We're about a week and a half away from our next Cast Iron theatre night, where we put on six or more short plays from local writers. They're usually brand new writing, or very new writing. We had a bit of a challenge this time round, because the dates of the last Cast Iron had to get bumped a bit, and then we had the Brighton Fringe swarm into view, which means that we've had less time (and less actors and directors) to play with: basically, we're having to do about six weeks of rehearsals in roughly 12 days. It's obviously a bit stressful, but everyone seems like they're coping. You'll be able to see for yourself in the middle of June.
It was pointed out to me that one of the reasons that I set up Cast Iron was for purely selfish reasons - in other words, to get my own stuff on stage. And that this was something I'd entirely failed to do: in the first year of Cast Iron, I had only put up one play for performance - which ended up getting a lovely review in the local paper. All the rest of the time, I hadn't taken advantage of the situation that I had set up for myself, and had let other local writers get all their stuff on stage. Which of course is lovely and the whole point of the thing, but if I'm not even nepotistic enough to exploit the fact that it's me who decides what scripts get through and which don't, then I really am missing a whole bundle of tricks.
So I am attempting to get a bit more galvanised with the works in progress. There's some pretty good stuff cluttering up some old laptops and the like, and stacks of paper that need to be re-edited, saved for prosperity, or simply burned. Perhaps the latter in some cases. Having a new laptop is a Godsend. When I was writing Four Play and The Snow Queen, both (different) laptops had a habit of freezing at annoyingly productive times, and getting stuck on a single punctuation mark. Considering I was writing these things pretty much in my lunch breaks, it's a wonder I got anything finished at all.
Time will always be the enemy it seems. One job that I have delayed on thus far is getting round to people to tell them (if they have indeed asked for feedback) why their scripts haven't made it through to this round of Cast Iron. Mostly it's benign reasoning - in other words, it's not because the writing is actively poor. It's more to do with the fact, sometimes, that we don't currently have access to the very specific type of actor that the script is indicating, or that the text is written to be somewhat more cinematic than a fringe studio theatre can provide. In this regard, running a short play night is teaching me almost as much about writing plays as actually writing them.
Tonight, we return Iron Clad Improv back to the DukeBox Theatre. We were at the Cricketers during the Fringe, but it will be lovely to get back to our spiritual home (three years old this year!). I've been doing lots of reading up with exciting new text books - including a UCB Improvisation manual, which is proving fascinating. The sessions start at 7.00pm every Sunday, and the theatre is at the back of the Iron Duke pub. In the meantime, I'm also running acting classes at the New Venture Theatre every Monday in June. At the moment, we're looking at script work, and the different ways to approach a text.
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