Never Enders

There was a fake news story ricocheting around the internet this week that suggested that the flagship BBC soap opera Eastenders was being axed at Christmas after 29 years. Now, nobody seriously believed this was actually happening for longer than ten seconds (apart from anything else, even if you were going to pull the plug on Albert Square, it's a fair bet you'd at least have the decency to let them reach their thirtieth anniversary before doing so) but the damage had already been done. By which, of course, I mean, hopes had already been raised. 

What was remarkable in the initial  reactions was the general air of grim relief voiced by people, as if the show was a patient in the last few stages of a terminal decline of a inevitable disease, one that everyone's known about already for a good few years now, but never had the courage to talk about openly until now. Actually, that analogy might be pretty close to the truth. 

For just a moment, it seemed like we could allow ourselves to hope for a couple of hours of primetime that didn't have to involve actors pushing narrative by the medium of SHOUTING A LOT AT EACH OTHER, and it appeared the door had been opened, just a crack, to let in a whiff of fresh air. Sure, we already knew that the story was fake, but now the idea had been planted in our heads, and we allowed ourselves to dream of another world, one with quality TV. One without OzCabs. (Hang on; they do still have OzCabs, don't they? It's been a while since I last tuned in). 

Don't get me wrong. This isn't entirely snobbish forcing of a TV menu. Well, it is a bit. And lets be clear, I'm fully aware that writing (or acting, or directing) for Eastenders is somewhat beyond me. But I'm not advocating a return to a non-existent halcyon day of silver age BBC television. It's not as if the BBC never did soaps before Eastenders. They had The Groves, and indeed, The Archers is one of the world's longest running soaps. It was just that they never really had one that struck it big until Eastenders (and then it struck really big; panicking ITV, who already had Corrie. That's why we flirted briefly with Albion Market. Oh, yeah, you'd wiped Albion Market out of your mind, hadn't you? Well, that's OK, you can probably find the opening credits on youtube. We'll wait. 

But the fact of the matter is that soaps have never really looked all that comfortable on the BBC schedule. Yes, I know they get huge viewing figures, but that's not really the point of the BBC. It shouldn't be chasing audiences with a programme that simply doesn't work in any real dramatic way. This is not to devalue the talents of writers, actors and directors producing a show 52 weeks a year, but that's just the point: it's 52 weeks a year. With a storyline that, by definition, simply can never be resolved. Not only that, but it's hardwired into the DNA of the show that it has to stop every 28 minutes for a cliffhanger. That theme music doesn't help, meaning that you are forced to contrive some very tenuous dialouge or dark looks (that are often just reaffirmations of the three previous cliffhangers). 

TV has changed so much in the last 15 years, and we're arguably at the latter end of the third silver age of TV. The first two, since you didn't ask, are generally the 50s and 70s, although that's really about US TV. But that's instructive too, since it proves that Eastenders  really has no place in primetime evening television. We consume our TV so differently now, binging on Netflix and the like. Indeed, a lot of the BBC ratings now comes from iplayer. We don't really watch TV as a nation together anymore, unless it's the World Cup Final or the Christmas Day episode of Doctor Who. And, yeah, OK, the Christmas Eastenders, just so that you can catch up on the year you've missed (someone will be mourning whoever died last year, and the couple who got married the previous Christmas will finally open that letter / tape / DVD that reveals they've been having an affair. Or something.) 

Indeed, Eastenders could be flipped back to daytime TV - since, with all due respect, a daytime soap is exactly what it is, and leap those prime slots for something else. I'm not arguing for a return to Play For Today, since those days are likely long gone (although Sky, of all people, seem to be having a good crack at it). Certainly, it seems impossible now to end Eastenders even if they wanted to, ironically because it isn't quite good enough. Nowadays, the drama we engage most with is shorter dramas with a smaller cast: Orange Is The New Black, Breaking Bad and the like. We know, someday, these stories will end. There is no such hope with Eastenders; the cast is too large, the stories continually evolving. IT CAN NEVER END. Even Corrie is restricted to a single street, more or less: if they needed to, they could engineer a finale where the entire road was knocked down to build a Lidl. With Eastenders, they'd need to blow up an entire postcode. It's just too vast, too nebulous. When the programme begun, it was - at least in part - about two warring families (the Fowlers and the Beales). That was soon dispensed as we investigated the neighbourhood. Another reason that it would be difficult to call time on the Queen Victoria is another essential difference between the underlying ethos of our two top soap: whereas Coronation Street has always played up the importance of families and friends (bolstered by the less abrasive theme tune), Eastenders has had Albert Square as an inescapable and seductive rotten cancer that has its claws embedded deep into you. This was laid down by punk Mary's V sign as she finally escaped (pretty sure that was scandal enough to make the front page of The Sun back in the day), and cemented by every character who finally returned five years after they'd fled. Even after dying. 

In the era of iplayer and watching digital boxsets all in one go, there's really no need for a half hour soap to be still taking up prime location on a BBC lineup. Again, that's not to denigrate the show. It could be perfectly respectable on a online platform, and become a programme that we could fall in love with again. 

And, of course: 'Anyone can fall in love. It's not hard to do .. '. 

No? Anyone? Maybe another thing to check out on youtube, then. 

I Can See Clearly Now

My contact lenses finally turned up this week, almost exactly three weeks late. They come through the post, and are monthly disposoables. Annoyingly for someone like me, they get sent in batches of three months at a time, which normally means that at about week eight, I've either lost a pair, accidentally ripped a lens while taking it out, or fallen asleep with them in. Usually all three. That was certainly the (lens) case this time round. 

I normally wear glasses day-to-day, so it's not actually that much of a problem, except that I was in a play for two weeks that was set in a time when plastic, black-rimmed glasses were almost certainly not a common sight. Anyone that saw you with such a modern affectation would have attempted to have had you burned as a witch. Now, whilst it's true that the play was all about witch hunting, I'm not sure the director would have been willing to go with me on such an abstract reading of the text. 

Which presented me with a bit of a problem. Without my glasses (or lenses), I'm pretty much blind. Look up, now. You see that bit of writing that's in front of you? There. No, there. Well, alright, behind you. Work with me on this. That bit of writing. Yeah, well, without my glasses, I couldn't read it. I'm not absolutely convinced that I would be able to even see that there was writing there in the first place. 

It was frustrating. I was convinced that my acting (whatever that is) was being eroded by at least 60%, simply because I couldn't really see anyone. And most of acting is reacting, right? I couldn't see what (or, occasionally, who) I was meant to be reacting to. It was a promenade performance as well, which meant that every night I had to address a character on their arrival, despite being completely clueless as to where exactly they were arriving from. Luckily, I'm apparently not one of those people who, upon removing their glasses, has to do a comedy squint for the next two hours. Allegedly, when im not wearing my glasses, I don't look at all like a man who has lost his glasses. At least, that's what I've been told. Perhaps people are just being kind. Or, even more likely, perhaps people are just saying that to me, safe in the knowledge that I will then take off my glasses, trusting them. They can then spend any downtime pointing and jeering at me, confident that it will never rebound on them, because I will never be able to see their cruel and derisive mockery. See, that's the trouble with nice people being nice. Can't trust them. 

It was a pity, because lots of the rehearsal had gone so well. I'm not claiming that I was doing any particularly great acting during the rehearsal process (and indeed, this is not the blog entry when I get into detail about quite how much I was doubting myself), but there were a couple of times when I was able to relax and feel the sense of the scene, the emotion. There's been a lot said about how you should just relax and let the character come to you. I think that's far easier said than done, because you either don't trust the advice and build a character that, while convincing enough, is still fairly fake. Or you relax too much, don't put the effort in, and become passive, which isn't interesting to anyone. Obviously I'm over-generalising massively here, but you see the point. But there's a lot to be said for how much you can discover from your character simply by how the other characters (or, more precisely, the other actors) demonstrate their perception of you. 

This is pretty much how it was in rehearsal. I'd be floundering around, not really knowing what I was doing, then catch the eye of another character, reacting to me. And if I was open enough, responsive enough, their expression would give me everything I needed. On more than one occasion, whatever they were doing would completely blindside me, and I'd find myself overcome, not entirely sure how I was going to end up at the end of a scene. For an actor in week eight of rehearsal, that's nothing short of glorious. 

This was all down to the person opposite me. So when, in production week of all weeks, I couldn't see a damn thing, it was actually quite worrying. There were at least a couple of scenes when I was having to throw brooding glances at someone about twenty feet away. Someone who due to my near-blindness, I didn't know for a fact wasn't actually thirty feet away. And three yards to the left. Basically, I had to trust my fellow actors were looking after me, and not pointing in derision at my pathetic blindness. Which I'm almost entirely confident didn't happen. 

Wednesday 4 June 2014

Oversaw my first rehearsal for Return To Steyning last night. It's a short play by a local writer - Richard Hearn - that's going to be performed in our next 'Cast Iron' night of new writing next month at the DukeBox Theatre. Yes, that's next month: but I haven't had a chance to do any rehearsals with the cast yet, mainly because I was fully committed to another play until the middle of May. People have been asking me what I'm going to be doing with all my evenings back. Other people, people who actually know me, haven't bothered to ask. 

I was late for rehearsal. This is both highly improbable, and virtually impossible, given that the rehearsal space last night is only about six minutes away from where I live, and it's pretty much a straight line from one to the other (indeed, if you veer too much to the left, you end up in the sea). But I still managed to be late - in fact, I'd already walked past where I needed to be. By the time I eventually arrived, my cast were already deep into rehearsal. In real terms, they didn't really need me. This is both encouraging and mollifying. 

They were doing so well, in fact, that I was loathe to interrupt them. But I did anyway, because this will be a very quick turnaround of rehearsal. Normally, I like to give my actors a bit of elbow room, and not straight jacket them into a limited character that I've already decided to pen them into. I'm not always successful at that, possibly because I like the sound of my own director-y voice too much, but I was very chatty last night - hopefully more chatty than I will be at any subsequent rehearsal, partially because I'm having to abandon at least some of my high ideals as a director and give the cast fairly limited parameters to work with. My justification is the limited rehearsal time: we don't have a helluva lot of time to try things out and go down weird artistic blind alleys (which of course, are the very best kind of blind alleys to wander down). The cast understood this, and accepted my constant interruptions with great grace and intelligence. 

Haven't had a chance to do a rewrite on the next draft of the current script yet, despite the two ideas that I had to insert into the text yesterday. I have, however, managed to scribble some notes on the most recent hard copy. I always find that the more time you spend away from a WIP, the more difficult it can be to get back on board - leave it alone for more than a few days, and it feels more than overwhelming to attempt to get anywhere near the script, like it's some kind of monotholic beast. But as long as you're checking in every so often on the days that you're not able to fully commit to the writing, then you've still got a leash on the monster, and it shouldn't escape you too easily. 

Have managed to do a bit of writing today that didn't involve actual writing. Now, that sounds like the sort of half-assed excuses that people who don't want to go through the actual tedium of third, fourth, and twelfty drafts come up with (and, indeed, it is a little bit), but I had two sudden solutions to plot problems (or more specifically, dialogue problems) on my way to work. In fact, while I was cycling to work. In the rain. It's true that I very often come up with writing ideas while in the shower, but I guess not so often when getting caught in a shower of a more natural type. 

Not only was I on my bike (not exactly a pen and paper to hand), but I was on my way to work, where I knew that I wouldn't be able to write any of this up for eight or so hours. And I know what I'm like - what loads of writers are like - it doesn't take too much for those really good ideas to go fluttering away on the wind. The good side of that is that you can kid yourself that the novel / short story / sketch you've finally hacked out would've been so much better if only you hadn't gotten distracted at just the critical moment. The bad side, of course, is the rather disquieting assumption that you will now forever labour under, that whatever it is you've finished, could have been so much better in some alternate, never to be realised, reality. There is a third possibility, of course. Equally as likely. But since that mainly involves managing to rescue your initial ideas and discovering that they - and so, you - weren't that good in the first place - it's probably not a thread that we want to pick at for too long. 

So, I found a post-it note (other informational reminder slips of paper with a mildly sticky strip on the back are available), and scrawled a couple of words on it, so that I would remember what the hell had occurred to me w hen I got back to the writing proper. They were 'FRIEND' and 'POWER', which, out of context, don't seem like particularly original words - and, indeed, they're not. It's just the clever-clever scenes that I've got bubbling under that make them relevant. (Of course the scenes are clever-clever: I haven't actually written them yet. Once I've got to work with my writers pen with all the elegance and subtlety of a caffeine-addicted spider monkey armed with a claw hammer, I'm sure I can reduce my works of potential genius to works of actual mediocrity. Oh, you don't believe me? Ye of little faith).

But I've been burnt by this method before, and not just by single words on Post-Its. On more occasions that I care to admit, I've scribbled eight pages on the way home, my fevered and over-excited mind working far faster than my penmanship can keep up with, only knowing that the words burning onto the bits of A4 have genuine wit, clarity and emotion. Only to get home and discover that the scribblings are literally scribblings, and I can't decipher what most of the words say.  

Apart from 'TURNIP' and 'MUSEUM'. 

I mean, what the hell? Perhaps it wasn't such a good idea after all. 

Monday 2nd June 2014

Gearing up for the next lot of short form improv sessions, which start again this Sunday (the 8th), now that we've had our break during the Brighton Fringe. We're doing something ever so slightly different with this block of sessions. When you've been doing improv for a while (and it doesn't have to be a particularly long while, not really), it's somewhat easy to fall into certain 'traps' - maybe you're often going for the gag, or taking over scenes, so that everyone else on stage has to follow your lead, whether they like it or not. Or maybe it's the exact opposite - perhaps your mind goes completely blank, and you can't think of anyway to progress the scene, and so you prefer to let someone else do all the hard work. At some point, all of us have been guilty of that to some degree.

These next four workshops - over the majority of June - take this into account, with a series of drop-ins that we're calling 'Iron Clad Surgery'. The idea is that each separate session will take into account one of these challenges, and tailor the exercises accordingly, to help performers begin to sharpen the tools in their toolbox. Perhaps the best thing about this is that most of (if not all) the exercises and games we'll be using this month are still the ones that will be familiar to those who have been popping into improv over the last year or so anyway: so it's not like that the unsure or inexperienced are going to be thrown a curve ball. The drop in sessions are as open to beginners as always, it's just that the content of each workshop is going to be more heavily weighted toward whatever particular challenge we're tackling that week. Anyway, for further details, you can have a look at [embed]http://andthisisandrewallen.weebly.com/ironclad-improv.html[/embed] . 

There, you'll also see details of our upcoming long form course, which starts at the end of June.

Tonight, a few of us rocked up to the DukeBox Theatre in Hove to take a few photographs of a regular improv session (not that there's any such thing). It seems we might get an article in the local Argus at the end of the week, so it was thought a good idea to get some photos done, on the off-chance that they might end up accompanying the article. I'm not all that fond of having my photo taken, so it was a bit of an effort not to be openly grimacing in each one. This, by the way, might seem a little difficult to swallow, since - as the person who runs Iron Clad Improv - I made a concerted effort to make sure I was in each and every photograph, and more to attempt to look like I knew what I was talking about. We'll see how successful I was if any when any of the photos get published on Friday. 

In real terms, I didn't get all that much writing done today. In fact, it was close to zero. I managed to think of a single rhyme for a song that appears in Act 2 (however improbable, I am still considering sticking songs in this thing), and scrawl a few notes in the margin for Act 1, but other than that, I've produced nothing today. I'm OK with that - first day back at work after a writing holiday away, after all - but I can't afford to let this happen too many more times. It is always so easy - so seductive, even - to allow a day to go past without any writing whatsoever, and to tell yourself that that'sOK, because you'll always catch up tomorrow.

You never will. 

Sunday 1 June 2014

Had a haircut and shaved the beard off in the last couple of days, and it feels like I've lost something roughly the weight of my own head. When the beard first started growing, back in January, it was mainly down to laziness, but then I got a part in a play in which the beard seemed to quite suit, so I kept it for that. And while enough people seemed to like it, there came a time that I was pretty keen to be rid of it, particularly as I was beginning to look like Serpico by way of Jesus (the Robert Powell version, obviously, not one that actually existed). 

And now it's gone, and I look concenviably younger. Only by about three months, but hell, I'll take what I can get. It's a good enough novelty while it lasts. The thing is, I'm not usually one of these people who gets their hair cut on even a semi-regular basis. (and yes, I realise while typing that last sentence that I could simply have replaced the phrase 'one of those people' with the shorter, and more accurate, 'people'. I'm pretty sure that there have been years when I've only had to cut it once. Not such a big deal when you're bass guitar in that band in your local pub that's definitely gonna make it any day now. Really, I've never really cared about what hairstyle I'm styling. People who have known me a while will be able to readily vouch for this. Cut, grow shoulder length, cut, repeat. 

But this time, it - along with the beard - had got so long - not really all that long, in the world of long beards (can you imagine such a world?), but long enough that any hairdresser wouldn't neccessarily know what it was that I wanted, particularly as my conversational skills with hairdressers tend to not get any more detailed than 'Just a bit of a cut'. This is an opening line that's served me well since about the age of eight, although addmitedly not one that you want to be misheard if you're in Croydon and the other person has easy access to a razor.  

Because that wouldn't be quite enough this time around, I did something that I've never done before, which was to bring along a photograph of the sort of style I thought I wanted. Of course, it wasn't a photograph at all, but an image on my mobile phone. This didn't stop me feeling slightly foolish as I showed it to the hairdresser. I wanted to be very clear that I wasn't expecting or even hoping to look like the guy in the picture, who was all pretty-boy-pouty-lips and airbrushed cheekbones. I think most hairdressers know this already, but mild paranoia had set in: I half expected him to do a double take between me and my proffered mobile, and fight hard to contain his hysteria. That, and beckon a couple of his work colleagues over so that they could join in their derision. None of that happened, of course.  He just nodded, looked entirely unimpressed, and got to work. Six months of hair were clipped into a reasonably innoffensive (and a helluva lot lighter) style in under twenty minutes. OK, so I had previously been waiting there for about half a hour, but that's hardly the point. 

Maybe it's just the change in hair, the change in weather and the change in month (hello, summer), but I'm currently feeling infused (and enthused, I guess) with all manner of upcoming projects. There's a couple of performances coming up next month, plus a full length script to get done in roughly the same time. Plus, I worked out this week that some of the writing projects I've got going on will take me - and this is if I'm working non-stop, along with everything else I've got going on - til at least 2020. That's two leap years away. On the bright side, I will have probably had a haircut again by then. 

Saturday 31 May 2014

There's about five weeks left before our production of Twelfth Night, which will be an open-air performance, and acted by young actors. I've been working on it, off and on, after the last couple of months, but it's only now - now that the Brighton Fringe is over - that I've been able to attack it with all guns blazing. The cast have had distractions of their own - exams, and the like - but they've been doing extraordinarily well, what with all their line learning, and discovering rich characterisations quite outside of any interfering directing that I might throw at them. 

Something at today's rehearsal wasn't quite working though, and I couldn't quite how to fix it. As I said, it will be an open air performance, within some walled gardens. The audience will sit in the middle of the space, and all the scenes will take place 360 degrees around them, meaning that the audience will have to do a bit of shifting around each time a new scene begins. It's certainly a bit different from a traditional 'end-on' performance. But something today wasn't making that work. The actors couldn't quite stop themselves facing each other when their characters were speaking to each other, meaning that the audience were getting a lot of back, which meant that the voices were getting lost - being outside, there's no wall for the sound to bounce off, and anyway, there's traffic from a nearby road vying for your attention to. 

When I realised what I had to do, it was just annoying that I hadn't thought of the solution in the first place. It - obviously - has to be a promenade performance. If I'm going to make the audience have to shift around anyway, I might as well make the most of it. With a promenade performance, I can get the audience to really enjoy the space we're in, and have a very unique experience - everyone genuinely seeing the show from a different angle. Once we started rehearsing it that way, with the actors able to constantly change where they were directing their performance toward, the entire thing lifted several degrees. 

Not only should I have spotted this somewhat obvious fix weeks ago, I REALLY should have spotted this fix weeks ago, since I've spent the last few months actually being in a promenade performance myself. I hadn't made the connection between the two, despite the fact that their Venn Diagrams were pretty much overlapping. It's a useful skill to keep developing - that whatever you're reading / watching / doing in your life, can be directly translated into something else you're reading / watching doing, even if the connective tissue isn't that obvious. That feels like something I could write an entire thesis on, but frankly, I'm not feeling quite intelligent enough to do that just at the moment. 

Sometimes the obvious fix is found by examining what the problem actually is. When directing Four Play, there was a problem when two characters had to drag a body off stage. The actor playing the corpse was a fairly tall lad, and wasn't the sort of boy you could simply sling over your shoulder. I'd written in some dialouge to cover, so it wasn't just two women dragging a body across stage in silence. But it still wasn't working, and we were opening the following night. We'd tried everything, a fireman's life, the actor trying to 'help' the girls - but it all looked awful. There seemed to be no way to get the body from one end of the stage to the exit door. It took me ages to work out that there was absolutely no reason why the character couldn't die at the door, thereby negating any need for fireman's lifts. Problem solved. 

I'm an idiot sometimes. But I think I'm an intelligent idiot.