Monday 28th December 2015

Enjoying the ongoing adaptation of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. What with that, Doctor Who, Meet The Midwife and a Victorian-era Sherlock later this week, it really seems that the BBC have reached Peak BBC this Christmas. Appropriately enough, And Then There Were None is Agatha achieving Peak Christie, with a bunch of disparate strangers trapped together in an old dark house (which, in turn, is located on a remote island). Soon, people start getting murdered, and it’s only a matter of time (and, literally, a process of elimination) before the murderer is revealed, by which time it’s far too late anyway. It’s a device that I used myself for Four Play, although I had to rely on somewhat more contrived reasons to keep everyone in the same house.

Sarah Phelps has done a spectacular job of adapting the story, smartly keeping everything drenched in the Christie mythos, while allowing the characters to break free into relative realism as much as possible. So, while everyone speaks with a stiff, buttoned up manner in polite company (at least, before people start getting bumped off), as soon as the genders are divided – the men wandering off for cigars and war stories – their language becomes a lot more loose and louche. Not only does it add to the realism, but once you understand that each character is themselves presenting a character, it immediately makes everyone more suspect.

I first read And Then There Were None about ten years ago, and haven’t returned to it since. That means that while I remember the central clever rug pull that Christie delivers at the end and could essentially spoil the ending if I wanted to, I can’t recall a certain fine detail that’s fairly important, so I’m going into episode three fairly blind, enjoying the ride as things (and bodies) fall into place. What I do remember is that there are two different versions of the story. At least, I think there are, I’m deliberately not checking the facts on Wikipedia so that I can retain my slight levels of plot blindness for as long as possible. But my recollection is that there is one ending for the novel, which is smart, fiendish, and a stage version, which – well, isn’t. If memory serves, the play is also by Christie, but cheats and fumbles the ending. It’s an understandable and even forgivable fudge – the writer of a novel has a lot more freedom: the author can dictate their voice over proceedings, and alert your attention in particular places. A playwright is (generally) limited to what characters are saying out loud. That’s not always true for every play, but it certainly tends to be the case in a genre that by its very nature is propelled by exposition (‘you may be wondering why I have gathered you all here’).

So on screen, it would appear that the stage (but clumsy) version would be the way to go. But Phelps’ version so far has been so witty and smart, I have every faith that she’ll stand on the shoulders of the original novel, and deliver the ending that is clever, breathtaking – and frankly, bloody cheeky.  

Monday 8th June 2015

In my final year at college, studying theatre, we were told to write and direct our own play. I can’t quite remember what the criteria were, but I know that we were required to come up with at least ten minutes. In a response that was to typify the majority of my writing since, I found it difficult to keep mine from sprawling over half an hour.

That play – which would have been produced in the spring of 2001, I think – was generally well received (certainly it was very well acted). It was a murder mystery with four actors playing four parts each, and – although I didn’t get the chance to write this – the chance of four different endings. It was therefore almost inevitably called ‘Four Play’. I did consider a whole lot of other titles before going for the pun, but nothing else sold the concept quite so well. A lot of the humour of the piece was inspired by watching far too many screenings of the Tim Curry film Clue (which also had multiple endings, and a frenetic, breathless final act), the acidic humour of Mad magazine, and – now that I think about it – an experience I had on another play in a previous drama course, back in Croydon.

I was in a farce called An Italian Straw Hat, and found myself playing two fairly sizeable roles: an aging grumpy old man, and an immaculate, humourless waiter. I’d like to think that this was to explore my very obvious and significant range as an actor, but it’s more likely that there simply weren’t enough men to fill the parts. I don’t remember it as a particularly joyous production – more skewed towards bombastic performance rather than acting – which, even in a farce, is leaning towards tedium. But there was one moment where I had to leave the stage as the grumpy old man, and then return as the immaculate butler in roughly the same amount of time that it’s taken you to read that sentence.

Much of my ego obviously got a kick out of this – managing to switch between two entirely different characters, as well as a complete costume change, in under 40 seconds. In the event, I’m not entirely convinced that anybody noticed the effort I was putting in, and that includes my fellow cast members. I’ve chosen to conclude that that proves just how devastatingly impressive my character switch was. Or something.

So, anyway. All that was in my writing DNA in early 2001. In the week of the show, the course co-ordinator took me aside and mentioned that a student on another theatre course hadn’t gotten around to writing the hour long play that she was meant to for the Edinburgh Fringe that summer. Each year, a select few of the college were able to ride of coat-tails and get a show on at the fringe. Except that this girl didn’t actually have a play finished. ‘And this,’ my course co-ordinator intoned, ‘is fringe material.’ He asked if I’d be interested in taking the ‘Four Play’ up to the Edinburgh Fringe. I was, despite never having been up there, and not truly appreciating the magnitude of the offer. However, the lazy playwright got wind of this idea, and pulled out all the stops to hack out her play (which I increasingly now think was the whole point of my job offer). Her play went up to the fringe, where it was reviewed with the classic line ‘the worst thing on the fringe this year’ (which, as is the contractual obligation, they blew up to a huge size and plastered it all over their posters). ‘Four Play’, meanwhile, was liked well enough that the cast repeated it the following year (after I’d left the course) for a revival. A shaky video of that exists somewhere. I always knew that I’d want to write the play again to full length, and establish the four different endings. However, as is often the case when somebody does a drama course, I entirely avoided acting for about seven years. Once I’d moved down south, I scoped out a few local drama groups, most of which at that time had no interest in producing new work (and certainly not one from a writer they didn’t know). One of the most promising was the New Venture Theatre, and so eventually I posted my colours there. I knew that I’d still have to play the long game -  there was no way they were going to offer a directing / writing gig to someone they’d only just met – and so I had a couple of fun years as actor, and directing a short play (by Mark Wilson) for a new writing showcase. After a while, I felt able to submit my proposal for a production. I’m sure that there were probably a couple of people who raised eyebrows at the idea of a writer directing his own work (quite often a pretty strong signal of self-involved self-satisfaction) but somehow I managed to get it through the gate.

And for the second time, I was blessed with an excellent cast, and a truly amazing back stage crew. There were around 120 complete costume changes, and on some nights, it felt like half of those changes took place in the last twenty minutes. Most audience members seemed to have a great time, some said that the play clearly had a future beyond the confines of amateur theatre, and many gently pointed out that it was a bit long. On this last they were absolutely correct.

So, while it needed a pretty savage edit, even people who had criticised the length said that it didn’t really feel that long – it was just, in order to make the whole thing commercially viable, it needed a chop. This was true, and I was content to leave it alone for a while as my mind attempted to solve the problem without my interference (due to the complicated nature of the set up, it was never going to be as simple as, say, cutting the third scene – each moment was stacked on the other like a house of cards). Meanwhile, almost in passing, someone asked me if I’d heard of a thing in London called ‘The 39 Steps’. I said that I hadn’t, and the conversation drifted elsewhere.

In the five years since, I have of course heard of ‘The 39 Steps’, and I’m aware of the similarities  between that production and ‘Four Play’: both are period pieces where a limited number of actors play multiple parts. It seemed like someone had got to the joke before I did, so I was intrigued enough to check out the London show to see if ‘Four Play’ was a lost cause, or if it was entirely different.

Well. It’s not entirely different. I found myself in London recently, and had a chance to see ‘The 39 Steps’ for myself. ‘Four Play’ does indeed share a very central gag with 39 – that there are four actors (why did it have to be four?) playing lots of different parts. A lot of the joy of both plays is that they are fringe shows done big – unashamedly punching above their weight, and we can see the actors working hard just to keep up. There’s even a joke in both plays that is essentially the same, when the script ‘cheats’ with an apparent fifth cast member in order to facilitate a plot point. Understandably, I spent much of the production squirming between enjoying the show and seething with annoyance. Seems like I can still switch between personas really quickly.

I did some homework to see who had their original production first, and – perhaps surprisingly – I was actually pleased to discover that ‘The 39 Steps’ had beaten me to the punch, in their original fringe production, by about four years. I think I’d rather that than the alternative: that I’d written and produced something, and then did nothing with it for nearly ten years while someone else managed to get in first. That would have been upsetting.

And yet. Although there is clearly a lot of shared DNA, there are marked differences. 39 delights in the impossible task of creating a Hollywood movie on stage, complete with planes, trains, and car crashes. ‘Four Play’, on the other hand, gets overly complicated by getting trapped by its own form and set up: actors aren’t able to arrive on stage as one particular character until they have the opportunity to leave the stage as a previous character, and as a result there have to be additional narrative quirks to facilitate the entrances and exits, as well as some humour coming from the actors/characters forcing the others on stage into ever quicker and more difficult changes.

The humour in 39 (I would claim) is also slightly broader: they have fun with breaking the reality of the staging once or twice, and the joke I spoke about earlier, the one about the fake fifth cast member, is actually somewhat different. In ‘Four Play’, it occurs relatively early in the text, and is reasonably subtle: all actors are on stage, interrupted by a knocking on the door. They are momentarily confused before shrugging it off and continuing. We didn’t explain the gag any further (it’s the first time the play implicitly references the number of actors), and I knew each night that if the audience laughed right away, then they’d got the gag, and we had them for the rest of the night. And so it proved. In ‘The 39 Steps’, they lampshade the joke a lot more, having an actor yell out in frustration ‘This is meant to be a play for four actors!’ (again, why did they have to have four?). The audience enjoyed it, but I felt it laboured the joke. That said, it was an indication that, no matter how much ‘Four Play’ and ’39 Steps’ appear to have in common, they are actually quite different.

However, I’ve spent a lot of time since undecided if I want to be all depressed about the whole thing – throw it all away – or take comfort in the fact that there’s clearly a market for this kind of thing. Nowadays, it’s all about the money: when I was able to produce ‘Four Play’ the first time round, doing it with a local theatre group – complete with its own studio space, etc, easily saved me thousands. Now, if I was going to produce it myself, it would be beyond me. So I consider the possible thought processes of any potential producer – will they react with ’39 Steps already did this,’ or ‘if people liked 39 Steps, they’ll love this! ..’

In the end, I rather think I’ll strap myself in, complete the edits, and then hawk it around to any possible interested producers or agents. Because, after all, I rather like this script. And after all, if ’39 Steps’ really did get to my idea of four actors playing multiple parts, I can take comfort in the reality that we can’t possibly have been the first.  

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.

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. 

Sunday 30th June 2013

Spent the last couple of hours working on a play. It's only a ten minute play, but that doesn't necessarily make things any easier. With a regular play - or indeed any story, you have to hit the ground running, not spend too much time circling the plot before getting stuck in. Apparently, a hell of a lot of scripts and stories submitted to competitions and  companies have too many opening scenes where people are just meeting up over coffee, having not particularly interesting conversations about nothing in particular. You can understand why these scenes have been written - the writer has had to try and work out who these characters are, how they talk, what makes them tick. What's less clear is why such scenes survive several drafts until the final submitted version. Those scenes are the ones that get cut (or should get cut) while you get to the point of the story, in two minutes or less. 

In a ten minute play, without stating the bleeding obvious, the same applies, to the nth degree. Your statement of intent has to be - well, stated, in the first thirty seconds or so. Certainly, in the draft that I've written so far, that hasn't happened. I can understand why, and also why many authors shy away from the same in their scripts. You don't want to blow it all in the first minute - otherwise, it could be argued, where else is there for your story to go? The answer, of course, is always forward. The story may not even be about what you originally thought it was. Now, that's a startling thought for any writer - that whatever idea got them to start the actual story is in fact facile, unoriginal, and at best, merely the kickstarter to the other story that you haven't even thought of yet - but it's an important one to realise, I think. It allows you to stop being quite so precious, and to be slightly more relaxed about letting go of your ideas - adapting, adopting to change. 

The draft that I'm working on isn't even the first draft, I think. I've recently got into the frame of mind that the first bit of work you do on a story or a script doesn't have to be thought of as the first draft. This allows your inner critic to get a lot more freedom, when you finally let them off the leash. Your inner critic still gets to go wild, bitter, and - yes, critical - on your 'first' draft, but it also means that you still get to do a lot of false starts and working out of ideas before you get to that level. For me, a first draft should still be a reasonable piece of work. Sure, there's probably (at least) ten drafts to follow, but that first draft shouldn't exactly be an embarrassment to anyone, least of all its author. 

This summer, I hope to redraft an old script that just won't let go - Four Play. This is a script that has already had two productions, albeit of two very different versions of the script. The most recent version, a couple of years ago, had very positive feedback, and I have decided in a fit of entirely uncharacteristic ego, to take that feedback at face value, including the holy grail that it (the script) might have some kind of life entirely independent from me (in other words, that it might make me some money). However, in order to make that any kind of reality, the one piece of negative feedback, often and consistently repeated, has to be taken into account - that it was just too damn long. 

Now, I believe people who were in the audiences that said that, when you were actually watching the play, that it didn't seem all that long. However, I also believe those people that said that, yes, it really did seem that dam long. So, its required from me to hack out about half a hour. Not exactly an easy task, and not just because I'm a precious writer who can't bear to kill his darlings. Well, not entirely because of that. 

For those of you that don't already know, Four Play is a story set in the traditional trappings of a county house murder mystery. The twist in this play is that all four actors have to play four parts each, the costume changes getting all the more impossibly quick and frenetic. Plus, there's also four endings. I think we calculated that by the end of the night, there are more than 116 costume changes - and an equal number of exits and entrances. All of this means that any editing that I do isn't simply a matter of just cutting out that scene or this scene, since that scene or this scene is very likely in place to accommodate another actor's costume change. Having said all that, I worked out earlier this year how I could (probably) knock off twenty minutes or so from the running time. In the original (or, to be more accurate, most recent) version of the script, a murder is committed in the prologue. Then, scene two, set the following morning, introduces all the main characters, and goes about setting up their motives, red herrings, etc. Nobody knows about the murder that's already been committed. After about forty minutes, the next murder is committed, and then the pace really kicks in. I always likened it to a roller coaster that spends the first part of the journey going steeply uphill, so that when it drops, it can do so with real speed and energy. 

Finally, I worked out earlier this year that if all the characters already know that the prologue murder has been committed, then we could get to the meat of the story a helluva lot quicker. Of course, it worried me that it would be a lot more difficult to introduce all the back stories and red herrings, and also how I was going to hide the identity of the first victim - it's a big reveal in the finale because nobody's actually aware of the murder, and therefore a lot more difficult to pull off as a surprise if everyone knows that somebody has been murdered. But, I was reasonably confident that something would work itself out if I just got along to writing it. It was still going to be a bit clunky, but I figured, that's what 27th drafts are for. 

However, yesterday, I realised that there was no need for scene two to be set the following morning - that was a waste of time, and actually made the pacing a bit odd. Actually, I realised, scene two should follow pretty much continuously from scene one. It does mean, however, that the very top of the play is pretty much at the heightened level of finale  - the pace and attitude of where we come in at the very start of the play is where most plays check out. Now, that worries me for a number of reasons - it's a hell of a big ask for the audience, and an even bigger ask for the actors -and I'm not yet convinced that the story itself won't be capsized by such a move. However, starting at the end is exactly what any writing manual / workshop implores you to do. I just never expected to be considering to do it quite so literally. Whatever else, I'm convinced that many audiences will not have seen anything like that on stage before. And that's a good thing. 

Probably.  

A Short Message About Acting Class

Reasonably successful Acting Class at the NVT tonight. I say reasonably because it's always difficult to tell. The classes are purely 'drop in', meaning that they always cater for all levels of practitioner and performer - the most confident actor, and the most nervous beginner. Add to that mix the fact that some people will want to play the same improv games again and again, while others will want to progress further and further, and you have a great deal of variables to contend with, looking around at a room of faces, unable to decipher they are pale from fear, lethargy, or the British summer.

So, all that said, it was a pretty good workshop, with lots of good responses and ideas from the fairly large group of NVT members we had tonight. I tried not to rely too heavily on improv this time around, partially because I'll be doing a series of NVT improv workshops in January (and hopefully some elsewhere in Hove later this year), but also because I want to see if there's anything else I'm capable of. I'm not sure what's going on there: I don't consider myself particularly confident in many aspects of my life, but when it comes to theatre - whether it's as an actor, writer or director (most often as director) I'm not very skilled at being complacent. I'm fully aware that that sounds like a 'humblebrag' - it's not meant to. Partially because I'm not always sure how successful I am pushing past my comfort zone, but also because it almost always makes me sick: with the last three three things I've directed, I've woken up in the middle of the night, wanting to run away from it all, wondering why on
Earth I ever suggested it in the first place. I include the third of the productions in this list, despite it won't even happen until May next year.

Actually, that's not entirely true. The three productions I'm talking about were 'my' productions - 'Four Play', 'Medea', and the as yet untitled play in next years Brighton Festival Fringe - but I didn't include 'Three Kinds Of Me', which I haven't (yet) ran away from, , possibly because I was invited to direct it (as opposed to asking to do so), although, thinking about it, that should probably put even more pressure on me. Perhaps I won't think about it quite so much.

I Think They Call It Grazing

A reasonable amount of writing today, although if I had an editor, they probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. My attention span seems to be slim for a writer. I've got about ten short stories on the go at the moment - which is great, it can be tough enough to come up with just one idea - but since one of my biggest problems (or do we still call it challenge these days?) as a writer is to actually finish the darn things, this can be something of a worry.

What I do then, is either a delaying tatic, or the best way forward, depending on what your view is. I spend a couple of hours on one story, and as I feel my interest begin to wane, or if there's a currently unsolvable problem that's about to demolish me, I jump ship to another story. I can't shake the feeling that this feels distinctly amatuerish, except for the fact that it seems to work. I certainly get more writing actualy done this way, rather than attempting the almost-always-failing method of re-working one page in an effort to get it exactly 'perfect' - whatever perfect means. I seem to work in this way even when I'm working on a single project - for instance, when I was writing 'Four Play', I intially wrote various keys scenes or jokes, then began to fill in gaps between them, before finally shifting them around, deleting them, re-writing, ignoring massive plot holes, writing the two scenes to bridge the plot holes, which would normally suggest only one logical thing between the two , write that .. and then, finally, have something approximating a coherent script. It probably isn't the most time-effective way to write, but it seems to have worked so far for me.

I'm a little concerned about work taking hours and mental agilty from me when I return next week, although it's true that for the first time in a year, I won't be working seven days a week. What is nice, however, is the messages of encouragement friends send regarding my writing, asking to see works in progress/finished stories. It's remarkably energising, and it's at least partially why I've been making an attempt to keep up this blog: while I'm painfully aware that there are few things more dull than a writer talking about writing (there's a fair chance that if they're talking to you about the novel that they're working on, that novel will never be completed), I use this blog to speak loudly and clearly to the three or four people who are actually reading it as a way of painting myself into a corner: if I have enough people asking me how the play/story/whatever is going on, there may be enough personal embarassment actor at stake to goad me into actually finishing the damn thing.

For the record, there are two projects (as a writer) that I'm working on at the moment: a re-write of 'Four Play', that I expect to take until at least the end of the year (which probably means that any new production won't be until at least well into the latter part of 2013), and a collection of short stories. As for the latter, I have no idea if short stories are fashionable at the moment or not - whatever I read on the subject seems to have conflicting views. But in any case, short stories seem to have a disipline all of their own - and the possibilty that they're about 150,000 words more likely to be finished.

It's Connected To The Arm Bone

Managed to do something painful to my shoulder the other day. I was trying to get something down from the top of the wardrobe, and I slipped. I put out my hand, slipped a bit too much, and my hand slammed against the wall, while my body ended up staying pretty much where it was. Bone ground against bone. All a bit painful. I looked it up on the internet, typing in 'Have I dislocated my shoulder?' (and google can get a bit disturbing with what it offers you as you're typing in those first few words). While it's still - a couple of days later - reasonably wince-making, it doesn't appear that I've done anything to worry about, although I'm very aware that my body is doing extra work to stop my shoulder being quite so painful, meaning that even writing this blog entry is something of a exhausting chore. But that's okay; I'm reasonably confident that it's probably something of an exhausting chore to have to read it, too.

I haven't won the lottery this week (actually, that's a lie, I won eight quid on the Euromillions, you may have seen it reported in the national press) so it looks like I'll be unable to avoid returning to work next week. This is something of a worry, since I've felt this week that my mind has been finally clicking into place with regard to all the creative stuff that I've had on the boil since, well, forever. A good few of the short stories that I've been working on are almost complete, by which I mean they're a couple of drafts away from their final incarnation. I'm very aware that once work hits back in again, I might end up being too physically and emotionally exhuasted to work on anything. I'm always in awe of those people who have full time jobs and families who still manage to create thier novel, play or whatever, although I'm fully aware that procrastination and re-runs of Fraiser are the real enemies here. In a good news/bad news situation, I'm about to lose one day of work a week. Good news: this means I'm no longer working seven days a week, four weeks a month. Bad news: significant hit on my already meagre funds. Good news: a full day when I can actually catch up on the writing that I always say I can't get around to writing because I'm working seven days a week. Bad news: I might be lying to myself.

Another thing that I've been managing to work on this week is surgery on a play I wrote last year, called Four Play. It was part of the Brighton Festival Fringe, and seemed to be very well received, even if everyone agreed it was too long. I need to lose about forty minutes from it. Now, it's not just the precious writer part of me that found this difficult - I'm quite happy to hack out huge parts of anything I write, but there's a technical aspect to Four Play that means that I have to consider very carefully logistics of timing even when I'm editing out just a few lines. But I've had a few ideas this month that would seem to allow me to do that - I just now need to re-write the damn thing in the full knowledge that the next draft (and quite possibly the one after that) will be an incoherent mess. But it looks like something good might come out of it, and as much as anything, I should really acknowledge and thank the vast amounts of encouragement that I've received from those who saw, and were involved with, the original productions. More news on that as it develops.

The two other things I'm working on at the moment are a one-woman show, and improv classes. The one-woman show is written by, and starring a friend of mine, and it's the first time (as far as I can recall) that I've been a 'director for hire', which has its own, unique series of pressures. Luckily, it's being produced with the New Venture Theatre in Brighton, which I've always found to be an encouraging and nuturing atmosphere.

The other thing - the improv classes - aren't being held at the NVT (although I will be running acting classes there next month). It's been a while since I've been directly involved with improv, although it's really how I began to perform when I was in Brighton. (like most drama students, once I got my degree, I immediately stopped acting for about five years). I will be producing an improvised play next May as part of the Fringe, and it's going to be helpful to start up a 'boot-camp' for those actors interested in getting involved before the auditions kick off. Although, in truth, the workshops are as much for me to get my game back on as they are for any improvisers wanting to improve their skills.

As usual, details when I know exactly what's going on (I'm just waiting for the venue to be confirmed). I'm aiming to get a couple of the short stories finished (by which I mean final draft finished) by the end of this week. The aim is to enter them for writing contests (something that I've never done before), and once I've got enough, put them together on a kindle collection. Hell, if everyone else is doing it .

Back To Brighton

I'm in a coffee shop in Brighton making two significant mistakes. The first is having chosen a coffee shop that comes with its own wifi access, meaning that the first real bit of writing that I've done this afternoon is the sentence and a half you've just read, and the second mistae is reading a book called The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide.

It's always the same at this time of year. Having not been at work for a couple of weeks means that I'm beginning to feel - well, you know, a human being, and having spent a week at the Fringe seeing a variety of great (and terrible) shows reminds me how possible it is to do the same. At the moment, my days aren't packed hour to hour with demands on my time, and so, despite my claim earlier, I am actually completing a bit of writing, and my mind is firing on at least two cylinders, trying to work out how easy (or at least possible) it would be to bring a show up to Edinburgh.

It is, of course, all about the time and money. Even those performers and companies that latch on to the valuable free festivals that have become so important in recent years have at least some disposable income to make a month away from real life a viable option. I've always claimed, and indeed assumed, that I'm in no way bitter - that's the way that the cards have been dealt, and in any case, I don't personally know of a single performer who hasn't worked incredibly hard for whatever degree of success they've achieved. But now I'm thinking I may as well get a little bitter. It's something to do, isn't it?

I spoke to a lot of performers this year who had found themselves in terrible shows, the quality of which was reflected in low audience numbers, and savage reviews. One actor I spoke to mentioned the review that the show in which he was appearing. Not only was the review better writen that the show, it struggled to give one star: 'And that was generous,' he muttered darkly. It must be disheartening for a company to repeat a show for at least two weeks of what's one of the world's biggest arts festivals to increasingly dwindling audiences, fighting against the positive word of mouth that's buzzing around - as far as you can tell - any other show in town.

What seemed to link these shows - apart from the fact that they were by all accounts dire - was that they were bankrolled by the director. At this point we should acknowledge that in these cases, 'director' refers only to the person with money and an ego, and not, as you might hope, any detecable charisma or talent. In at least two of these cases, the 'director' was doing the show as part of their PHD. I'm still not entirely sure what this indicates.

All of this doesn't stop me, each year, from coming back to Brighton in a slightly more creative frame of mind, finally working out what cuts and changes are needed in the show that people have been telling me for about ten years now that I really MUST bring to the Fringe, of having new ideas for stories/plays/stand up that invariably jostle for postion alongside the incomplete ideas I had this time last year before real life got back in the way. I often read of all these people who managed to complete their first novel in the half hour between waking up and going to work, and I honestly don't know how they managed it.

This year, then, I'm going to see if there's any value in the small and short. There's plenty of short story and short play competitions out there, all with, if not some critical recognition, then at least cash prizes. In some respect, this is what this blog is about. While there are few things more boring than a writer talking about what s/he's writing about (while they're talking about it, chances are they're no-where near getting to actually writing about it), I can understand why they do it: if they announce they're working on something, they have witnesses. Not an audience, but witnesses - people who can pull them up in a years time and ask them how that novel/play/joke/to do list is going. And if they've got nowhere with it: well, clearly they're not serious about it all.

A Day Off. Sort Of.

Within the finishing line (for me) of Edinburgh this year, as I'll be leaving in a couple of days. I've enjoyed it more than I did last year, although it feels more like hard work this time round - the reviews I've been writing have felt like more of a struggle, particuarly in the instances where I've attempted to review things that are somewhat outside my 'comfort zone'. There have been a couple of things this year that I knew I was never going to review, simply because I liked the performer too much. I'm thinking specfically here of the likes of Daniel Kitson and Josie Long, who I happened to see on the same day. I knew that I didn't want to review them,  just see them as a punter, because I wanted to simply watch them without the need to make notes, and also (this may the more important point) there comes a time when it's entirely pointless to review performers you already expect to like and be positive about. There are a couple of acts this year that, keeping that in mind, I suspect I have written my last review for.

However, I feel like I've become a true Fringe veteran today because I 'almost' had a day off. In years past, I would feel like I was wasting a day up in Edinburgh if I wasn't seeing five or six shows. Considering it takes about five years to truly get a measure of the city, and there can be less than three minutes between shows, this way madness lies. But today was somewhat relaxed, and I had no desire to complicate matters. I still had one show to review at the end of the night, but the rest of the day was fairly empty. Which is not to say that I didn't fill it with a couple of shows anyway - Richard Herring's Talking Cock (actually the first time I've seen him live), and earlier in the day, Angela Barnes and Matt Richardson on the Free Fringe. Both shows were great fun, and both were crammed to the rafters with punters. It's very delightful to see such huge audiences attend shows headlined by performers you have at least a nodding aquaintance with. I'm sure I'll be boring people with 'I knew them' type anedoctes in less than a year.

The other way I know I'm a Fringe veteran actually started a couple of years ago, but I thought I'd gotten over it. However, it kicked in again today (or was it yesterday? It's the Fringe, I have no idea). It's the point where, as an audience member, you begin to take as keen an interest in the sightlines and lighting rig as you do the act on stage. I get frustrated by this, this niggling hope that at some point I might have the chance to bring a production up to the festival. Of course, at the moment, without recourse to a lottery win, this seems to be pretty much impossible.

These latter days of my Fringe visits are the most cruel - surronded by thousands of creative people, relaxed after a couple of weeks off, my mind begins to start actually having a couple of good ideas that might genuinely work as Fringe ideas, and just today I had an idea how to rewrite my Brighton Fringe play from a couple of years ago to get it to a Edfringe-manageable time of at least a hour and a half. Nobody seems to have told my head that in a very short time, it'll be back at work. It seems a shame to let it know ...