Thursday 4th Feb 2016

It’s been a busy old while. Lots of plays submitted to Cast Iron 7, and it was a tough time whittling down the selection to the final six. Even then, casting was a bit of a challenge, since there are a terrific amount of projects going on in Brighton at the moment, not least as people begin to batten down the hatches for the Brighton Fringe. I think we’re almost settled on the line up for Cast Iron 7, but I’m going to hold fire on a proper announcement until after the weekend, just in case anything else changes. (IT’S NOT GOING TO CHANGE. IT CAN NEVER CHANGE.)

In the meantime, I’ve been doing a lot of research and redrafting for Year Without Summer, which is a play that I’m writing and directing at the DukeBox Theatre for the Brighton Festival Fringe. As you may know, 200 years ago this May, the poets Byron and Shelley rocked up to Lake Geneva. With Shelley is Mary Godwin – later known as Mary Shelley – and pretty much the only reason that Byron is there is because he wants to meet Mary and Percy, who he admires and respects. The whole meeting has been somewhat engineered by Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister, who has been somewhat besotted with Byron for a while, and is running the risk of losing his interest. History has, with the exception of a few dedicated biographers, pretty much forgotten Claire (Polidori, Byron’s physician, gets more footnotes), but if it hadn’t been for her bringing these poets together, Byron would not have been around to suggest to the group that they all tell each other ghost stories. And if he hadn’t done that, it’s at least possible that Mary Shelley would not have put pen to paper to write Frankenstein.

I’m ploughing through drafts at the moment (as well as tinkering with some Cast Iron 7 stuff), but hope to announce audition notices very soon. Whatever happens, the auditions will be at the end of February, with rehearsals kicking in early/mid March.

Also in mid March are two events – well, two events as well as Cast Iron 7. There’s Not Just The Companion, held as part of a special week celebrating International Womans Day, and Cast Iron Theatre, along with Iron Clad Improv, are holding a series of writing and storytelling workshops during the HoveGrown Festival. More details about all of that very soon.

Thursday 28th January 2016

So, where are we? This week, I managed to (finally) assign scenes and speeches to performers in Not Just The Companion - the evening that Cast Iron Theatre is presenting for International Woman's Day at the DukeBox Theatre -

- and that's quite enough words in bold font for one paragraph, thank you very much. If I haven't explained before, the idea behind Not Just The Companion is reasonably simple - there will be a group of performers, all female, delivering scenes that are traditionally, iconically, male. While we don't intend to get too political about it, and simply deliver an evening of drama and comedy that is entertaining, the night is, by the very nature of its existence, a political statement: without getting too deeply side-tracked by the figures (in this blog entry, at least) it remains true that men are far better represented on stage and screen than women. It may be too combative (while somewhat true) that all the best parts go to the boys, while generally the women have to play wives and girlfriends. That's not happening 100% of the time, but it happens often enough for it to be a real problem. It happens often enough that characters like Rey (Star Wars) and Furiosa (Mad Max) become noteworthy purely because they exist - the very fact that they are front and centre of a movie is somehow worthy of mention. In 2016, that's depressing.

Not Just The Companion isn't anywhere near a redressing of that balance, but it's at least a smudge on the ledger - a response. A reminder that 'male' does not have to be the default casting, the default character. So much so that you can take a part written for a male - sometimes specifically for a male - and have it performed by a woman, changing nothing more than gender pronouns (and on occasion, not even that much). We're very excited about what the evening will bring. At the bottom of this blog entry is a link for the facebook page for Not Just The Companion.
Staying with Cast Iron, I've been putting a lot of work this week into casting Cast Iron 7. In truth, it's not actually the seventh show we've put on, but we haven't numbered our Halloween and Christmas specials, as well as any of the other one-off shows we've curated. This Cast Iron will be part of Hove Grown, a new writing festival which will be in its first year for 2016. Many people will be delivering their own shows, workshops and plays in the festival, which is brilliant, beautiful and bountiful .. and means that a lot of the supremely talented people I had intended to cast in Cast Iron 7 simply aren't available. It has meant that I've had to switch a few things and scripts around, and some plays are going to get shunted to the next Cast Iron (which, in all honesty, probably will be called Cast Iron 8), but it has meant that the casting process this time round has taken a little longer than I'd expected. Frankly however, it's a nice problem to have.
Finally, Iron Clad Improv is having a real burst of energy at the moment - still really welcoming to nervous newcomers, but also genuinely challenging. We're talking a lot this month about leaving your ego at the door, dropping the jokes, and increasing the generosity for your fellow performers. Each Sunday between 7 and 9 is a revelation, and I consider myself lucky to share a learning environment with such hungry students*
*hungry for knowledge, not for food. That would be upsetting.
https://www.facebook.com/NotJustTheCompanion/?fref=ts

Sunday 25th January 2015

Pretty good session at Iron Clad Improv tonight, with three new people (all of whom took a loyalty card, so in theory that's a pretty good sign). While the Sunday night sessions are for all intents and purposes drop-ins, meaning that anyone can rock up on any Sunday, or indeed miss out on any number of Sundays without losing out or getting lost, I do try to have some sort of soft 'umbrella theme' stretching over a period of roughly four weeks or so every so often, in order to focus our minds on whatever improv challenge or problem that's currently cropping up a lot in class. So far this year, in the first few sessions back, we've mainly just been doing short form stuff in order to ease ourselves back into the groove, which has been fun. Now things are beginning to click back into place, and it looks like (with not a great deal of surprise) that our focus in the first part of 2015 will be a return to basics on the so-called Three Rules Of Improv: listen/say yes/commit. 

I find these three rules of improv endlessly fascinating. They are always the same, and yet at the same time, constantly fluid. I find new things in them roughly three times a year, the more I act, direct and write. They are both as bluntly simple as they first appear, and vastly more complicated. They mean just what they say, and are always changing. Yes, I'm aware that this sounds vastly pretentious, and I'll probably be able to explain myself better once I get my groove on with this blog and write entries more regularly, but generally I think what I'm saying about improv - and by extension, writing, or acting, or directing - really, any kind of storytelling - is that you can't get to the end of learning how to do it. Once you've 'worked it out', you're screwed, because of course, once you've learned all there is to learn, you can no longer be taught. For me, teaching (and learning) about improv is much like going into a darkened library with a candle. With the light of the candle you see this book, and that book .. and you read those, and find them delightful. So you pick up a few more. And a few more. And because the library is dark, and because you've only got the candle to light your way, it takes you a while to discover (and this you will constantly forget) that the library is vast, the perimeter far far away from your reach, the candle lighting the here and now, and simply suggesting what has passed, and what lies in the future. 

This weekend, we've been getting the last few entries  for our next Cast Iron night, which will be at the end of March. This means we have to read the plays pretty damn quickly, in order to get them cast and assigned to a director, hopefully before the end of this week. All this while trying to finish my own ten minute play, this for the NVT evening of short plays, the deadline for which is this week. 

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. 

Tuesday 18th March 2014

Not long now til the deadline for our second round of submissions for Cast Iron, our semi regular night of new writing for the theatre that we've set up in Brighton - actually, at the DukeBox Theatre. I've had a couple of submissions come in during the last few days, and look forward to reading more. We're already coming to the end of rehearsals for the first batch of plays, which get performed on Saturday 5th April (there'll be a link around here at some point). Despite my best intentions, I'm in one of them, and - still - the lines aren't quite there yet, although I'll concede that they are more well learned that I think they are, if that makes any sense.

For the first night, we're premiering eight new plays, which is a pretty tall order. We've got people directing one play, appearing in another (or two others), while writing up another. In some cases, this is while holding down normal things like jobs and families, as well as rehearsing for their Brighton Fringe shows. This has clearly been a bit exhausting for everyone, not least because of trying to wrap their heads around the logistics of sorting a batch of rehearsals that people can all attend at the same time - while attending a completely different rehearsal elsewhere. 

Partially, that's the reason why the number of accepted plays this time round will be slightly less - possibly seven, probably six. That's slightly less pressure on me as the reader, but also slightly more pressure on each playwright, with literally two less spaces to fight for. In any case, the deadline is this Friday, although if people were to give me the heads up that they're still working on their final-no-honestly-it's-nearly-finished draft, then I'm sure we could find a but of elbow room over the weekend. 

The acting classes at the NVT have been going really well, ever better than I hoped. I was trying for something a little bit different with this series of classes, and was initially not quite sure if I could pull it off, since what I was trying to achieve was a little more nuanced than the classes I have previously delivered for the New Venture Theatre. But everyone seems to be getting a real kick out of it, and it's been gratifying to see performers dig deep and find new reserves within themselves. Apart from anything else, it's been humbling to see so many people come back week after week. There's a fair chance that I might redraft this series of classes as a course of workshops elsewhere for people who weren't able to make it this time round. 

I suppose the main excuse I could throw up for not having quite learned my lines for the short play night is because all my line learning facilities have been powering up for The Crucible, which is the Brighton Fringe production I'm involved with. Thankfully, the lines for that have been a bit of an easier ride (although I'm no way near to being totally signed off of the script just yet). It's a really interesting production, told in a promenade style, and will be performed in a church. I'm told that tickets are already beginning to sell, despite the fringe still being over a month away. It's a great cast, and that's important: a real company feel that makes rehearsals feel like really productive, fun, and pleasingly hard work. It's actually a pretty difficult atmosphere to pull off: I've been involved in a couple of shows where the grumpiness within the cast has broken out into open hositilties. Which, let's be honest, isn't the greatest way forward in a rehearsal. 

The part I'm playing is something of a challenge, if only because of my somewhat preconceived ideas, and how almost literally everyone else has played him: like many Arthur Miller male characters, he's something of a bear of man, at least figuratively, if not physically. Although the physical aspect is something I'm very aware of: I'm a reasonably slight man (although almost a foot taller if I simply stop slouching) and there's a good few cast members who are easily taller than I am. It makes me acutely aware of how I appear on stage, within the context of the play. Having said all that, both as writer and director, I've always been interested in playing against the expectation. I'm just somewhat startled to be playing it myself ....