Saturday 6th April 2013

I'm probably two, maybe three drafts away from the final draft of a story I'm working on called 'Broom Handle'. If I'm lucky, it's only one draft. When I had the idea for the story, it seemed really simple. And, actually, it is: the idea itself is quite a basic one, and shouldn't require too much in the way of complicated add-ons. But because the concepts aren't that simple for the characters themselves, I need to be a bit clever about how I'm telling the story, a cleverness that's currently hiding from me. Over the last few drafts, I've begun to hate this story. Not actively, not with real passion, not even so much that I consider the writing (and re-writing) of it to be a genuine chore .. but certainly enough for me to question if the story is actually good enough. And, by extension, if I'm good enough as a writer. 

Again, this is why it's useful to have deadlines. If I'd been writing this story a year or so ago, pretty much at any point in my history, there's a damn good chance that I'd have given up on it by now. After all: what's the point? Who's actually waiting for this story? No-one. (actually, that's a bit of a lie: two friends have asked to read it when it's finished, because they quite liked the sound of the idea behind it). It's so easy to let a pretty good idea wither and die even before it's finished. That's any idea: whether it be for a short story, a film - or even a little blog like this: if you don't get the damn thing down as quickly as possible, even if it's not particularly good, then there's a very good chance that nothing will get written at all. Of course, that's a major factor in itself: so many things don't get written because they are not perfect in their first incarnation. Then the inner critic gets disheartened, dials back, and thinks that they'll do better if the first running jump is much better. What happens, of course, is that there are lots of running jumps, quite a few bad stumbles, and then: nothing. Nothing actually gets finished. Writing (as well as anything I do, like acting, directing, improvising, whatever) seems to be a journey of constantly re-learning the same things, over and over. You can have twenty years in the same discipline, and still, in that twentieth year, re-realise with evangelical fervour the thing that you learnt in the first day. For me, in this past year, it's been this: it really is irrelevant if I write every single day. Even if I'm producing, say three thousand words every single day: that doesn't matter. Sure, it's relevant, but those three thousand words a day don't really add to the pile if you don't do one simple thing: ACTUALLY FINISH. 

I think it was doing Nanowrimo last year that really cemented that ethos for me. Now, I haven't yet looked back at the novel that I finished in November (with about thirty minutes to spare), and I'm reasonably confident that it's a pretty shoddy bit of story telling. But I know that it's a pretty shoddy bit of storytelling  and that in itself has been a instructive experience. Just the pressure of finding narrative closure (or a deliberate lack of closure) for my characters demanded of me a certain amount of discipline  that I hadn't always really buckled down to before, mainly because of that old idea that nobody's actually waiting for the story, so it didn't matter - not really - if I didn't actually buckle down and finish the damn thing. 

This year, I seem to have got a lot better at actually finishing stories. Some of them, I even think are reasonably good. So far, fate doesn't quite agree - none of them have been shortlisted for any short story competitions that I've sent them off for. On occasion, I suspect that the story wasn't quite right - either for whatever comp I was sending them off for, or maybe even that the story itself wasn't perfect. I haven't sent off a story that I didn't think was as good as it could be, however. 

So, these deadlines are a real life line. As I've indicated, there's a reasonable chance that if I didn't have a deadline for this story (April 15th), I might have bailed on it quite some time ago, as just so much damn hard work. It's easy to forget, however, that writing - good writing - is supposed to be damn hard work: it's not as if you can just throw one word onto the page after the other without so much as a re-write or checking over to see if it makes any sense whatsoever (like this blog, for instance). It really is - without getting pretentious about it all - an actual craft, and that demands a certain amount of respect and hard work. It can take a very long time to understand exactly what that means. I suspect I'm not even close to truly appreciating what I'm taking on. 

Lots of rehearsal this week for both the Brighton Fringe shows. With Three Kinds Of Me, we're having to do a fair bit of re-write in order to get the balance of the show right for the new space (and the new running time). We always knew that, just because of these seemingly innocuous and irrelevant details, that the show would be very different, that, indeed, it would be about something different, but it's still a helluva challenge to rip up what you've already achieved, and, for all practical intents and purposes, begin again. Well, I say we: all of the work is being done by writer/performer Sarah Charsley, who is doing extraordinarily well. I can imagine how challenging it is to totally re-do something that you are creatively so close to. 

As  well as 3KoM, we've got A Beginning, A Muddle, And An End, the totally improvised show. I'm still debating with format, etc - I don't want it to be too much of a ringleader/circus type improv show, where the 'director' directly addresses the audience and asks them to call out suggestions, because I feel (this week, anyway) that this is not quite in the neighbourhood of what I want the finished product to be. This isn't a judgement call on one kind of improvisation as opposed to another, but I certainly want the audience(s) to have the very real experience of a play - rather than an extended sketch - being formed before their very eyes. This week, we were rehearsing in the DukeBox Theatre, which gave the cast a good chance to experience how it will feel to perform on an actual stage, with light and music / sound. Things are beginning to fall into place .. 

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.

Monday 18th February 2013

In the middle of auditions for our improvised play, A Beginning, A Muddle, And An End, which will be performed in May, as part of the Brighton Festival Fringe. I've had over twenty people rock up to the auditions, which is a remarkably good result. Over the last couple of years, I've been directing scripted pieces, and had a decent enough turn out for auditions, but the numbers turning up to these auditions genuinely surprised me. You'd think people would be a lot more scared by volunteering to get involved in a production where they really won't know what they're going to be doing even by the second, third or fourth night of the run. This is what quite a few people (who aren't auditioning) seem not to be able to get quite clear on: BME will be an entirely improvised piece (as opposed to devised). It's a fact that's already waking me up in the middle of the night.

I have to keep the cast relatively small, but that still means I could go as high as eight. I haven't quite decided yet (and won't do so until the end of the week). Whatever happens, I'm going to have to turn away people whose auditions and previous work I've really quite enjoyed. This is one of the more difficult aspects of directing anything, and it's not something I'm looking forward to, particularly if there's anyone who - clearly talented and charismatic - gets turned down, and asks the deathly question 'why?'. There's not always a clear and logical answer.

Also this week, we had our first meeting for Three Kinds Of Me, which is being revived for the Fringe. There's going to be a lot of juggling of timetables (I'm having to find a way to essentially rehearse two plays at the same time. That's ok, because I'm only in that situation until late March. When I add a third, and then a fourth production into the mix). There's also the fact that Sarah Charsley, who has written and will perform 3KM, will have to adapt the script into a fringe-friendly hour. That's not impossible, since the original only ran at about a hour twenty, but editing isn't simply a case of hacking off a number of pages so that you can make the timings work. If you cut what seems to be the least relevant piece of dialogue, then what's left can seem weighted all o one particular subject, and the play ends up being about something that you didn't quite intend. Well, we begin rehearsals for 3KM in March, so it won't be too long before the new version takes shape.

This morning, I sent off a couple of sketches to the BBC radio show Newsjack. The sketches I sent last week didn't make the cut, which is obviously a bit of a knock. Added to that, I couldn't really think of anything to do a funny sketch about. I had a couple of angry rants about the Sun's front page on Friday morning, as well as the Daily Mail publishing photographs of an actresses sonogram of her unborn baby (really), but, needless to say, neither of those stories lent themselves particularly well to a programme that is, despite any topicality or satire, is more impish than hard hitting. Plus, I couldn't get away from the fact that the real life events were more ridiculous and sad than any sketch I could contrive to write. I managed a couple of things, however, and managed to post them just before the deadline. While my inner editor told me that they were awful (and therefore, should I really be wasting the readers' time with them), I recognised that they were at least OK, and might be better than I personally thought they were. Plus, I kept at the forefront of my mind the possibility that the quality of the thousands of other submissions that newsjack would receive woolly be at least equal, if not worse, than my effort, and in any case the amount of submissions in week 2 was reasonably likely to drop off quite dramatically.

Finally, tomorrow, at the Marlbourgh Theatre in Brighton, I'm going to attempt a bit of improv that I'm going to find absolutely bloody terrifying. The idea is that I'm going to make up a story on the spot, and tell it, Jackanory style, in front of a paying audience. I'll get a character name, a location, and then tell a story - hopefully coherently - in about 10 minutes, which is going to be a heart-attack-inducingly long time. I won't have any jokes or improv games to fall back on, and not will I be able to rely on fellow improvisers. One of the biggest rules of improv is making sure that you listen. Not only will I have nobody to listen to, but, as I have increasingly discovered recently, I'm not even capable of listening to myself.

Sunday 3 February 2013

I've just come to the rather startling realisation that I'm going to be directing four different things this Spring, all at the same time. Three of them will be in the Brighton Festival Fringe, and the fourth will be about a month after that. This might be what people are going on about when they accuse me of taking too much on.

The first thing is a revival - my friend Sarah Charsley wrote and performed her own script Three Kinds Of Me last year, and graciously allowed me to hinder her in the productions realisation. She's making the same mistake again for the fringe, and we're adapting the production to fit into a hour's space as per the usual demands of the festival. Three Kinds Of Me will be performed at The Warren (we just got the venue confirmed this week) and it looks to be very exciting. I'll be fascinated to see how we adapt a script that was created with one venue in mind (the NVT), and alter it significantly (but on the other hand, seemingly not at all) for a whole new venue complete with it's own dimensions and technical specs. I know that this is what professional productions have to do all the time, but I've never claimed to be in any way professional.

Speaking of the NVT, my second fringe production will be staged there, just a week after Three Kinds Of Me (which will make the production weeks of both interesting, to say the least). It's going to be an entirely improvised play, with a completely new story/play each night. It's at this point that many people react with suspicion, assuming that there must be some kind of 'cheat', or key scenes that stay the same each night. This isn't the case. The cast will rock up on stage each night with absolutely no idea of what they're going to be doing over the following hour. Now, you might argue that's largely true of some scripted plays, and I'm not going to argue with you on that score, but the fact remains that this is already one of the most terrifying productions I've been involved with, and it hasn't even started yet. And I speak as someone who's already directed Greek tragedy. There's a couple of audition dates, the first of which is this Friday (the 8th). If I get enough people along to the audition, I'm hoping to audition people together in hour long slots (you know, 7 til 8, 8 til 9, 9 til 10), so please get in touch if you're thinking about trying out for the production, and I'll let you know what's going on.

The other two productions are both with the youth theatre I work with - the PQA - and the first is a 10 minute play competition. I'll come up with more details as soon as they're confirmed, but generally, if you know any budding playwrights between the ages of 10 and 17, there's a chance for them to script a 10 minute play that will be performed by professional actors at the Old Courtroom in Brighton towards the end of the Fringe Festival. We'll also throw in a master lass with a BAFTA winning playwright to really get you kick started.

The other thing I'm working on with the youth theatre is a musical. For someone who isn't a particular musical fan (and indeed cannot sing) I find myself directing a fair amount of musicals. Well, I say musical. The last one was We Will Rock You. Which was actually great fun, although I did find myself rewriting significant amounts. Not because I'm that power hungry, but because they send you out the same version of the script no matter who you are, and they make no changes in the youth version, leaving you to edit out all the blow job gags (of which there are a fair amount). I felt that some edits were needed before I let the kids loose on it. Luckily, I don't think that there's quite as many of those sort of jokes in The Wiz. Not as far as I can remember, anyway.

Finally, I've spent this morning re-reading my latest draft of a short story called Broom Handle, a thing that I originally started last year. And, by God, it's terrible. Well, it's not terrible, but it's very clunky. The idea itself isn't too bad, and I like the characters, but it's very exposition heavy, and it takes too long to get to the point - which it currently needs to, because there's a lot to explain, otherwise the point that it's currently taking too long to get too will be - well, pointless. It's an odd read, because I can still see the potential for the finished product, but because it's currently frankly not very good, it's a bit of a dispiriting read. It would be extraordinary easy just to give up on it now as far too much effort. Luckily, however, the themes and ideas in it fit terrifyingly well into an upcoming competition with cash prize and inclusion in anthology, so that serves very well as some kind of incentive. It's probably about three drafts away from whatever version I finally send off as an entry. We'll see how it all goes ..

Moran And More

Went to see Caitlin Moran this week, at the Old Market in Hove. She's just published her new book, and is doing the whole chat/Q & A/book signing tour thing.

I met her afterward - by which I mean I lined up with everyone else to get my book signed - when we chatted very briefly, and she said flattering things. I'm reasonably convinced that she has a whole list of well rehearsed flattering things to say to people at these sorts of events, but, hell, if she's going to put the spadework in to lie so sweetly, it would be impolite not to take her at face value.

She's a great talker, effortlessly charming and engaging, and has the rare raconteur's skill of managing to spin out what could be a reasonably tissue thin story about a chance encounter on a train into a much more  more  of a brilliant anecdote. In person, she's what you hope every columnist will be in real life: someone you can just prop a bar with for a few hours, line up the G&Ts, and just natter with into the small hours. As opposed to the rest of us, who manage to pummel potentially good anecdotes into over-long bits of dirge. Which I hope to demonstrate daily, with this blog, here.

But despite the fact that Caitlin Moran is quite garrulous, she made a couple of allusions to being quite shy. This was met with some derision by her interviewer, and indeed, those members of the audience who had already read How To Be A Woman, that suggested people didn't quite believe that shyness was something that could be always listed in her top 10 of characteristics.  But to me, it made absolute sense. I think it makes sense to anyone who uses words as some kind of transaction in their career. Obviously, most of us talk from day to day in our lives, but equally obviously, for some of us, words are our currency, whether that be as a writer, an actor, or any kind of public speaker. I think it's entirely possible - and indeed, logical - for someone who spends so much of their lives performing on stage to not want to be even looked at when they're off it. Even if you're appearing behind a microphone 'as yourself', it's not really an accurate version of yourself. At least when everyone's paid nine quid to see you, and is sitting in neatly ordered rows, you know that that's a, if not falsified, then certainly rarified atmosphere. You have an 'in' - these people, you know, are here to see you. If you find yourself chatting at length at the local bar, then the chances are you'll suddenly find yourself panicking that everyone around you is simply waiting for you to shut the hell up. 

Someone who doesn't always want you to look at her when she's offstage, but is magnetic when on it, is Sarah Charsley, whose show, Three Kinds Of Me, ends tonight (and they told me I couldn't segue). It's actually sold out - the last seven tickets have gone in the past hour, as I'm writing this - and last night was extraordinary. The atmosphere in the studio at the New Venture Theatre was electric, and managed to indulge in all those cliches of a roller coaster of emotions - you'll laugh, you'll cry, etc, etc. If you manage to see it tonight, you're very lucky, at least as lucky as I have been to have been involved in the production. The mood in the bar afterward was buzzingly excited, with so many people really insistent that these shouldn't be the only performances of the show. Now, I'm fully aware that this runs the risk of tottering over into hyperbole, and that similar things are often said whenever there's a particularly good production going on, but I honestly think that there's truth in there them statements. We're beginning to think about reviving the production already, with at least the Brighton Fringe in our sights, so if your venue has a few spare performance spots, you know where to get in touch. 

(If you don't know where to get in touch - I mean here. Here is where you can get in touch. I was hoping that I didn't have to spell it out to you)

Music To My Ears

Earlier this week, I tuned onto Radio 2. It’s something I almost never do. I’m aware of Radio 2 as something in the background, even if it is not something that’s literally on, in the background. When I was younger, it was Radio 1, and I’m not entirely sure why, since I’ve always found it almost nail-plucking annoying. There was a time when I used to wake up to Radio 2, when it felt like being nudged to wakefulness by somebody with a freshly brewed cup of coffee (maybe it still does; I haven’t listened to it in the morning for years), but most recently, my radio has been dialled to Radio 4.

There’s something very liberating and almost empowering to discover that you don’t give enough of a damn to worry about the fact that you’re old enough to listen to Radio 4. I’m not sure exactly when the change kicked in; I’ve been listening to 4 for quite some years now – but I’m pretty sure that at some point I must have considered 4 to be outside my realm of interest, with its wall to wall talk, chatter, debate and opinion. But the fact of the matter is that I’ve never been much of a muso, and so it’s unsurprising that I never really found much of a grove going on with a radio station that just played the most popular track of the charts. And then again, fifty minutes later. Then twice more before the 6 O’clock drivetime news.

The reason I pulled up to Radio 2 this week (it was on iplayer; I wasn’t able to listen as the programme went out) was because an old friend, Louise Cookman, was featuring as a guest on http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006wr7s The Big Band Special. Now, I should acknowledge that my use of the term ‘friend’ is somewhat elastic: I didn’t really have the balls to talk to her whilst at college, which is where I first met her, spending more of my time instead with a woman who was a lot more spritely brightly Laura Ashley. This is intriguing, as the 39 year old me would always choose to spend time with someone more obviously arch and playfully cynical than the person I actually did spend my college time with. In fact, I’ve only seen Louise once since – all thanks to facebook – after what must have been pretty much a twenty year gap (and since when did any of us have lives long enough to squeeze a twenty year gap of anything into them?). It what felt like a scene straight out of a rigidly scripted Richard Curtis movie, I found her singing with a live band on a stage on the South Bank of the River Thames. She was an absolute pleasure to watch perform; and to speak with; somewhat disquietingly, I think we spoke more in the twenty minutes between sets than we did during our entire time at college. I’d like to think it’s because I’ve become less shy as I’ve gotten older, but we all know that’s not the case.

Hearing her on the Big Band programme was a glorious moment. I can’t sing at all (and have no patience for those who declare, with no patience, that ‘everyone can sing’), and am always slightly in awe of those who are particularly skilled at delivering a song. Obviously, many people can do the basics of carrying a tune (I can’t, my carrying of a tune sounds more like I’m dragging the corpse of a tune over a war-ravaged roadside as blood gluts out of its throat), but there are certain singers whose voice occasionally defy your understanding: you’re unable to work out quite how their voice can lock into place that way, that can jump, seemingly effortlessly from one sound to the next, can sound so perfect. It is, I guess, why there’s been such a rise in voice-correction software in music over the past few years. It’s an effort to create the seamless – and –makes-it-sound-so-easiness – voice that a few singers have in abundance. Hearing certain voices is to witness – and I don’t use the word lightly – a thing of beauty.

That’s pretty much how I reacted listening to the programme on Tuesday, and I’m fairly sure I would have reacted in the same way had I not had some tenuous connection to the singer. There was something very pleasing in hearing someone I know personally appear on national Radio and sing a few big band classics, even though I was mildly disappointed that she didn’t go for the obvious gag during her rendition of a song from Calamity Jane.

This sort of thing actually happens a reasonable amount, because a lot of my experience and training is in the performing arts, but because I myself haven’t had much discernible professional success. It’s always slightly startling to see someone you’ve spent time with begin to turn up on panel shows, for instance. I remember one morning waking to my alarm clock radio (which at this point was tuned to 4), and being startlingly presented with the voice of a woman I hadn’t spoken to for about ten years, talking about the major adaptation she’d just written for the London stage. Since my writing credits at that point largely consisted of a shopping list – and even that was incomplete – it was an alarm clock in more ways than one. Another friend of mine has started doing a lot of extra work, and although I’ve not yet seen him on screen, it’s very pleasing to know that at least one person I’ve acted with is actually getting paid for being on a film set.

Later tonight, we’ll be having the next rehearsal for Three Kinds Of Me, which opens this Friday. It’ll be nice to get a good crowd there, so do make sure you book your tickets as soon as you like. At the very least, it would be good to have an audience that outnumbers the cast, and as it’s a one-woman show, that shouldn’t be too much of a challenge. We’re pretty much through the worst of the technical stuff by now (although the crew may well have something to say about that statement), and it’s a show that I’m very proud of. Not necessarily because of any negible contribution I might have brought to it as director, but simply for the chance to have worked with such a talented writer and performer. Yes, I know it’s pretty much a contractual obligation to say such things about the people you work with, but I have worked with people who have made me want to drag a cheese grater over my own eyeballs. Or, even better, theirs. Those people who make working on a show a joy are to be celebrated. This could very easily have been a difficult show – Sarah is performing her own script, and I have had the audacity to tell her what her own script means – more than twice contradicting what the text itself actually says – and even if she’s felt that my instincts are entirely insane, she’s been gracious enough to indulge me, and treat me as someone who knows what the hell they’re talking about.

Also this week, I’ve been beginning to leave out flyers for the series of improvisation workshops I’ve got coming up. It’s called Iron Clad Improv (cause it’s on at the Iron Duke, d’you see?), and the first drop in is on Sunday 28th October, which suddenly doesn’t seem all that far away. From then on, it’s every Sunday, 7 – 9, and I’m genuinely looking forward to it. Of course, it doesn’t work unless actually get some punters in through the door, so do please spread the word, even if you can’t get through the door yourself. I’m obviously fretting that I’m going to be doing a lot of these improv drop-ins to which absolutely nobody turns up, so I’m having to get over my own instinctive shyness (which even though I’m even older than was when I last referred to my shyness at the start of this blog), and shout about the improv class from the rooftops. Or, at the very least, leave out brightly coloured flyers in every coffee shop the Brighton and Hove area.

Lastly, before rehearsal tonight I’m going along to the Old Market in Hove to see Caitlin Moran talk about her new book. I saw a great many people last year reading her previous book, How To Be A Woman, although – curiouser ad curiouser – none of them were women. Presumably none of them felt that they needed instructions on how to be a woman, or possibly they were all reading Fifty Shades on their kindles. It’s the second time this week I’ve been to The Old Market (I saw a show of Comic Strip at the weekend, headlined by the blistering Terry Alderton, who I’d never encountered before), which is bad, since it’s a great venue, and practically on my doorstep. There are a few times when I get exhausted and poor, but all it takes is a reminder of exactly where it is I live, and its enough to consider myself reasonably lucky



The Final Furlong

So, tonight, we hit production week on Three Kinds Of Me at the New Venture Theatre. As I’ve doubtless mentioned before, it’s only on for two nights, so you’re well advised to book your tickets up now, by clicking on the link to the New Venture Theatre.

I think I’m right in saying that it’s one of the most challenging things I’ve ever directed. Now, this might seem a bit rich, considering that I’ve already gone through directing musicals (bit of a test, since I’m about as musical as a blanket) shows with casts of kids numbering forty or more, or most recently, a Greek tragedy, and, by way of comparison, 3KM is simply me offering advice to a good friend who’s performing her own script. You’d think that, at the very least, that last fact alone would cut down on the amount of time we spent discussing what the playwright really meant. In theory, I didn’t really need to be there at all.

But Sarah has been patient enough to indulge my theories and suggestions on how to best present her text. It has, as I’ve indicated, been a surprisingly difficult process, not least because we’ve made every effort to make it as simple as possible. People who have worked with me before, upon hearing me declare that I wanted to make this production uncomplicated, were no doubt clearing space in their schedules for that inevitable moment when I finally said in a musing tone, ‘actually, I’ve just had this idea ..’ It appears that easy is not as easy as it looks.

A recurring conversation in rehearsal was what this production actually was: was it a play, or was it storytelling? It certainly lends itself to the latter, as it’s delivered in epistolary fashion, meaning that the entire narrative is packaged in smaller chunks. There’s still an over-reaching narrative arc, with a beginning, middle and an end, but just not necessarily – as you might have guessed – in that exact order. In the end (or, to be exact, quite near the start) Sarah and I agreed that it was indeed a play, rather than storytelling (Sarah has experience of both). The distinction is important, as different things come into play when you – well, get into a play, particularly in a play like this, which is largely about story-telling. Don’t worry if you’re not keeping up; I’m not sure I am.

When directing, I tend to start out from a single image that I find striking and arresting. Due to constraints of time, budget, and occasionally, simple logic, I can’t always deliver that image on stage, but that doesn’t matter – it gives me enough of a foundation to make decisions throughout the entire production, and can be a great influence on style and theme. With this production, interestingly enough, it was all about telling the story. Of course, I’m aware that every production is about telling the story, if you’re doing your job right, but since 3KM is simply about the power of one woman’s voice as she attempts to discover who she really is, I considered it vital that the production itself was as unfussy as I could make it – there could be no attempts to hide behind tricksy directorial flourishes. At least, I said all that, and then found myself concerned if we could maintain the simple elegance of a young woman standing in a black box for a hour and a half. In the end, of course, there is a sort-of compromise between the two: it really is simply a woman standing in a black box for a hour and a half (which sounds more and more like a David Blaine magic trick each time I type that), but we have introduced small little grace notes that I hope enhance, rather than distract, from what is being said on stage.

*

If you get a chance today (Monday 15th October), do try to pop along to the Google homepage, which today celebrates one of the most important comic strips of all time, Little Nemo In Slumberland. Little Nemo was not, as you might have thought, an abandoned clownfish, but rather a 1905 newspaper cartoon that filled the entire page (and this being the time when a newspaper was about the size of a reasonably sized six year old child). As time went on, newspapers discovered they could make significantly more money by hiring their space out to advertisers, but for a few glorious years, Winsor McCay’s creation tumbled Alice-like from his bed into a dream world of wonder. Nemo literally tumbled, too – from frame to frame, the fairly wordless cartoons seeming stationary as Nemo dropped out of one panel down to another. The strip was magnificently cinematic in an era when cinema was barely a flicker in a projectionist’s booth. As a sidebar, McCay is usually credited with creating the first animated character in cinema history with a distinct personality – Gertie the Dinosaur.

Little Nemo’s presence can still be very firmly felt in today’s cartoons, from ‘In The Night Kitchen’ and Alan Moore’s work, and most certainly in the Sunday cartoons of Calvin and Hobbes. The Google cartoon is a thing of gorgeousness, and certainly a good gateway into Slumberland if you’ve not yet heard of Little Nemo.

Making A Song And Dance

Still doing very well with rehearsals for Three Kinds Of Me (although I had to shout a bit yesterday, something I've not really had to do as a director in about twenty years; luckily and thankfully my ire was not directed at my actor). We're reasonably ahead of where I thought we might be at this point, which is a blessed relief. It's one of the most challenging experiences I've had as a director, made all the more intense because of the singular nature of the piece (it being a one woman show). I have every intention of keeping things as simple as possible (people who have been in a show of mine before will be scoffing right about now), but it may be that there are certain moments in the play that need a certain push, or light shining on whatever that moment happens to be about. That's the danger, however: I can't simply - for example - stick a bit of sad music on to make sure the audience knows that they're meant to be feeling sad. I know that sort of thing happens often - particularly in film and TV - but it should be serving as an embellishment to the main story, not as a replacement for it. Otherwise, frankly, I'm not doing my job properly. What's interesting is how much I'm having to feel my way as we go along. To a certain extent, that's true of any production, whether as director or actor (or, occasionally, even as writer), but the text is such a subtle and elusive one (the lead character has had a massive emotional upheaval, but the play itself is about her recovery), that I'm constantly discovering new things about it. The practical upshoot of all that loveliness, however, is that my production manager and crew get increasingly frustrated the longer I don't fight the show's elusiveness, and haven't yet made absolutely firm decisions regarding set and props.

The other thing to be careful about with regard to music (I am listening to a fair bit at the moment, to see what pieces can/should be used for 3KM), is that I'm absolutely selecting music based on what I feel is right for the show, as opposed to what my personal tastes are at the moment. Having said that, the two can dovetail: about fifteen years ago, I'd been asked to direct a show - again, a piece of new writing, again, a piece about tension, fragility and loneliness - there must be something about me that makes people feel I have something to say about that stuff (Probably best not to dwell too much on that train of thought). For the music between scene changes (there were a surprising amount of scene changes, which switched location quite often), I played some music, most of which happened to be different tracks from an album I was listening to at the time. Of course, some of the reason behind that was simply that I liked the album (it was I, Megaphone by Imogen Heap), but also because it happened to suit the narrative of the play very well. There's at least a chance that I might use something by Imogen Heap again this time around. But everything will require a lot more listens first.

The pub theatre where I'm going to be running my improv workshops from the end of October got its name today. As its a theatre at the back of the Iron Duke pub (in Hove), it's going to be called, simply, the DukeBox Theatre, which I think is fun and quirky. They're beginning to get an online presence via all the usual forums like facebook and twitter, so have a look out for them; it would be great to get their opening season off to a flying start.

Til then, I'm still running drop in acting classes at the New Venture Theatre, still about making mistakes, and starting all over. Tonight's session, my fourth class in this series (although you can drop in at any point) will start looking at script work. There's been some great responses from class members in the past month, so it promises to be a great night. It's £5 a session, unless you're a NVT member, in which case it's only £2.50. If its your very first session, then it's absolutely free of charge.

Laugh It Up

This week, I got the confirmation on the series of improv drop-in classes I'm going to be holding, starting later this year. They're going to be every Sunday evening, 7-9, at the Iron Duke in Hove. As we speak, a fringe style theatre is being built there, and it's set to have a launch/opening night in a couple of weeks time.

It's been a couple of years now since I was regularly involved in improv, and the time feels right to get back in the saddle again, particularly as I'm going to be directing the improvised play in May as part of the Brighton Festival Fringe. It may well be a contributory factor that I don't really intend to be a participant, just a workshop leader.

I use improv a lot as a director, and it also forms the bulk of what I do in the drop in classes at the New Venture Theatre, but I'm hoping that the drop ins at the Iron Duke will be somewhat different. The classes at the NVT are exactly that - classes, meaning that there's an expectation that all manner of things might be covered for all manner of 'levels'. The drop ins at the Duke are likely to take a significantly more relaxed tone - more game playing, occasionally more emphasis on the 'fun'. Which is not to say that there won't often be a serious side to proceedings. They will be workshops that will change and evolve according to the needs and wants of those that turn up to them week after week.

The first workshop won't be until towards the end of October (the Sunday before Halloween), since I have Three Kinds Of Me to direct before that, but there's already been a pleasing amount of interest shown already. I'll stick the details up on the website pretty soon, but the basics are: Iron Duke, Hove, Sundays, 7-9, £5.

As I mentioned yesterday, we're about halfway through the text for Three Kinds Of Me. One of the most impressive things this week has been the laughing. There's a sequence in the play that requires Sarah to laugh - slightly hysterically - at events that are beyond her control. We were both mildly concerned about the scene, since actors having to laugh notoriously don't convince: it's painfully obvious to everyone that you're doing a fake laugh. I'm particularly bad at this kind of thing. My laugh sounds fake, even when it's genuine. I have this odd thing of phonetically laughing, actually vocalising the 'ha-ha-ha-ha!'. I'm not entirely sure why, although any cast I've ever worked with always knows when I'm in the audience. When Sarah and I were discussing how she would approach her fake laugh, our solution was simple: if it didn't convince, we'd just cut the laugh, or re-write the line. After all, Sarah's the writer, so it wasn't as if we would have to worry about worrying the copyright holders. As it turned out, it wasn't an issue: Sarah's fake laugh is remarkably convincing (so much so, that at first I thought she was corpsing. Of course, the possible upshoot of all this is that Sarah occasionally reads this blog, and if she reads that I've spoken well of her fake laugh, it's at least possible that she'll get overly self conscious, and end up doing a fake fake laugh after all.

Tonight is this weeks Ghostwalk, which as ever meets outside the Druids Head in Brighton at 7.30. (£8 unless you're reasonably young or reasonably old) . There's quite a few in the next few weeks, as we get closer to Halloween (plus, a special 9.00 walk on the night of Halloween itself) and the list of dates can be found on the website. Last weeks Ghostwalk was particularly fun, with a good sized crowd who were really in the mood for a good time. If you're free, come along. You've been saying you will for, like, ages.

I'm fully aware that today's blog seems to be mainly an advert for upcoming features, much like before the trailers in a 1970s cinema. I did write another blog (about spoilers), but it seems like that might be a good piece to send off for the Prolitzer (not the Pulitzer, I think that's somewhat out of my league). Whether the spoilers piece ends up on the Prolitzer website or not, I'll post it up here eventually.

Half Way Mark

Lovely rehearsal for Three Kinds Of Me tonight, which, as I was saying earlier, is just a month away. It's in very good shape. Tonight, we ran through the first half of the play, which is roughly forty minutes. I think once we get the tone and pace right, mess around a bit with sound fx and music, it will probably still come in around the forty mark. Already it's pacy enough to feel quicker.

We had a small audience in tonight, made up of our technical crew, which definitely helps with things like tone, and with blocking (we're performing it to three sides, and not just because of the title of the play). As a director, you can often become overwhelmed by the whole business of problem solving, and trying to get the whole thing to make sense. In that regard, I have every chance of becoming something of a control freak, but it's absolutely vital to have a fresh pair of eyes on the thing that you could possibly be becoming overly familiar with. It also gives you the elbow room and strength of mind not to be too concerned if there's a couple of scenes that you haven't quite solved yet. There was a sequence tonight that I was somewhat concerned about, but after being able to talk about it out loud for less than thirty seconds, we were able to spot that the solution was easy, accessible, and actually added another layer to the play. I love it when that happens.

There's not another rehearsal for Three Kinds now until Sunday, although the New Venture Theatre are having their AGM on Saturday, which is followed by a Social, a chance to meet members new and old (or just ageing). It promises to be a good night, which somewhat surprisingly, I'll be free for.

In other news, I have other news. About a new series of Improv Classes starting up next month, but I'll talk about that in the next blog, as well as the series of short stories that, contrary to every expectation I had, I appear to have a very good chance of actually finishing ...

Take A Joke. Just Don't Tweet It.

So, the other day, I responded to a tweet from Mock The Week. They were asking for gags, specifically Unlikely Complaints To A TV Channel. By the time I saw the tweet, it was about twenty hours old, but I threw a gag or two their way anyway, confident in the assumption that whatever I came up with would've been done already.

Initially, I tried to do a joke about Mock The Week itself, and it's notoriously low number of female comedians on the panel, but I couldn't see how to do it without coming across as overly combative. Not under 140 characters, anyway. I briefly considered some joke about Frankie Boyle being trapped in a car crash, but it just sounded like I wanted Frankie Boyle to be in a car crash (not actually true), and anyway, the man hasn't even been on the show for about three years.

In the end, then, I went for the second most obvious gag: suggesting that it was annoying that there was no TV channel to watch old episodes of Mock The Week. A weak joke, I know, but the only one that occurred to me at the time. After a couple of hours, however, Mock The Week re-tweeted the joke. It must have been a slow night.

It occurred to me then, of course, that a lot more people would now see my tweet than would normally be the case if it had just turned up in the feeds of my 'followers'. I assumed that the worst that would happen would be that a few thousand people would see my joke, tut, think 'that's not funny', and go about their day. Perhaps a few of them would feel compelled to tweet me personally to tell me that my joke was not in any way amusing. Or maybe I was being too hard on myself: maybe one or two people would actually find the gag at least mildly amusing. What I didn't expect, however, is what actually happened.

Over the next few hours, I got a reasonable amount of unreasonable tweets. Some derisive (you could say mocking), some actually angry. But all of them linked by a common thread: they all seemed to genuinely believe that I hadn't heard of the TV channel Dave. Even though that was the point of the joke.

I tried to remain open-minded about it all. Possibly, as naivety was the foundation of my joke, perhaps my respondents were playing along in the same spirit: pretending to honestly believe that I was hunting furiously for year old repeats of MTW, but didn't know about Dave. But the tweets were too bitchy, too teasing, too ready to take the mick. Even the ones who were nice clearly thought that I was being sincere, including the lovely lady who pointed out that the previous weeks episode often appeared on YouTube (but, as she pointed out, in two parts). I guess I was just startled that so many viewers of Mock The Week were unable to understand what a joke was. (insert your own punchline).

In other news, there's now about four weeks to go until the performances of Three Kinds Of Me. In an ideal world, we'd be rehearsing every day of the next month. As it is, time and constraints limit us to a few evenings and some Sunday afternoons. We have a kind of technical meeting tonight, where our lighting & sound designers and operators are going to want to joe exactly what it is I want. And I, like the most annoying and unprofessional director ever, am going to have to declare that as yet, I'm not entirely sure. I'm very lucky in that I have a designer that can be both pedantic and patient (usually, you have to settle for one or the other, and the combination of both is a startlingly valuable commodity), and who can usually decipher what ill-formed (and ill-conceived) ideas I'm struggling to come up with. We're halfway through the play now (in terms of pages rehearsed), and I'm hopeful that we will pick up pace even further in the next week or so, giving us a comfortable amount of time to run the whole thing over a few times. Anyway, that's the plan. As I've mentioned, it'll be on next month at the New Venture Theatre in Bedford Place, Hove, and tickets (already selling) can be booked via http://www.ticketsource.co.uk/newventuretheatre/ .

Heading To Hedda

Hoping to get up to see the Old Vic production of Hedda Gabler soon. It won't be that easy, as I have a very full schedule over the next few weeks, what with rehearsals for Three Kinds Of Me, extra Ghostwalks (October being the month of Halloween) and, of course, the NVT Acting Classes (two down, four to go). But I don't see nearly enough London theatre, and I want to start remedying that. Two factors contribute to me wanting to see this particular production - the first being that lastminute.com have this 'theatre fortnight' deal going on at the moment, so that some tickets are just fifteen quid. Since my usual excuse for not going to see more theatre is that it's priced well out of my range (as long as I'm going to remain adamant that I'm not going to sell a kidney, or anything), that's obviously a compelling argument, even if the tickets turn out to be shunted behind a pillar.

The second factor is that I was in a production of Hedda Gabler myself this year, and it's always interesting to see how different companies interpret the same show, even if it is, literally, a different interpretation, by which I mean a different translation. I know that I read through several different versions of Medea before choosing the Tom Paulin one to direct, a move that my cast and audiences certainly appreciated.

I think that Hedda is a deceptively difficult show to put on, and to pull off. It can be a bit of an old warhorse of a text for am-dram companies to pull out of the bag, and I know from various conversations that some audiences find it difficult to get a handle on why (and indeed if) its relevant today. I suspect that people can get hung up on the belief that it's a play about class. Obviously, that's a major factor, but I think it's significantly more visceral than that, that it can be a very relevant, vital, and indeed a more sensual and sexy play that its sometimes dusty reputation suggests. Hell, it's a play about blistering frustration, clearly it should be delivered with all the energy of a powderkeg set to blow.

But as well as all that, it seems that modern audiences (and actors and directors, come to that) are only coming across the startling idea that Hedda Gabler can at times be funny. It's possible that this was one reason behind the casting of Sheridan Smith in the title role. Now, I'm not suggesting that the producers are expecting the fanbase of Two Pints Of Larger And A Packet Of Crisps to rock up to the Old Vic, although obviously that's the ideal when you cast someone from a popular show, and it can't hurt.

I'm not really aware of Sheridan Smith's work outside Two Pints, and so I was one of those who noted with interest her arrival as one of the most iconic female characters in drama, wondering briefly if it really was stunt casting. Somehow, I'd forgotten that, with a very few exceptions, that if an actor has made it to the main cast of a major television series, then it's very likely that they've done a great deal of varied work elsewhere before the avearge audience member has heard of them. You think of another Smith: Matt, who to many seemed far too young and far too inexperienced to be cast as Doctor Who, but had aleady been around impressing for a good few years previously.

Smith (Sheridan, not Matt) seems to be doing a great deal of spadework this year to ensure that Two Pints is but a footnote on her career, which is great, since it was very easily a role that could have seen her typecast for decades.

Three Kinds Of Rehearsal

A night off tonight. Earlier this week, we'd become terrifyingly aware of the concept of four weeks being actually quite a short amount of time. With that in mind, we went through diaries and plugged up any spare night going with an extra rehearsal. Turns out that there's not a great many spare nights between now and curtain up. Not that we're using a curtain, but you get the idea.

We had booked in a rehearsal for tonight, but we pulled it - giving ourselves a chance to gird our loins before things really kick in, and anyway, I suspect that Sarah's boyfriend would quite appreicate actually seeing her before Halloween. Because between now and then, the rehearsals get quite intense.

One of the reasons the rehearsals are now getting a bit intense (apart from the subject matter) is the method of rehearsal we're using. We're doing something called 'actioning', which is something I've tended to avoid as an actor. Very roughly speaking, you endow every single line - every one - with a seperate 'action', a word that describes what your intention is within that line alone. It doesn't have to be (and possibly sometimes shouldn't be) in the context of the lines that surrond it on either side. In terms of performance, it can make for something of a jolting, even unrealistic narrative, which is possibly why I've previously always been a little wary of it. In this sense, I suspect it's more of a director's tool than that of the actors, if only because it makes the director's life easier - they can simply engineer their actor to be in a particular place/postion/mood at a particular time.

Of course, the key word there is 'tool' - it's not the end, but a means to an end. Something I've become very aware of while directing Three Kinds Of Me is that while I might generally be the same kind of director whatever project I work on, I'll employ very different tools depending on what the show is - a one woman show about mental health, for instance, or a big cast Shakespeare. I've known a couple of directors who operate in exactly the same way no matter what they're directing - knockabout farce, or mid-80s AIDS drama. One director, in particular, I remember saying absolutely nothing in any rehearsals, but would spend the first five minutes of the following rehearsal passing around little notes (no bigger than a Rizla) before another wordless rehearsal. Incidentally, I seem to remember that my only note said something like 'Speak slower, speak louder'. To be fair, I'll concede he had a point.

Because we're doing this 'actioning', the intial bout of rehearsals are going slower than I'd expected - not too slow, but certainly not as quick as I'd first planned (to give you and idea, I'd hoped to do five pages on Tuesday. We didn't quite manage one). It means everything is very textured and toned, and as the subsequent rehearsals follow each other, our 'muscle memory' will kick in, and we'll start speaking in a shorthand. It's one of the most endlessly interesting projects I've had the pleasure to work on, and I'm looking forward to continuing the journey.

By the way, tickets went on sale this week, which means that we haven't just imagined it, or anything, and the play will actually happen. I think I mentioned before that it's a very limited run, (only two nights) and tickets are already selling. Pop along to the new venture theatre ticket page to relieve yourself of a few quid for the pleasure of a great one woman show.

Icecream Sunday

A day off today. I'm not used to days off. I mean, obviously, I've just come off a few weeks holiday, but that's different. It's been a reasonable whack of time since I last had a regular, weekly day off. The two weekend acting classes that I run were combined into one easily manageable Saturday session, freeing up my Sundays. It means I'll take quite a hit on my monthly pay, so I'm going to have to spend less on things like, I don't know, fresh fruit and vegetables, but on balance, it's probably a bearable sacrifice to make for my mental health. And it's not as if I eat a great many fresh fruit and vegetables anyway.

So far, despite my all new work ethic, I haven't done a great deal with my day off, but I'm going to call that a good thing, since it's my, you know, day off. I've had to prepare for tonight's PPM (Pre-Production Meeting) for Three Kinds Of Me, and sort out what I'm doing in tomorrow night's Acting Class, but that's been fairly low impact, all things considered. Actually, all things considered, I probably wouldn't have found them to be such a low impact duo of tasks if today hadn't been a day off. That's the thing with wall to wall, relentless seven day week work .. Your mind (and emotions) aren't given enough breathing space to do anything,

I even found myself on the beach this afternoon. Only the second or third time this year, which is criminal, considering how close I live. I've been physically down there quite often, but normally only as a passage to get from the flat to town, very rarely as a destination. I think my boredom threshold is very low. It always seems like a grand idea, like the sort of thing I should be doing: sitting on the beach, reading a paperback, but quite often I'm getting twitchy after only ten minutes. I did ok today then; I was down there for about two hours. It helped that I went for a bit of a swim in the sea.

Now, I haven't swum in the sea for a couple of years. Again, criminal because the beach is only blah blah blah, but time and circumstance always seems to drive it away from me. Nevertheless, I'd decided quite early this week that I was going to commit to swimming in the sea on my new found day off. Once I'd checked the weather forecast, I knew there was no escape. It would be stupid not to. Once I'd done enough avoidance tactics of reading stuff on my kindle (it's true, you know, it really is easy to read in direct sunlight), I finally managed to get myself into the sea. Now, bear in mind this is the first time in about two years that I've been in the water, so I spent about two minutes doing a sort of paddle thing as I contemplated just how cold the water might be. As I did this, I was aware that was surrounded by loads of kids who clearly had no problem whatsoever with how could it was. So I (literally) took the plunge. And that's another truth often told: it's ok once you get your hair wet.

And it was actually quite lovely. I swam out further than I expected, not quite far enough to experience an Open Water moment, but far enough to almost lose the sounds of the crowd on the beach. The sound of the brass band on the bandstand did manage to float over. Another solitary swimmer splashed by. And suddenly, without warning and unbidden, an idea for a sequence for the novel that I hope to hack out during NaNoWriMo came to mind. Turns out I was working after all.

Fear Of Peers

Good, but strenuous, rehearsal tonight. I don't think I was communicating my intentions or wants as a director particularly well, which meant that my cast (of one woman) spent a lot of time feeling her way in the dark, trying to work out what I was on about. Not literally feeling her way in the dark, of course. I'm not like Werner Herzog. Although, that might be a good warm up exercise for another time.

The other thing that was interesting for me was that while I was directing my leading lady (Sarah), we were visited by my last leading lady (Sarah). It shouldn't rattle me. But it did, slightly. Whilst we get on well, and while I think she enjoyed her time on Medea, I was very aware that she herself is a director, and one who speaks with straight-to-the-point clarity, whereas I can sometimes be guilty of chatting around a subject in order to get to the point, rather than taking a direct route. Both ways have their value, but it's easy to get very self conscious.

We all know of, and in some cases, have worked with poor directors ( I've noticed that I started that sentence with 'we', somehow assuming that anyone reading this blog is definitely involved in some way with theatre. While that's certainly very likely, it's by no means guaranteed.) These are the directors who passively offer no opinion (or, indeed, direction), or at the other end of the scale, stamp their opinion on absolutely every aspect of the production, meaning anything about the actual script is pulverised. I would give examples, but that would mean, you know, giving examples.

I like to think that I'm a pretty good director. I talk slightly too much in the early stages, but in context, I think it's a forgivable sin. Interestingly, even now I can feel myself channelling a director I used to know almost twenty years ago, when I worked at a theatre in South London: CYTO, or the Croydon Youth Theatre Organisation. I can't ever remember him sitting down to direct, he was almost always on his feet. Quite a few directors do direct from a seated position, and insomuch as I've thought about it at all, it's always disquieted me somewhat. Certainly, I've never felt comfortable staying seated while directing. Maybe it's nervous energy; and that's certainly how I remember this director from twenty years ago, right down to the habit of clicking the fingers on both hands while trying to get his head around a concept or narrative problem. In recent years, I've begun to wonder if I've imagined, or invented that tic. It doesn't really matter, I suppose, even if I seem to have adopted that tic for myself.

So, most of the time, I think I've got a pretty good handle on what it is to be a director. I've got a certain style and approach that I return to, but that gets altered and shifted depending on what the project is. A knockabout farce with just four people is going to have different demands than a drug survival play with twenty five young people all aged under 18. But that's the thing, I know all that. But, if someone I know and respect is in the room, I suddenly feel like a fool and an idiot. Well, more so than usual. I feel like an amateur, like a snake oil salesman who's one paragraph away from being unmasked as the liar everyone has suspected him of being.

It's ridiculous, of course: both the women in the room have elected to work with me on a number of occasions, and both have asked my advice on creative and artistic matters. I have to be logical about this: they wouldn't do that just to be nice (actually, if we're going to be logical, it's entirely within the realms of possibility that they'd collaborate with me 'just to be nice', but that gets a bit too Truman Show and oddly egotistical to make a great deal of sense, so I have to put my faith in my lack of faith.)

In last nights rehearsal, I began talking about the image of Russian Dolls (you see how I talk around something rather than getting straight to the point?), and it's just occurred to me now that that's how the rehearsal itself felt - while was looking in on Sarah (my actor), hoping to guide and support her, I felt Sarah (my previous actor) looking in on me, offering guidance and support. Didn't always stop me feeling like I was being exposed as an idiot who didn't know what he was talking about. I don't know why I was worried: I achieve that quite well enough by writing this blog.

The Sound Of Deadlines As They Woosh By

So, I failed. Utterly. I had meant to complete at least 500 words for the short stories I'm working on at the moment, particularly as I'd missed my vague daily target of 1,000 on the previous two days. But, no luck: 500 might not seem a great deal, but the trick is to have them make some sort of coherent sense. Now, you may think that such concerns about coherence haven't previously constrained me before (such as in the writing of these blogs, for instance), but I feel compelled to make the occasional effort.

However, at the end of last night, I couldn't even manage the 500, ironically because I'd been entering that day's blog entry. Ironic because one of the main purposes in my keeping up to date with the blog is to ensure that I don't get too rusty with the writing. But I've decided not to feel too guilty about missing last nights writing session (although if the same happens tonight, then we have a problem). If I was going to beat myself up about the fact that I'd missed a night's writing (alright, three) then it would be very easy to get despondent, and go three weeks without bothering to flip open the pc. Better to keep the momentum going, even if you stray from the path for a couple of days. I imagine it's a bit like attitudes to giving up smoking. Now, I myself have never smoked, so I've never had to go through the whole trial of giving up, or trying to, but it seems to be that the problem is all contained within those two words, 'giving up'. There's not much wriggle room there; you're either a smoker, or you're not. You either still smoke, or you've managed to give up. So, when someone who is trying to give up has a faltering moment, and has 'just one' cigarette, then it's too easy to think that they've dropped from having 'given up', back to being a smoker. I've often thought that instead of 'giving up', we should try the phrase 'pausing'. Everyone's allowed to pause. And it means there 's no pressure: if you successfully 'pause' smoking for a good long while - say, three years - and you happen to take a puff of someone else's fag on new years eve, then no-one can judge you, it's not like you've fallen off the wagon; it's not like you now give up giving up, and go back to smoking 20 a day.

All of which is a tortuous way of saying that, despite the fact that I haven't written a great deal over the past couple of days, I'm not going to panic about it too much. Although, to be fair, you can only go so long, not writing, and still call yourself a writer. But I'd rather not get back into the groove of going too long without writing again. Too easy to let things go fallow, let the ideas wither into dull nothingness.

There are things to get in the way, however: there's another rehearsal for Three Kinds Of Me tonight, and both Thursday and Friday are taken up with Ghostwalks, which are beginning to have a different feel to them as the nights get darker.

What Have You Done Lately?

Great rehearsal tonight, for Three Kinds Of Me. There's been something of a gear change, and it's to do with moving into a different space. Whereas before, we were rehearsing in a flat, we're now in the building of the theatre itself, and that puts a whole different mentality on the process. It's like we're here to actually work. Rather than, you know, drink tea and eat HobNobs (it's just occurred to me that those biscuits could easily be the punch line to an obscure gag about Quatermass, but since Quatermass itself is reasonably obscure, it's probably left well alone).

Acting, and directing, and certainly writing, are amongst the most labour intensive duties for the least demonstrable booty as an end result. I imagine most artistic endeavours are. I suppose that's why the producers of Hollywood films get such a bad reputation. They just don't get it. They have to make sure nobody's wasting the studio's money, make sure no-one's going off in some weird, unpredictable manner. But that's just the point. Rehearsing, and creating a show, can absolutely be weird and unpredictable. And there's not really a great deal of value in putting the brakes on that. Having said all that, however, I'm glad I don't have a gang if Hollywood producers breathing down my neck*, because I know that the work Sarah and I did tonight was productive, constructive, and effective, but if I was compelled to put into a chart exactly how much ground we've covered, script wise, tonight: it would be a single half page. Perhaps not even that much.

But that's part of the process. Digging a little here, scratching at a bit of paint there, applying a bit of pressure to see what bends, and what simply snaps. It's a genuine pleasure when a rehearsal goes well, it means you're discovering the play again anew with each new re-read. Two lines of dialogue that seem confusing are actually the solution to each other.

Actually, the thing about lines of dialogue is intriguing. As a director on this show, I'm directing the writer, who's appearing in her own show. As such, then, conversations about meaning and nuance surface often. After all, it's not often you, as director, get a chance to speak with the person who created your script. I worry, though, because as director, needing to tell the story, I'll sometimes want to shift a line to the middle of a sequence rather than at the start, or cut a word altogether. Sarah's very accommodating, and takes on all my suggestions with good grace and positivity, but I have to repeatedly reassure myself that I've got my directors head on, not my writers. There are few things more egotistical than a writer-director. I should know; I am one. I suspect I'd make a very poor copy/proof reader: rather than checking what my client had written, I'd probably be trying to change the ending.

Talking of endings, in the end, I recall what Harold Pinter said about directing his own work. Like a lot of stories associated with Pinter, it's possibly made up, but that doesn't necessarily stop it being true. Apparently, Pinter was saying that there was a difference between what he, Pinter (the director) needed to achieve with a script, and what he, Pinter (the playwright) had originally intended. The two don't always match up, or at the very least they don't quite hold hands. The trick is to deliver the truth of the script while not feeling a slave to it.

With that in mind, I should really get back to my own writing. I haven't written anything for two days. Partially it's because I'm back at work, but that's a poor excuse: and if it isn't, then it will end up being an excuse for at least the next seven weeks, and that's bad. I'm hoping to get back on track with a thousand words. A thousand words a day - even between work and rehearsals - isn't a bad average to aim for. On those days that I do manage a thousand, I'm working well enough to produce at least five hundred more. I'm not saying that those 1,500 will necessarily be any good, but at the early stages, that's not really the point. And anyway, those days that I manage to hit above the target should make up for the days that I struggle to produce even 400. Or, judging by yesterday, none whatsoever.

Hopefully not tonight, though. It's a bit too late to reasonably think I'll actually manage a full thousand words, but as we hit midnight, I'll settle for half that in cash.

Wish me luck ..


*I'm afraid I don't know at this time what the collective term for a group of Hollywood producers is. A purse of producers? A sequel? A despondency ?

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.

In At The Deep End

Finally managed to go for a swim yesterday for the first time this year, which considering there's two swimming pools in easy distance, and I've got the English Channel at the bottom of my road, is pretty much unforgivable. I managed to do it in the end simply because I'm very aware that I'm in my last couple of days off from work right now, but also because of the damage I did to my shoulder earlier in the week. I thought, in some vague way, that swimming would do my shoulder some good.

So far, that seems to be the case, as my shoulder hurts significantly less this morning that it has all week. It wasn't always thus, though: while swimming, I was very weak on my right side, and wincing manfully (or something) as it was too painful to do a full stroke on the right hand side. I've never been a strong swimmer in any case, having never really learned to swim properly: as a kid, I just got into the water and largely suceeded at not drowning. Water seemed to be the great leveller, as I seem to remember the tough kids being surprisingly inept in the pool. But, as I say, I never had 'proper' swimming lessons, meaning that even when I have full use of all my limbs, I always end up being convinced that the onlooking lifeguards aren't there to potentially save my life; but more to sneer at my pathetic attempts to look like I can swim. But hopefully, I'll be able to take the start suggested by yesterday, and begin to swim more regularly.

However, next week is where things start really to kick in. On Monday is the first acting class of the new season at the New Venture Theatre, led by myself (I'll chat more about the details of that in the next blog), and for three nights of the next six weeks, I'll be working on a one-woman show, Three Kinds Of Me, which will be produced in early October. Right now, that seems like a reasonably long time away. I'm sure my opinion on how much time I have will drastically alter very soon. I'm still working on a couple of short stories, and expect to have a significant demand on my time in all of November, which I'll tell you about closer to the time.

And tonight, I have an extra Ghostwalk, this one being at the same time as Brighton Pride. I have no idea how that's going to go yet - the streets are likely to be somewhat busy because of everyone being, well, proud, but I'm not convinced that a lot of them will actualy make it out to the Walk. And, anyway, a lot of our core audience - kids - won't be dragged away from the living room tonight. For tonight, Doctor Who starts its 50th anniversary season. I'm very glad I live in the era of the iplayer ..