Last night was the final performance of Three Kinds Of Me, and it was a great performance. A different show, certainly, due to a quieter audience and a louder air conditioning system, which at one point began to sound like someone was emptying cups of water into an empty toilet, but still a great show. It's been a intriguing journey for a play that started life as a series of short stories, but now looks like it will have a life (and a set of your dates) after this weekend.
This is good, since this run was only two performances long. Sarah was still finding new things to do with the text, new nuances and discoveries within the narrative. This sort of thing happens with actors often in productions, but it's normally a few performances in- last night was both only the second performance and the last performance - and it's interesting that she was discovering things about the story when it was she herself who actually wrote it.
You're quite often told to regard with caution anyone who directs their own work. The concern is that they'll be too fixed in their own ideas, that they won't be able to move on a certain concept that might tell their story more easily: 'but she was wearing a red jumper, not a blue jumper!'/'I thought that this wasn't based on real life?'/'it isn't .. but the jumper was definitely red!'. This problem can remain if you're directing someone who is acting in their own work. While all fiction is - well, fiction, it's standing on the shoulders of reality, of our opinions, of, yes, things that actually happened to us. I'm finishing off a story at the moment that I need to send off by next weekend (deadlines are so concentrating for the mind), and while it's pretty much a fairy story, rooted entirely in fantasy and the ridiculous, I'm confident that there's a great deal in there that is only there because I have written it; if someone else was the author of exactly the same story, it would have an entirely different feel and tone.
Luckily enough, there were no such obstacles when directing Sarah. She's a very hard worker, an intelligent actor, and - this being something that I've really only identified as a rare gift in the past few months - a genuinely trusting performer. I don't mean that she'll blindly and unquestioningly carry out whatever instruction you deliver to her, but I do mean that she will display faith in what you're suggesting, and at least give it a shot: she'll trust that you're considering all the angles, or, at the very least, you simply want to try something to see if it works. For someone who I consider to be shy offstage - or at the very least, a woman who appears not to draw too much attention to herself - she was remarkably able to be unselfconscious as a character. No matter if she didn't actually feel like that on the inside. I had a number of her previous directors come up to me afterward, waxing lyrical about how good she was to work with. I couldn't help but agree. Whatever she decides to do as her next project, she's going to have a long list of wiling volunteers.
As for my next project - well, I don't know. I would say nothing, but the last time I said that, I found myself cast in two plays one after the other. But it would be refreshing to have the occasional evening off. Most immediately, however, I know that I don't have Sundays off: from next Sunday (the 28th) I start holding improvisation workshops at the Dukebox Theatre on Waterloo Street in Hove. It's the inaugural workshop this Sunday, so, if I'm honest, I'm slightly nervous that no one will turn up. But, I suppose, if that's the case, it will mean that I get another night off. Every cloud.
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