Sunday 29 December 2013

So, I'm going to be directing Shakespeare in the new year. I'm not convinced that I have truly comprehended what that will actually entail; particularly as I'm going to be directing teenagers. And it will be an open air performance. and, for he most part, the rehearsals won't be much longer than a hour. I truly may have bitten off more than I can chew.

The play that I've chosen is Twelfth Night. I have to admit, a lot of the reasoning behind that choice is sheerly me being bloody minded. One of the usual go to choices when you're doing Shakespeare with kids is A Midsummer Night's Dream (the younger kids can play the fairies!) or perhaps Macbeth (the older kids like the bloody bits! - plus, it's short). I do have ideas for both those plays, but now isn't the time. Twelfth Night is much more of a cheerful mess of a plot, which actually makes it a far more attractive project for a young group with a potential attention span deficit. The main challenged at the moment is doing a non-offensive hack job on the text, as it's reasonably unlikely that we'll be able to deliver the full text (then why bother, you may well ask, and I'm sure I'll get into that in a later blog entry).

Elsewhere, I'm considering directing again for the NVT (I'd already decided not to direct this season). Reading through scripts from old pot boilers, to Ibsen (of whom I'm inordinately fond) to a couple of more crowd pleasing, kids shows (which are performed reasonably rarely at the NVT). Nowhere near making a decision yet, but I think I have to put in an application soon. Truth is, I'm going to be fairly busy outside of the NVT as well this year: the short form improv workshops continue to go well, a second batch of longform courses start in the spring, and, perhaps most excitingly, we're setting up a regular night of brand new short plays at the DukeBox Theatre, which will begin in April. I know it's exciting because, very gratifyingly, friends are often taking the time to tell me how excited they ate about it.

And those two short stories I'm working on, to meet a deadline? Still working on them. One was for an event that demands its stories are no more than 1500 words. There's no way that's going to happen. And that's not a far-too-previous writer incapable of killing his darlings talking: the story just won't work if I try to shave it into the right word count. I've tried that before for another comp - while vicious editing is almost always a good thing, it can be instructive to realise sometimes that if the story needs to be told in, say, 2000 words rather than 15000 - then it should be. And the competion should be shelved for another day.

Unless, of course, I come up with another idea. You see, that's the mark of a truly lazy writer: always abandoning the work in progress for the next great idea.

Wait here ...