The Whole Lanyards

This week seems to have been one for breaking things. There was the back door to my bedroom, which leads onto a balcony, on which the lock has suddenly snapped (indirectly a result of the four or five days of almost relentless rain we had earlier), and then my phone froze, with no hope of a way out. It seems the smarter a 'smart' phone is, the more likely that it's actually quite stupid; when I was young (alright, two years ago), 99% of problems with your phone could be fixed eventually by simply taking the battery out and putting it in again. But now, since the battery is often irremovable from the casing of the phone, you're kinda screwed. The third thing that might have got broken this week is possibly my ribs. Hm, seems that I should really have put that one in at the top of the list.

It wasn't exactly an event that I could fill into a form that started with the question 'have you had an accident that wasn't your fault', but then it wasn't something that I really saw coming. I'm always losing my keys, so I have them attached to a lanyard. I didn't know that the big strappy things that ID cards and the like were called lanyards, but I suppose they had to have a more elegant name than 'big strappy things'. I've managed to build up a reasonable collection of them, since I get one attached to a press pass every time I'm reviewing up in Edinburgh for the fringe festival. It's the closest I feel to importance all year.

It was this lanyard that was dangling out of my pocket as I was cycling home on Wednesday. You might be able to see what's coming next, even if I didn't, or, indeed, the cars that were directly following me. The big strappy thing dropped, hung, and then wrapped itself against my front wheel. It was like a particularly cheaply made instalment in a Final Destination movie. The bike very suddenly stopped. I suffered no such impediment until roughly three seconds later, when I smashed into the road. The car behind me, luckily a sensible driver, was able to stop in time (quite remarkable when you think about it, since the cyclist in front of him didn't even do anything like braking, they simply .. stopped. It must have been like watching someone slam into an invisible wall). The driver got out, and helped me retrieve all my stuff, and get it off the road. He also asked me if I was ok, sounding just about as shocked as I felt. I didn't sound shocked at all, but this was largely due to all speech having been winded out of me.

I continued down to the train station (just before I got there, I heard some kid from the school where I work shouting abuse at me, presumably unaware that I'd just escaped death. I like to think that he would have stuck to his morals, and still continued to throw names in the direction of my bloodied, twitching corpse), and eventually got home. After a bit of a sleepless night, I struggled (literally, the pain was getting quite bad) into work, but by the time I arrived, I'd realised that work was going to be very difficult, so after a convoluted series of conversations, I was able to get myself to Accident & Emergency.

Where ... they were able to do almost nothing. That's the thing with ribs, it seems. They don't even x-ray anymore, because it won't actually change what they do afterwards, which, essentially, is not a very great deal. So, there's every chance that I could currently be walking around with a cracked rib, which certainly is something to follow the fake dislocated shoulder I had last month. In all reality, it's reasonably likely that the ribs are simply very bruised, (it doesn't seem that they are actually broken, since they're not, you know, letting air out of my lungs or anything like that), but the pain is still quite often terrific. But only when I move. Apart from that, it's fine.

Odd was the inescapable guilt I still had about having to take time off from work. I wonder what I would consider an appropriate reason to take some time off work. Decapitation, perhaps, or maybe just the loss of a lesser limb. The staff at the hospital were all fantastic, and another reason why I'm always so pro-NHS. We hear a lot of negative stuff about our health service (thank you, Mr Lansley), but at the very least, when I go to them in pain to hear that there's not actually anything they can do, it's a relief that I'm not having to spend two hundred quid for the privilege.

The Times They Are Achanging

Trying to cobble an article together for an upcoming competition. I don't really do articles, since that usually demands that I try to sound like I know what I'm talking about. So, usually, I stick to fiction: plays, stories, and the like. Recently, however, I've done a few reviews and opinion pieces, mainly for stage, TV and film. Presumably, that's one of the reasons for keeping up with this blog: trying to exercise a writing muscle, with the hope that for every 100 blogs I write, there might be at least one that I can hack apart and re-use.

The article that I'm attempting to put together at the moment comes from old material, but I'm not precisely sure where. At times it reads like a spec piece for the Guardian, whereas at others it sounds more like a bit of stand-up. Therefore, the latter, while perhaps funny enough for a topic on stand-up, just sounds clunky on paper. This has happened often before: an idea, well-written and well paced, simply doesn't work in whatever format you've decided to place it. I could write exactly the same story as a short piece of fiction, a radio play, and a half hour spot on TV, and all three would demand entirely different narrative techniques. Now, no doubt this is old news to anyone who's been writing professionally for a while, but it's still something I'm finding my way around. I'm still at the point when I'm ploughing through a story, not able to work out why a reasonably simple but clever idea isn't working. It usually takes me a while to work out that I'm simply writing it in the wrong format. By which I don't mean the wrong version of Microsoft Word.

The thing I'm trying to get this article finished for is the 2012 Prolitzer Peize, which is a significantly more open door affair than the Pulitzer Prize (and unless I can lip-read Andrew Mitchell, I don't think that's coming anywhere near me soon). This morning, on a whim, I checked the deadline, which I knew without checking to be October 31st. However, it seems that the deadline with checking is thirty days earlier - less than a week away. The good news is that I've already got more than half of the word count written. The bad news, of course, is that it isn't all about the word count. In the current version of the article, which is an opinion piece, I state quite emphatically my opinion. I do it at the top of the article. I also do it at the end. And, for good measure, I find space and time to do it a couple of times within the body of the text itself. As an opinion piece, it's certainly not short of opinion. However, in terms of witty and erudite words to back up the opinion, it's currently backing bash fully away from any semblance of coherence. However, it's a good writing exercise, and as ever, it's useful to have a deadline looming to sharpen the senses. Whether I get anywhere with the entry or not, I'll post the resulting article up here in a few weeks.

Last night's Acting Class at the New Venture Theatre was great fun, possibly the breeziest and loveliest class of the term so far. There was a reasonable amount of improv interspersed with everything else, and while the NVT classes are more Acting technique-directed than the upcoming improv drop ins at the DukeBox Theatre will be, the vibe promised great things for Iron Clad Improv come October.

The wind and rain seem to have tailed off a bit (touch wood), which is about time, since I have a Ghostwalk tonight. As ever, it passes by the Northern Lights bar in Brighton's Lanes. Normally, I wouldn't mention this, bit I'm aware that a friend is having birthday drinks in that bar tonight, and I'll be passing through, telling ghost stories while she's there, despite the fact that she (still) hasn't come along on the walk. This means that she will be getting at least one ghost story for free. I have decided that she can have this as her birthday present.

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.

Goodbye, Ponds: Top 5 Doctor Who Farewells

So, it’s goodbye to the Ponds in this week’s The Angels Take Manhattan – But what other farewells have there been in history of Doctor Who? Which are the best? What’s the worst? And why do the companions who travel with Colin Baker end up with hairy loud misogynists?


5) Rose Tyler (Doomsday, 2006)

Massively diluted due to subsequent returns and being married off to a human Doctor on a wet beach, the emotional impact of England’s Rose Tyler being dragged into an (allegedly) inescapable other dimension was shocking and unpredictable, not least because it flew directly in the face of David Tennant’s solve-everything-attitude incarnation of the Doctor. It was a glorious end for Billie Piper, who only a few years previously, had been dismissed by fans as ‘stunt casting’.


4) Jo Grant (The Green Death, 1973)

Forget the revisionist viewings of whether or not Pertwee’s Doc is being side-lined romantically for a younger, hippier, and more human model, this departure scene sticks with the lonely Time Lord, rather than the departing companion played by Katy Manning, as we witness the Doctor hesitating outside the pub before driving on; a stark reminder that even if these people are his friends, their lives move swiftly on without him. Of course, the scene is given added poignancy when you consider the classic Barry Letts production team was dismantling.

3) Sarah Jane Smith (The Hand Of Fear, 1976)

The archetypal tacked-on, bundled-out-of-the-TARDIS scene, but also the template of how to do such a scene absolutely correctly. Elisabeth Sladen plays the scene as if she’s never given any consideration to the possibility that her travels with The Doctor might end - even in the story that’s just happened, on present-day Earth, she doesn’t take time to catch up with friends. That belief was likely to have been shared by the millions of fans who adored her. Her unexpected return to the series thirty years later was one of the show’s emotional high-points.

2) Adric (Earthshock, 1982)

Infamously, not the most popular of companions, but it’s that simple fact that makes Adric’s noble sacrifice all the more affecting. It’s in a story that begins with Matthew Waterhouse’s character bickering with the rest of the TARDIS crew about the lack of respect he’s afforded, and that he’s side-lined in favour of comparatively less intelligent companions – a sort of proto-Sheldon Cooper. He’s even responsible for saving the Doctor in his absence – via the use of his gold-edged award in the shape of a star. One thinks that even now, the Doctor carries the gilt of Adric’s death but, like the closing credits of this story, in silence.

1) Susan Foreman (The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, 1965)

It’s the very first departure of a series regular, and as such, is milked for everything it’s got. There’s David’s awkward flirting as he realises that Susan’s loyalties lie with her grandfather (witness Ian being completely oblivious to the situation, and Barbra almost having to forcibly drag him away to give the couple a bit of privacy), and William Hartnell’s subtle bit of business as he darts into the TARDIS – it’s clear that he’s decided to leave Susan behind long before David brings it up. And, of course, there’s the Doctor’s final speech to his grand-daughter, a almost-coda for the series, certainly iconic enough to serve as a prologue to the 20th anniversary adventure, The Five Doctors: “One day, I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine …. “

And The Worst :

Perpugillium Brown (Mindwarp, 1986)

Oh, we know. In a fair world, this would easily be the best, by a country light-year – it’s a shocking, violent, and cruel. Surprisingly, it’s even casual and unfeeling (as far as villain Kiv is concerned, Peri is just a body – perhaps reflecting some dad’s views) and it strikes home as the murder of a well-loved companion – made all the more unbearable because the Doctor might’ve been able to help if the Valeyard hadn’t dragged him off to the Trial Of A Timelord. We’re pretty sure it’s the way Nicola Bryant would’ve wanted to go. But then, a few episodes later, the OXO mum arrives to kiss it all better in a clumsy bit of retro fitting that even Bobby Ewing wouldn’t have dared come out of the shower for. It makes about as much sense as Melanie Bush suddenly deciding that she wants to stay on a ice-cube planet with an intergalactic Del Boy. Which, admittedly, also happened.

It's All In The Timing

Today, I had an idea for a column. Nothing important or even intelligent, just a bit of fluff, a bit of filler, but it promised to be a mildly diverting read, the sort of thing you click on while wasting time on the internet. I write the occasional review and column for a website called CultBox, and this seemed an ideal place to send my bit of writing to.

It took about a hour, and was a fairly smooth bit of writing, presenting very few problems or challenges, bar a few checks of dates and spellings. After tidying up the prose a bit, I sent it off.

Less than a hour later, I got the inevitable reply: someone had already pitched, written, and sent a similar article. Very similar, in fact, apparently making many of the same points I'd made in my article. The only difference, really, was that they'd got there first. You see, kids, this is what happens when you don't send a speculative querying email first.

Obviously, I'll be reading with interest to see what I think if the article that beat me to the post, but overall, I'm reasonably ambivalent about the while thing. Despite having written things, on and off, for about twenty years or more, I feel like its only really now that I'm really getting to grips - nearly - with the various disciplines of being a writer. I'm not exactly saying that I've been lazy (not out loud, anyway), but I suspect that even earlier this year I would've had that idea for the column, written half of it in my head, not actually written any of it in real life, and missed the chance to get in published. I'm aware that I missed the chance anyway, but you get the point. It wasn't so much about acting on the idea more quickly, but having the idea itself more quickly.

Although someone else 'got my gig', I don't regret the time I spent writing the piece. It's quite some time away from anyone ever pays me for anything I write, and indeed, everything I read suggests that I'll spend at least a year or so having stuff published with absolutely no expectation of remuneration. But, the idea is that it's all good practice, and in any case, it's entirely likely that I'll be able to use the article (or some version of it) in the future, and adds to the mythical portfolio that may well help me get that first gig.

Well, that's the idea, anyway.

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.