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.