Tuesday 26th March 2013

Another rehearsal for Three Kinds Of Me last night, the first of two plays I'm directing at the Brighton Festival Fringe. Although an earlier version was performed at the New Venture Theatre in October, this is a slightly different beast, adapted for the fringe, which means that we're still at the stage of tweaks and re-writes, discovering what it's all about, Alfie (it's not about Alfie. That was a needlessly confusing diversion). This, I imagine, is to be expected when you have a writer directing a writer in her own script. Certainly, I have to be very mindful that any suggestions or revisions I offer are done so from the mindset of a director, not a frustrated writer (even if it's actually a frustrated writer that's come up with the idea for the revision). I find it endlessly curious how the meaning of a story can change over time, even if you don't actually change the words. A single story can mean something completely different to people depending on when they see it - ie, what year or decade - and what they themselves bring to the story: if they've recently become a parent, or come out of a relationship. The final writer is the audience. I think that's already been said elsewhere before. Probably by somebody able to write the idea significantly more elegantly.

It reminds me of a story that John Cleese used to tell, about the first time the Parrot Sketch from Monty Python aired. The morning after, Cleese was stopped in the street by an admiring fan who told him how funny the sketch was before turning serious and conspiractal: 'So,' the man said. 'It was about the Vietnam War, wasn't it?'

I'm finding meanings in stories a particular challenge at the moment. This week, I have four deadlines for short story competitions all jostling for position. They're all pretty much on the last draft stage because I have been working on them before I had any inclination that I would be entering them for competitions. There is one in particular which I am rather afraid that I'm going to have to rip apart and start all over again, simply because I have no idea what it's actually about. I mean, it makes sense, and has a plot, and events happen one after the other in an attractive fashion, and it's a perfectly pleasant read, but I'm not entirely sure what the point is. I'm cheerfully confident that there are plenty of stories, books and films that have no real rhyme or reason and are nonetheless entirely successful. But I can't help thinking that this story needs a bit of bones under the meat, that it needs to be about something other than simply just the plot. Or maybe I should just bite the bullet, and post the bloody thing off before deadline. If I think it's good enough.

All of a sudden, I have two Ghostwalks this week, which depart from the same place and same time as usual - 7.30, outside the Druids Head in Brighton. This week, it's on Tuesday (tonight, if you read this quick), and Thursday. It's been a bit of a slow season so far, largely to the bitterly cold weather that continues to hang around like the lonely and slightly too sober chap at a party who's still there when all the music has been switched off. Hopefully an improvement in the weather is not too far away now, and anyway, in just a few weeks is the the Fringe.

The other thing I'm doing for the fringe is the entirely improvised show, which is going very well in rehearsals, although we only have one rehearsal this week, which is a bit of a strain. Although it's true that due to the very nature of the show being improvised, there are no lines or moves to learn, it's obviously good to keep the group together as much as possible. Each rehearsal is either adding to the tool kit, or keeping those tools well oiled and sharpened. It's dangerous to let the momentum slip for too long, otherwise everybody runs the risk of getting a bit rusty: a good improv show - short or long form - is all about trust and confidence in everybody else on stage. However, this is the only week that I expect us not to be able to meet regularly. Up until now, it's been like the first fifty seconds of a ride on a roller coaster - that very sharp incline to the highest point when you can hear all the gears working hard to get you to a certain level. After Easter, however: that's when it's full speed ahead.

He's Not Only In The Wrong Decade .. He's On The Wrong Planet

Look, it can't be much fun being trapped in a newspaper that's mostly only fit for lining the kitty litter tray. Believe me, people, I've written a load of these blogs, and I'm reasonably confident that I can count my regular readers on one hand. Using the other hand. Which would be less than five.

I have every sympathy with those writers who need to earn a crust, in a time where the print industry is spluttering and panicking worse than someone trying to defend Rebecca Brooks at the Leveson Inquiry. Newspaper barons pay taxes too. Actually, maybe they don't. I haven't got the data on that. If only there was some method, deserving of universal respect, that could look into these kinds of things for us.

Richard Littlejohn, on his twitter account, declares 'I'm not the bigot you think I am', which as an introductory salvo, is the same kind of Hallmark greeting as 'I'm not a racist, but ..'. He tells us that he's not the bigot we think he is (which leads to the disturbing thought - exactly what kind of bigot is he?), but he's clearly capable of some pretty bigoted stuff. Some of you will be aware that this blog is roughly modelled on an article he published just before Christmas, but without all the vile stuff. I'm not able to repeat it, even in a clearly satirical way. Presumably I'm just not as skilled a writer as he is.

For instance, Littlejohn is so skilled, he was able to create a furore over Christmas last year over very little. When Lucy Meadows made the move from her previously male persona to become a woman, the school board were notably and suitably proud of their teacher that they supported her fully. You might guess that it's difficult to find a more nervous and paranoid group than the average school board. Looking after kids while the nations tabloids look on ensures you think over your more sensitive decisions very carefully. One imagines that the announcement on the website wasn't exactly the first time the PTA had heard about this, despite Richard Littlejohn's need to play sleight of hand otherwise. It's worth pointing out that the twitter account I'm referring to has not been updated in a good long while. It does appear likely that it is a spoof account, and nothing to do with Littlejohn himself. Then again, the evidence for that assumption is mainly to do with some tweets containing quite shocking bigotry that you'd think nobody would put in a public forum, and, well ..

But, has anyone stopped for a moment to think of the devastating effect all this will have on the people who really matter? Adults with IQs as low as 7 aren't equipped to process the type of bigoted idiocy that Littlejohn spouts, swallowing it without question or concern, repeating it in turn to others. At least the Express doesn't really have an opinion to repeat.

The article quotes a father who is apparently concerned about his boy, who allegedly is afraid that he'll suddenly turn into a girl. Nobody thinks to mention to the dad that there's an excellent solution to this thorny issue: actually talk to the child (rather than a tabloid newspaper).

It's very unlikely that the Leveson Inquiry will make any real change to the way that newspapers - tabloids in particular - will treat innocent people, regulation or no regulation. The problem is the same as it ever was: this bizarre idea that if someone has made any kind of choice to live apart from what we clunkily call the norm, they surrender their rights to respect and privacy. This seems to apply if someone decides to become a singer, a film star, a woman, or even someone who would dearly love to find their missing daughter alive. The often stated opinion is that such people have to expect press intrusion. No, they don't. It's really that simple: no they don't. I have yet to hear one intelligent or even reasonable argument why they do. Bullying is bullying, and we still seem to place all the responsibility on the victim, arguing that they should either put up and shut up, ignore it til it goes away, or - even better - not to do anything that draws attention in the first place. This is clearly not good enough: the most concise and effective way to combat bullying is to actually blame the perpetrator. Not the victim. But for some reason, we seem to be remarkably unskilled at that. Incidentally, one of the reasons why rape culture seems to becoming ever more ingrained into our lives, rather than less. It's not just Littlejohn, and I've always been a little uneasy that we throw our hands up in horror at the victimisation of members of the public, but somehow consider public figures to be ipso facto fair game. It just allows newspapers (and not just tabloids, if we're honest) a little more rope with which to hang us.

Look, freedom of speech is a great and noble thing. And it does protect your right to state your opinion. But it doesn't protect any right to be a vicious bully about it. And certainly not be be a fracking idiot.

Sorry, in that last paragraph, I went off the Richard Littlejohn template. But, as is increasingly obvious, it's very easy to go off Richard Littlejohn, full stop.

Monday 18th March 2013

Pretty good stuff going over at the rehearsals for Beginning, Muddle, End. Over the last couple of rehearsals, we've been concentrating a lot on 'Yes, And'. Talk to a hundred different improvisers, and you'll get three hundred different opinions on how to improvise. (yeah, I know the maths don't add up, but improvisers are a confusing bunch of people, you're just going to have to deal with it). But Yes And is pretty unarguable - its the idea that you literally accept, and expand on what the other actor is offering you. And it is an offer, a gift. Yes And is a great way to educate yourself into a frame of mind where you're constantly supporting your fellow actors, making them the best - the most brilliant - they could possibly be. The amount of energy and fizzy fun I'm getting from my cast is a joy to see.

What I'm becoming increasingly aware of, both in the rehearsals for BME and in the Sunday night workshops (yes, we have noticed you've not turned up yet. We weren't gonna mention it, but now that you've brought it up, maybe you wanna clear your schedule?) is something that I go on a lot about in my directing, and also in my writing. It's absolutely true of improv, too - essentially, all story telling: if you're hitting a wall, if the story isn't progressing, if you're just spinning your wheels, chucking up mud and progressing NOT AT ALL, then there's actually a damn good chance that you've already put in place the solution you're looking for. I first started being aware of this quite recently - well, about five years ago - and used to voice it to myself like some kind of fortune cookie mantra. It was a helpful crutch to lean on when I couldn't think of a damn thing to write, in any case. But here's the thing. Ever since I have voiced it, ever since I've given it the talismanic quality of a belief system - it's never failed me. Even on Sunday, both at rehearsal and at the short form drop in class (seriously, where have you been? We start, like five minutes late every week because we think that maybe you're gonna come through the door), there were moments where the scene was so close to - well, closure, but the improvisers weren't quite sure how to clamp their jaws on the tail of the story and end it there and then. But there were always certain that they were, like - this close - to that end. And it's because they'd already introduced the vital element earlier in the scene. On occasion, within the opening few lines. And of course, when there's an audience, and you manage to stitch these two apparently disparate plot points together, you will look like improvising AWE INSPIRING GENIUSES.

I had to have a guy drop out this week, because they weren't able to juggle their commitments, which is fair enough. At least, that's the story he's given me: I prefer to think that he had become increasingly uncomfortable with the raw sexual power that spilled over whenever he and I were in the same room at the same time. No, wait. It's probably the juggling commitment thing. Now, that leaves us with eight women, and one man. Also one teenaged boy, but it's the male / female ratio I want to talk about briefly. When I discussed it with a writer friend, she was concerned: wouldn't I have to get a replacement man? If it was just one man in a cast of women, wouldn't that look, well, weird? Well, possibly. Particularly as I'm eschewing one improv trick: I'm intending that each actor plays to their own gender. This will mean, at the very least, there will be eight characters who are women, and just one that is a man. That's not including the possibility that performers will play secondary characters (which is at least likely). But I want to commit to this. And the thing about just one man in the cast looking a bit odd - well, why should it? OK, I accept that it might - that, indeed, it probably will look odd - but a cast of mostly male characters, joined by a single female, wouldn't attract attention in quite the same way, save, possibly, for a side swipe that she was the 'token' female (the inference being that her role in the narrative is pointless, save for the sole purpose of having a woman on board) . For as long as I've been aware of such things, it's been cited that the population is roughly 52% women. And yet, in a narrative arc, they are considered 'other'. I'm not entirely sure why. Well, OK, I could throw a guess, but I'm not nearly intelligent or well versed enough to make the argument. I just think that this is a sweet opportunity to create a play in a field which is very heavily slanted towards male performers, which happens not to play by those rules. And I'm not expecting that the improvised plays will be in any way feminist - indeed, that's not the point. There's absolutely no reason why the stories that eight women (and one man, and one teenage boy) make up need have anything to do with inherently women's issues. I'm not naive enough to think that the gender imbalance will be invisible to the audience. But I do earnestly hope that it will ultimately be one of the least interesting things about the show.

Monday 11 March 2013

On Friday, I went up to see a friend - Samantha Andersen - in a production of Oedipus in London, at the Blue Elephant Theatre. Even now, after years, it still seems odd to see friends in 'real', professional productions. I met Sam when I directed her in Four Play a couple of years ago, and it was by pleasing (and not really all that surprising) when, a little while later, she decided to take the plunge and get into the uncertain, heady world of 'actual' acting. I know, I know, we can have a very long debate here on what exactly is meant by 'professional' and 'amateur' theatre, since we've all seen examples of the one that seem to better represent the other, but let's just bite the bullet and declare, however unpleasant / inaccurate we consider it to be, that if you're getting paid for your work, you can consider yourself professional.

It was a very good production. There's always a slight fear, when going to support a mate, that you're going to be reduced to platitudes like 'well, the set was great' (always awkward if there isn't actually a set to speak of), but we had nothing to worry about. The production was energetic and visceral, the chaps playing Oedipus and Creon were great, and - most importantly, as far as the supporting gang were concerned, Sam was fantastic, managing passion and glamour, steely confidence and level headiness, and tormented anguish - sometimes all within the same speech. It's a good show all around, and well worth your attention, running to the 23rd March, I think.

On Sunday, we had our first rehearsal for Three Kinds Of Me, the one woman show running in the third week of the fringe. Sarah (Charsley) has done a couple of rewrites, not out of a writers inability to just let the damn thing go, but because we're having to adapt it for a different space and running time. Just these little changes mean that the play ends up 'meaning' something else, being about something else, which is a theme I've already gone on a bit about in pre-rehearsal meetings. Yesterday seemed to add weight to that theory, and it looks like we're gonna have to do a couple more rewrites before the final (final, final) script can be locked down.

I've utterly failed to write anything for newsjack in the last couple of weeks, which I'm not too concerned about, since I don't think I would have been able to come up with anything of quality in the last fortnight (I blame the poor news stories), but it means that I should really be spending time on trying to come up with better stuff for The Show What You Wrote, the deadline for which is at the end of the month. I've also got a deadline at the end of the month for BROOM HANDLE, a story which, despite being short, has caused me all sorts of narrative problems since about October. I think I might have solved it this week, though. However, that means having the rip the whole thing apart, write it in what's almost a completely new style, doing a bit of a hack job, before seeing if the new style works. And that's the point; I have to write all that, with no idea if my plan makes any sense at all.

Been reading a lot of Chuck Wendig this week, who is very motivating in his writing style. If you have any aspirations in being a writer, his How To books are well worth a look.

Tuesday 7 March 2013

Right, that's the first week of rehearsals for Beginning Muddle End done. Three rehearsals already, and if I'm honest they were more intense and hard work than I'd anticipated. That's by no means a bad thing; it means we can apply the brakes slightly after having sped ahead at the start, and begin to get down to some basic skills of improvisation. I'd decided even before I started rehearsals that I was going to - quite deliberately - go in somewhat blind. That meant that, for the first few weeks of rehearsal (at least), I wouldn't decide on any sort of structure, or format on which to hang the final show. Obviously, as we got closer to the performance date, that would change, but for now, I'm quite happy for it to be a little loose. Let the structure be dictated by the group dynamic, by the performers' individual wants and needs.

That's all well and good, of course, but I think many of us have been involved in productions where the director has voiced a similar intention, and it's clearly been code for 'I have no idea what to do, and frankly I'm just a bit too lazy to buckle down to a final decision'. It's something I've been acutely aware of in this first week of rehearsals. True, I don't yet know the exact journey my cast and I will take (and if I come up with a more pretentious phrase today, you can slap me on the back of the neck with any number of improvisation text books), but it's important to have a pretty good idea of where you want to end up. There's nothing wrong with heading out into woodland area in a generally aimless fashion, as long as you're pretty sure that you're not going to get panicky and start walking around in very tight circles, banging your fists against your thighs, sobbing 'why does this sort of crap always happen to me?' Its OK to get (sorta) lost, so long as you can keep the destination in sight.

Except, screw it, even that's not exactly right, because it suggests that you should always know how things are going to resolve themselves, and that's not improvisation. I guess I'm still thing about the Great White metaphor. Keep moving or die. You can get as lost as you like, but if you're afraid of moving forward, if you let the entire expanse of - nothing - overwhelm you, then you're screwed. When my mum was coming up to her fifties, she suddenly decided - on a whim, it seemed - to learn to drive. She was an insanely terrible backseat driver. My stepdad's nerves were no doubt shot, because my mum was never able to understand that her field of vision was deceptive, that her depth of perception was off kilter just by virtue of sitting in the passenger seat. So she would spend entire car journeys screaming like a banshee, convinced that the car was about to plough into traffic coming the opposite way. The woman who tries to wrestle the steering wheel from her partner in panic, succeeding only in steering the car closer toward whatever it is that's causing a problem in the first place? Yeah, that was my mum, years before someone else stole the idea for a reality TV show. You'd think that things would improve once my mum became a driver herself. They didn't, because, bless her, she wasn't the best driver in the world (according to her, she was exactly that - the very best driver in the world. I know this because of the very firm opinion she voiced about everybody else on the road).

However, she was really pleased to be able to drive. She certainly had no real reason to, but she loved to take the car out on Sundays for long drives. Because she needed the company, I was often taken along for these rides. Rides that I found teeth grittingly, eyeball poppingly frustrating. Because they appeared to have absolutely no purpose. I had no idea where we were going. The journey had no point whatsoever. My mum would just be content to drive the car around for three, maybe even five hours, just for the joy of driving. I mean, OK, I get it - she's a child of the 50s, growing up in rural catholic Ireland. The idea of simply taking the old jalopy out for a spin has a certain romance to it. Yeah, great, I get it. But I think it's maybe worth pointing out that we weren't in Ireland. We weren't even in the 1950s, where cars were a much rarer sight. When my mum drove around purposely, we weren't driving around the countryside, on the hunt for a pub or a car boot sale.

We drove around housing estates in Croydon.

I'm not kidding. Because my mum still wasn't a confident driver, she didn't want to get too far away from her starting point. But she didn't really have any idea of where she wanted to go. And so we kind of simply drove around in circles, achieving almost nothing but the emptying of a petrol tank. All that energy, and nothing to show for it. We ended up nowhere. And I mean, literally nowhere, because, almost inevitably, despite the fact that the car probably never got further than 15 miles from the house at this point, we seemed to always find the trading estate with absolutely no signage, or people. Well and truly lost. With almost no petrol. Fifteen years before mobile phones or the internet. Still a few years before I drank in front of her. Although, to be fair, the experience probably hastened that activity quite significantly.

Wait. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Improv. This is exactly like that. Improv is like getting stuck in a Datsun Sunny with my mum with absolutely no comprehension of how we're going to get back. Shut up. I know what I'm talking about. Well, maybe. The point is this. Nobody knows where they're going with improv. That's the point. But to stall, to meander in circles, to not dare to get away from your starting point, doesn't mean that you're not going to run out of juice, and that you're not going to get totally lost.

Hell, that metaphor worked out a helluva lot more successfully than I expected to. Yeah, I know it sounded clunky to you, but I didn't know I was going to come up with until I was in the middle of typing it, and I'm pretty pleased with it. Yeah, it's ugly, and with jagged edges, but it makes the point, and it gets the job done.

There's probably another metaphor in there somewhere. I've got to stop with the metaphors, they're getting to be like -

Hell. Really gotta stop.

6 March 2013

Rehearsals began this week for A Beginning, A Muddle And An End. Although, because it's going to be an improvised play, I'm always going to feel like it's a bit of a
Iie to refer to them as rehearsals, in much the same way that I won't always feel like its strictly accurate to call myself a director. Of course, it the early stages of - well, I'm going to have to call them rehearsals, aren't I? - there's going to be a lot more side-coaching from me, lots more suggestions of different ways to try the same methods with which to tell a story. It's certainly true that when it doubt, it's best to keep the story simple - obvious, even - and it's almost always a hell of a lot easier to see that simple, clear and elegant resolution to a narrative when you're in the audience, or at the very least, offstage and looking in. One of my early tasks will be attempting to facilitate the cast with the toolkit so that they can, with a group mind, work together towards the same resolution. No pressure. I'm also starting rehearsals this week for the other fringe festival show, Three Kinds Of Me, which will be premiering in a all new, stripped down version at The Burrow. Now, you might well claim that attempting to mount two festival productions at the same time is the very height of madness. I'd argue that the height of madness probably involves sacrificing puppies, or gouging out your own eyes, or maybe buying a boxset of The Only Way Is Essex. By comparison, spending your free time with talented actors getting to make up stories seems like an entirely sane use of one's time.

Our first rehearsal (for BME) had a really good vibe to it, full of energy, but energy that was absolutely focused. That's reasonably rare in new improvisation groups, where it's more usual to have a few souls pulling focus in a misguided attempt to prove their worth to anyone watching. There was none of that yesterday, no egos calling for attention. In fact, everyone was really supportive of everyone else in a remarkably short amount of time. When you consider that at least a couple of the gang have thus far done very little improv, and therefore may well have been feeling understandably nervous, this is pretty damn impressive, and bodes well for the rest of the rehearsal process. I will very often get into a routine where I've decided what The Most Important Rule In Improv is, and it forms my approach for the surrounding months. Usually, it's a re-stating of a rule that's already familiar, or possibly even over-familiar (which is why I consider it necessary to re-state it, in slightly different language). The start of rehearsals for BME coincide with me going on quite a lot about my new Most Important Rule Of Improv, which basically is ''Make Everyone Else Look Brilliant".

A lot of improvisation is about taking a leap of faith, celebrating Tabula Rasa, going in blind even when nothing appears to make sense. Trying very hard to avoid the phrase 'Yes, but ...'. Logic and intelligence aren't always your friends. You're having to do several things at once, and quite often those things don't exactly support one another. You can't plan the story too far ahead, you have to be ready to drop whatever scenario you're setting up in less than a second, while at the same time being mindful (and indeed, pushing) a multitude of various possible story-lines.

Very often in improv workshops and rehearsals, actors will declare that they were 'about to' set up a certain scene (or relationship, or location, or motive). Granted, it's next to impossible to pitch all that in the first three seconds, but we should have a damn good try: yes, it's important to find moments of calm and quiet, and we don't want all our dialogue to be purely exposition, but if we're not constantly moving forward, we're just dancing on the head of a pin. All that energy, and barely anything to show for it. It does seem logical to always have an idea of where we're going, even if we're going in blind. Constantly moving forward, barely ever looking behind, never risking staying still, not spending even thirty seconds spinning your wheels, because if you do, if you spend just thirty seconds not moving forward, then you die. Move or die.

Hell, I've just realised that improv is like a Great White Shark. And to further punch this strained metaphor into the deep dark water, improv - if you're not careful - has teeth that can bite. Oh, and it has dead eyes. That too. The point is, if you as an improviser are not constantly moving forward, improvisation can turn around and bite you on the ass within seconds. We've all seen improvisation groups that mistake energy for being loud, that mistake dialogue for the excuse to restate the same plot points again and again. As an improviser myself, these are the crimes that I'm (currently) most aware of, and perhaps inevitably, these are also the crimes that I am (currently) most guilty of as a performer. A couple of weeks ago, I was attempting some improvised story telling - ten minutes, one word after another. False modesty and self deprecation aside, honest critical opinion? It wasn't great. I mean, let's be abundantly clear: it wasn't awful either. And, considering that this was still my first real bit of improv in public in about three years, I was reasonably content with what I came up with. But still: it wasn't great. Most of what I got 'wrong' (whatever that means), I knew there and then, when I was still performing, long before the post mortem.

Despite the fact that as a director or workshop leader, I'm always adamant that the story is always propelled forward, that it's a misuse of energy to spend too long restating and repeating plot points (although there is space for that), I spent at least 6 of my 10 minutes doing exactly that, telling the audience loads of stuff that I'd already told them. In ten minutes, that's a helluva lot of repeating. Mainly, it's a fear of saying the wrong thing. Or the obvious thing. Or, worse, the boring, unoriginal thing. And I know this, but still I fall foul of it. Screw it. Learn, move on. And, of course, it's significantly easier to tell the kids in rehearsal not to fall into the bear traps than let them know you have a few scars yourself.

Be the shark. Keep moving. Get to the end of the story. In fact, screw that, pass the end. Get to the sequel. Tell what happens next. That's what's interesting.