Monday 18th February 2013

In the middle of auditions for our improvised play, A Beginning, A Muddle, And An End, which will be performed in May, as part of the Brighton Festival Fringe. I've had over twenty people rock up to the auditions, which is a remarkably good result. Over the last couple of years, I've been directing scripted pieces, and had a decent enough turn out for auditions, but the numbers turning up to these auditions genuinely surprised me. You'd think people would be a lot more scared by volunteering to get involved in a production where they really won't know what they're going to be doing even by the second, third or fourth night of the run. This is what quite a few people (who aren't auditioning) seem not to be able to get quite clear on: BME will be an entirely improvised piece (as opposed to devised). It's a fact that's already waking me up in the middle of the night.

I have to keep the cast relatively small, but that still means I could go as high as eight. I haven't quite decided yet (and won't do so until the end of the week). Whatever happens, I'm going to have to turn away people whose auditions and previous work I've really quite enjoyed. This is one of the more difficult aspects of directing anything, and it's not something I'm looking forward to, particularly if there's anyone who - clearly talented and charismatic - gets turned down, and asks the deathly question 'why?'. There's not always a clear and logical answer.

Also this week, we had our first meeting for Three Kinds Of Me, which is being revived for the Fringe. There's going to be a lot of juggling of timetables (I'm having to find a way to essentially rehearse two plays at the same time. That's ok, because I'm only in that situation until late March. When I add a third, and then a fourth production into the mix). There's also the fact that Sarah Charsley, who has written and will perform 3KM, will have to adapt the script into a fringe-friendly hour. That's not impossible, since the original only ran at about a hour twenty, but editing isn't simply a case of hacking off a number of pages so that you can make the timings work. If you cut what seems to be the least relevant piece of dialogue, then what's left can seem weighted all o one particular subject, and the play ends up being about something that you didn't quite intend. Well, we begin rehearsals for 3KM in March, so it won't be too long before the new version takes shape.

This morning, I sent off a couple of sketches to the BBC radio show Newsjack. The sketches I sent last week didn't make the cut, which is obviously a bit of a knock. Added to that, I couldn't really think of anything to do a funny sketch about. I had a couple of angry rants about the Sun's front page on Friday morning, as well as the Daily Mail publishing photographs of an actresses sonogram of her unborn baby (really), but, needless to say, neither of those stories lent themselves particularly well to a programme that is, despite any topicality or satire, is more impish than hard hitting. Plus, I couldn't get away from the fact that the real life events were more ridiculous and sad than any sketch I could contrive to write. I managed a couple of things, however, and managed to post them just before the deadline. While my inner editor told me that they were awful (and therefore, should I really be wasting the readers' time with them), I recognised that they were at least OK, and might be better than I personally thought they were. Plus, I kept at the forefront of my mind the possibility that the quality of the thousands of other submissions that newsjack would receive woolly be at least equal, if not worse, than my effort, and in any case the amount of submissions in week 2 was reasonably likely to drop off quite dramatically.

Finally, tomorrow, at the Marlbourgh Theatre in Brighton, I'm going to attempt a bit of improv that I'm going to find absolutely bloody terrifying. The idea is that I'm going to make up a story on the spot, and tell it, Jackanory style, in front of a paying audience. I'll get a character name, a location, and then tell a story - hopefully coherently - in about 10 minutes, which is going to be a heart-attack-inducingly long time. I won't have any jokes or improv games to fall back on, and not will I be able to rely on fellow improvisers. One of the biggest rules of improv is making sure that you listen. Not only will I have nobody to listen to, but, as I have increasingly discovered recently, I'm not even capable of listening to myself.

Monday 4th February 2013

I only had a couple of dates this month into which I could slot the auditions for the improvised play that I'm going to be directing at the NVT this May. Well, actually, I could have held some auditions on the Thursday after next, but I imagine that not that many people would have liked to have come out on Valentine's night. The first available date was February the 8th, and it was only this weekend that I realised that that was actually this week, and I hadn't done anything particular about the auditions - like actually telling anyone. This meant that there were lots of frantic typing out of audition notices that need to be printed out and delivered to the NVT, with the full knowledge that none of them will get delivered to members before the first audition. I remain confident that I will be at least this organised throughout the entire production.

In fact, I almost missed the deadline to knock up some kind of basic image for the fringe brochure, as it is meant to be all done and dusted by today (Monday). Since the whole idea for this production is that it's meant to be a completely different and entirely improvised play each night, it's not exactly as if there's a unifying image - or even theme - that we can sell the production on. My mind was a complete blank, which isn't exactly a great frame of mind for someone who's meant to be training up a group of improvisers for the next couple of months. Luckily, I was able to throw a panicked phone call to Tamsin Fraser, who has created a great many of the posters for New Venture Theatre productions (including the brilliant ones for Four Play and Medea). Given no time whatsoever, she was able to turn around a lovely image inspired by (read: in spite of) by incoherent ramblings.

Over the weekend, I was able to join in with a friends birthday celebrations, at a bar in Brighton called The Hope. It's a very popular and cool place, and as a consequence, I had never been before. As well as being slightly overwhelmed by just how good looking the birthday girl's friends all were (and, indeed, the birthday girl herself), I was very engaged by how friendly the bar was. I don't think I've ever really been to a bar or a pub where a complete stranger just strikes up a causal, friendly conversation. Admittedly, that may have more to do with the types of places I usually do my drinking (and definitely has something to do with the fact that I spent a couple of years working behind the bar of a Wetherspoons), but this was pretty much new to me. It was the kind of place that the opener 'Mate, are you looking at my girlfriend?' would be followed by 'Yes, she's gorgeous, you make a lovely couple,'

Having said that, I did find myself dancing with a girl because, seemingly, her boyfriend didn't want to. There's a couple of factors at play here, not least the minor issue that I have no idea how to dance (actually, there's also the issue that I have no idea how to respond when approached by an attractive woman, but we won't dwell for too long on that). The other factor is that the fact that this girl picked me up (at one point quite literally; it was some kind of jive, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't the one leading) led to at least some degree of tension between her and her non-dancing boyfriend. I only know this anecdotally, since my back was to them when they were having their 'discussion'. I kept my back to them throughout this because, while I already knew that I can't really dance, it remains true that I thus far am able to use my legs for walking and stuff like that, and I was pretty keen to keep things that way. Things were apparently resolved, however, because the girl took me dancing once more (literally, out of approximately eighty men in the room, quite possibly the worst dance partner she could have gone for), and her boyfriend did a good show of applauding gamely at the end. And didn't give me a black eye, which I think we can put in the 'plus' column.

In the meantime, I'm still struggling to get 'Broom Handle', a short story I've been tinkering with for a few months, to quite work. It's sci-fi, or more accurately speculative fiction, a genre that I do t have a great deal of experience in writing, and there's far too much exposition going on at the moment. I think the emotional pay-off at the end still works, but the journey there is very baggy and saggy (in fact, 'baggy and saggy' is about the level of far too many paragraphs, and it's not even like I'm writing Bagpuss slash fiction). I think I've worked out the solution to give the story a bit more pace, but I've not yet quite worked out to apply that solution. As I've mentioned before, it would be easy and very tempting to just junk the whole thing in now - it's only 4,000 words or so - but the fact that there's an incoming deadline is a great leveller. That said, I'm glad that the deadline is not until the end of March, since I think it will take me roughly that long to wrestle the damn thing into some kind of legible prose.

Sunday 3 February 2013

I've just come to the rather startling realisation that I'm going to be directing four different things this Spring, all at the same time. Three of them will be in the Brighton Festival Fringe, and the fourth will be about a month after that. This might be what people are going on about when they accuse me of taking too much on.

The first thing is a revival - my friend Sarah Charsley wrote and performed her own script Three Kinds Of Me last year, and graciously allowed me to hinder her in the productions realisation. She's making the same mistake again for the fringe, and we're adapting the production to fit into a hour's space as per the usual demands of the festival. Three Kinds Of Me will be performed at The Warren (we just got the venue confirmed this week) and it looks to be very exciting. I'll be fascinated to see how we adapt a script that was created with one venue in mind (the NVT), and alter it significantly (but on the other hand, seemingly not at all) for a whole new venue complete with it's own dimensions and technical specs. I know that this is what professional productions have to do all the time, but I've never claimed to be in any way professional.

Speaking of the NVT, my second fringe production will be staged there, just a week after Three Kinds Of Me (which will make the production weeks of both interesting, to say the least). It's going to be an entirely improvised play, with a completely new story/play each night. It's at this point that many people react with suspicion, assuming that there must be some kind of 'cheat', or key scenes that stay the same each night. This isn't the case. The cast will rock up on stage each night with absolutely no idea of what they're going to be doing over the following hour. Now, you might argue that's largely true of some scripted plays, and I'm not going to argue with you on that score, but the fact remains that this is already one of the most terrifying productions I've been involved with, and it hasn't even started yet. And I speak as someone who's already directed Greek tragedy. There's a couple of audition dates, the first of which is this Friday (the 8th). If I get enough people along to the audition, I'm hoping to audition people together in hour long slots (you know, 7 til 8, 8 til 9, 9 til 10), so please get in touch if you're thinking about trying out for the production, and I'll let you know what's going on.

The other two productions are both with the youth theatre I work with - the PQA - and the first is a 10 minute play competition. I'll come up with more details as soon as they're confirmed, but generally, if you know any budding playwrights between the ages of 10 and 17, there's a chance for them to script a 10 minute play that will be performed by professional actors at the Old Courtroom in Brighton towards the end of the Fringe Festival. We'll also throw in a master lass with a BAFTA winning playwright to really get you kick started.

The other thing I'm working on with the youth theatre is a musical. For someone who isn't a particular musical fan (and indeed cannot sing) I find myself directing a fair amount of musicals. Well, I say musical. The last one was We Will Rock You. Which was actually great fun, although I did find myself rewriting significant amounts. Not because I'm that power hungry, but because they send you out the same version of the script no matter who you are, and they make no changes in the youth version, leaving you to edit out all the blow job gags (of which there are a fair amount). I felt that some edits were needed before I let the kids loose on it. Luckily, I don't think that there's quite as many of those sort of jokes in The Wiz. Not as far as I can remember, anyway.

Finally, I've spent this morning re-reading my latest draft of a short story called Broom Handle, a thing that I originally started last year. And, by God, it's terrible. Well, it's not terrible, but it's very clunky. The idea itself isn't too bad, and I like the characters, but it's very exposition heavy, and it takes too long to get to the point - which it currently needs to, because there's a lot to explain, otherwise the point that it's currently taking too long to get too will be - well, pointless. It's an odd read, because I can still see the potential for the finished product, but because it's currently frankly not very good, it's a bit of a dispiriting read. It would be extraordinary easy just to give up on it now as far too much effort. Luckily, however, the themes and ideas in it fit terrifyingly well into an upcoming competition with cash prize and inclusion in anthology, so that serves very well as some kind of incentive. It's probably about three drafts away from whatever version I finally send off as an entry. We'll see how it all goes ..