STAGE 32 LOGLINES

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THE LAST RESORT
By Rosy Moorhead

GENRE: Drama, Comedy
LOGLINE:

An ageing, alcoholic resort worker will stop at nothing in her quest to finally win over the one guy that got away.

SYNOPSIS:

MAYA THORN is a 42-year-old, alcoholic holiday resort worker who's been wandering from job to job for the last 20 years, never staying in one place long enough for them to fire her.

Set over the course of a few months one summer in the late 1990s, the story starts in Maya's most recent resort in Spain, where she has pissed off and alienated all her colleagues. Her thoughts turn to SAM OWEN, a 40-something fellow gigging resort worker that she's worked with on and off over the years and who was the one guy who never slept with her. She decides that her happiness lies with him.

First of all, she has to find him. Oblivious to the harm she's caused all these people in the past, through her alcoholism and self-centredness, Maya approaches Sam's parents and a series of former colleagues, all of whom refuse to tell her where he is or how to get hold of him. She's left with no choice, as she sees it, but to go back to the UK, where he is most likely to be.

The second problem she has to overcome is finding the money to get her back to the UK. Her job pays very little and her lifestyle hasn't left her with any savings. Her attempts at getting extra work or a promotion meet with failure, as do her attempts to get money from a friend and trying to sell drugs to holidaymakers' kids.

Kicked out of her job for the latter, Maya is forced to pot-wash, busk, walk and hitch-hike her way back to the UK, penny by penny. Once there, she discovers, by spying and stake-outs, that Sam is the owner of a failing, run-down water park.

She's found him! The only trouble is that, as a former addict himself and victim of her one-sided friendship, he wants nothing to do with her. Plus, he has a girlfriend. Maya takes a job at a local pub and settles in for a war of attrition against Sam's heart and reason. This involves hijacking Sam's AA group, breaking and entering, sabotage, and the hobbling of a lifeguard.

Having inveigled her way into the water park and Sam's life, Maya inadvertently sets about destroying both and squandering the precious chance she's finally got at living her perfect life. She charms money out of her boss at the pub to give to Sam to keep the park afloat, commits a string of health and safety violations, steals, and lies to cover her tracks. It all catches up with her when the park is closed down, the pub landlord is left penniless and she finds herself hated by all and completely and utterly alone.

Maya then has to draw on her own, limited, resources to try to sort this whole mess out. She's learnt that her relationships with others are doomed to fail unless she can address her relationship with herself, and that primarily means facing her addiction to alcohol. Humbled but evolved, she resolves, piece by piece, to patch her own life and the lives she's damaged back together.

Nate Rymer

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Tasha Lewis

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