Sunday 7th June 2015

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.

Wednesday November 5th 2014

So, here we are then: just one month until the first night  of The Snow Queen. Back in March, it was just so many scribbles on scraps of paper. Now it's a cast of twenty-five plus. I'm still slightly giddy at how it's all turned out.

Don't get me wrong; strictly speaking, it hasn't turned out yet. There's still a month to go after all, and all sorts of special effects to sort out, as well as recording the music (a chapter of accidents has meant that our original musician isn't able to provide the music for us, which, if the show wasn't already in  a pretty good place, would be feeling us with fear and panic. As it is, however, the songs have sounded pretty damn good acoustically, so I'm inclined to think that we're in a good space no matter what happens). But there's genuine chemistry between the cast, some really lovely performances, and all manner of people working behind the scenes (occasionally literally) to ensure that this will be a very special show.

On this Friday, we've arranged a photo shoot on the Brighton Pavilion ice rink (snow / ice - c'mon, we wee going to pass up an opp like that?) which really begins our countdown to the show. Early next week, we get the cast into the space, and at roughly the same time the set will begin to be built. (I keep saying to anyone who will listen that I had genuinely intended to do a show that was simply two actors, in a black box, no set. Nobody ever believes me). We're hoping to lay some tracks for the songs next week or so, and at around the same time we invite the youth theatre section of the NVT to join (making the cast numbers bubble up around the 30 mark: next time - 2 actors in a black box. Honest.)

It's all getting far too exciting, and I am in equal parts eager and terrified by what the next month will bring.

Wednesday 24th September 2014

Last week was the first read thru for The Snow Queen. I only realised during the evening that a significant number of the cast were there on a lot of faith - they hadn't seen a script at audition, or even when being offered a part. (They should consider themselves lucky: some of my casts haven't seen a complete script until halfway through rehearsal. You think I'm kidding). 

It was a lovely night. Obviously, as director/writer, you're hyper-sensitive to the mood of the room, anxiously scanning the faces to gauge the reaction of everybody (particularly when they're not reading, and simply listening to others), but it seemed to me that everyone was generally positive, even allowing for my manical paranoia. The play itself seemed to whip along at a fair pace - a good sign if that's happening on the very first read thru - and no scenes sounded like they outstayed their welcome. 

A couple of lines still clanged in my ears, dialogue that just snagged like a jagged nail on a jumper (lines  like that one, for instance), but they seem to me to be easy fixes: a word here or there to get everything breezy. And it's encouraging to know that all of the actors are already finding the character within their characters - in a play like this one, even though it's not actually a pantomime, it's really important (to me at least) that each character, even those who might only be on stage for a matter of minutes, have the potential to be the absolute favourite character of some kid in the audience. 

Despite my very best intentions to keep things simple (no, honestly - don't laugh), there are still a good number of technical demands on the show, not least a number of snow effects. To their credit, the team on Snow Queen (Team Queen?) have not yet ran away screaming, and are clearly thinking hard about how to get me what I want, or at the very least a decent facsimile. It's all very humbling, and prompts in me a desire to look like I know what the hell I'm talking about. We've had a couple of rehearsals proper since then, and I'm keeping them fairly small and simple - the big rehearsals with twenty-plus (?!?) won't start really untill next month. We've got a couple of issues, like the image that's in my head for the Snow Queen's throne, and the fact that, while we have the music and lyrics written, we've just lost our best chance of someone to arrange the music. It's not that surprising, really - its quite a challenge to find someone who's prepared to give up lots and lots of hours of creativity and talent for no money whatsoever. 

Actually, scratch that - it's what the New Venture Theatre (and many other non-professional theatres up and down the country) are absolutely brilliant at. Obviously, a good few of us - such as the actors and directors - are reasonably guaranteed of some degree of praise at the end of everything. Generally speaking, people don't tend to go out of their way to praise the set. Indeed, if they do, it's usually an implicit criticism of the production. So I'm reasonably confident that we'll be able to solve our musical quandary (I must be, otherwise I wouldn't be happy talking about it on a public blog). 

Tonight's rehearsal is with Gerda and the Robber Girl, both of whom I'm rehearsing with for the first time - Gerda partially because the actress is already deep into rehearsals for another production which goes up in about a fortnight, so frankly, that tends to be her priority at the moment. I'm really looking forward to tonights session, and seeing what everyone does with the roles, particularly as I've altered the characteristics somewhat from the Hans Christian Andersen original. But then, I had to do that once or twice in the adaptation ..