Herding Cats

Well we certainly seem to have a lot of people on stage from time to time! The phalanx of 'new girls' is a mighty powerful sight when it's working well but it's going to take a lot of work (AND FOCUS!!!) to get it right.

 Last night we worked through a number of elements but the real frustration is that we always seem to have a key cast member away. Consequently we're a little behind where I'd really like to have been but with plenty of time to catch up I'm not overly concerned.

With our lighting guy Jack fully on board now and Alex well into his soundscape construction I'm increasingly confident about the finished product.

A local school has offered to loan us all the flats we need (phew) and with the other tricky items already identified I think we are in pretty good shape...

The National Theatre has approved all our artwork so that's all off to the printers now - I guess we'd better start to sell some tickets!

The Boy Preference starts to take shape

To say I am excited about how The Boy Preference is shaping up would be a huge understatement.

Asking Emily to co-direct was SO the right thing to do and despite my control freakery I'm actually loving it. She's a great foil and inspiration and is bringing so many great ideas to the process.

Last night we met with Jack, our lighting genius. Jack has a long history with Best having lit many of our summer academies while he was till at school. I think he'll make our show look superb - and we now have a solution for the tricky 'diving board' issue...

And what's most exciting of all is to see how the cast have taken to it. There are some beautiful, rounded characters already developing and they seem to have instantly grasped the whole feeling of the piece.

I'm on the hunt for props which is turning into a really fun quest. Having tracked down the only remaining sunflowers in the UK last week, I'm after all kinds of other goodies now. More news on this as it comes in.

And finally for now, the National Theatre have finally approved our our poster - and here it is:-

The Boy Preference - week 1

A brilliant week started off by an excellent meeting with co-director Emily. We had a fantastic idea for a sunflower thing. My next thought was 'oh no. the sunflower season is over, where will we find some?' so I got on the phone to all the major growers of sunflowers in the UK and eventually spoke to Nicholas Watts of Vine House Farm north of Peterborough. What a lovely man! He grows around 6 million sunflowers a year and he personally went out and searched across all his fields to find the stalks we needed. We drove up there today to collect them.

"Sunflowers???"  I hear you ask - well you'll juts have to come and see the show to find out (although more hints will doubtless follow.

On the way back we dropped in to see the venue for our partner theatre show at Royal; & Derngate in Northampton. What a beautiful theatre! Two main house - a  lovely'producing' Victorian space (the Royal), a more modern 'receiving space (Derngate) and our studio - the Underground. It's just right for our show.

Then it was back home after a 200  mile round trip to rig up a strange contraption in the greenhouse to keep the mice off the sunflowers till next February! The thing we do for art, eh?

More news next week!

The very helpful Nicholas Watts!

Nicholas retrieving the stalks from the warehouse

The Empty Space

Heath Robinson strikes

Kate Bush - theatrical genius!

I should preface this by saying I am a huge Kate Bush fan - I've waited 30 odd years for this so by gum it needed to be good. It wasn't just good. It was simply stunning.

At the end - and I feel guilty having taken it!

These blog posts are written from a theatre school viewpoint - so what can we draw from last night's show?

1. Never forget that if you are onstage, you are there to entertain. There's no purpose to what you do without an audience. Kate Bush put everything into drawing the audience into her differently created worlds - first as a multi-million selling uber-singer, secondly in the Ninth Wave as the desperate woman washed into the sea awaiting rescue, and thirdly as part of a summer dream tinged with the fear of blackbirds. Theatrical always, visually amazing throughout and all underscored by her wonderful music played by a superb band. And finished off with a song everyone could sing along with - somewhat euphorically!

2. Attention to detail - we go on and on about everything on stage meaning something - the slightest look, the tiniest hand movement. Everyone on stage was 'on it' 100%. But also the whole visit should be an experience, so the programme was a work of art, the merchandise original and apt (including a sea survival kit!) and even the confetti blown into the audience was printed with lines from a Tennyson poem.

3. Enjoy the show - leave the cameras/mobiles at home. Kate Bush asked fans not to take photos/recordings during the show and just enjoy the event. What a difference that made! Everyone just focused on the performance, not on dodging lit up screens. We always ask parents not to take photos or film during our main shows, primarily for security reasons but more and more I believe important moments are being ruined by the desperate need for validation through photographic proof that 'you were there' and to have every moment of your life digitally stored. So I (hypocritically)ended up like everyone else with a photo of the theatre outside, two of empty stages and one at the very end - and even then I felt a bit guilty. But it was nice to see the whole audience rapt and focused and not littered with little lit up screens. Perhaps our communications on this with parents should reflect more on 'being in the moment' rather than recording it.

4. There's no substitute for a massive budget sometimes, but it still takes skill to use it well. Kate Bush had obviously gone for the best specialists she could find - not just the brilliant musicians, but the lighting and stage/costume designers and even Adrian Noble as her co-director. I wonder if they'd come and help with 'The Boy Preference'. I'll ask...

5. Commit to your creation! Nobody is memorable for being mediocre. Try something amazing. You never know...

So overall, this might well have been the best gig I've ever seen - and I've seen quite a few. Trying to think now what my other favorites were... Japan as a support band for Blue Oyster Cult (yes it did happen), the original Two-Tone tour, Peter Gabriel's 'Growing Up' tour... no, this was the best.

There's rumours of a DVD of the show being released. I strongly advise you to make a small investment.

Not so Great Britain...

The West End transfer of the National Theatre's production of 'Great Britain' looked uncomfortable last night.

It was written and rehearsed in secret whilst the phone-hacking trials were in progress and opened soon after (June) without previews or too much publicity to generally favourable reviews (especially for Billie Piper in the lead role).

It is strange that such an immediate and 'current' piece should look so dated, so quickly! Not only is the phone-hacking scandal already very old news, but the 'state of the nation' on which the play comments has changed hugely during the debate on Scottish independence. We aren't living in the same 'Great Britain' that we were in June.

But even given this, it was a very uneven and ultimately disappointing show that dealt in broad stereotypes that we have seen far too often.

Lucy Punch played the role originally created by Billie Piper at a constant level of coarse smugness that was simply annoying after the first 10 minutes - to be honest she was pretty awful. Dermot Crowley did a good job as the Murdoch-figure and Robert Glenister was fun as the awful Editor (until he disappeared in the second act). The show was totally stolen by the hilariously incompetent Police Commissioner played by Aaron Neil and by the brilliant graphics displayed on very funky large dividing screens at scene changes.

But 'riotously funny' it was not.

There's a real benefit to the brilliant NT Travelex ticket scheme by which £15 seats are offered to most shows - you can go to a play and be disappointed without being too irate that you've wasted a huge amount of money!

And crisps £1.70 a bag (I missed my tea)! Come on....

Fantastic fringe!

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year was superb. It's not just the vast numbers of variable quality pieces on offer (2000+), nor the ability to go from dawn to early morning in a constant stream of theatre, it's the whole vibe of so many people with similar outlooks brought together in one place. The vibe is remarkable.

Ostensibly we were there to support the youngest son with NSFW and his experience is very typical I suppose.

You arrive to a hastily constructed space (in his case an old office block just off the Royal Mile which was very atmospheric and are given a very short space of time to get your technical rehearsal done - 45 minutes at 6.30am in his case.

You open the next day and before your slot (12.55pm for NSFW) you are all out on the streets desperately leafleting away in the hope of getting an audience to see you. Walking down the Royal Mile during festival time is to run the gauntlet of creative, well-meaning, occasionally to pushy or just mad leafleteers. Your pockets swiftly fill up with bits of A6 card. Here's a nice article on the art of leafleting.

Next you hope for a good review, and the earlier the better, to attract more people. Luckily NSFW got 5* from the well-read BroadwayBaby.com in the first week and so numbers were pretty god. This was followed by a 4* and 3* from Edfringe later on. So the numbers were kept bubbling along - you are there for three weeks!

By the last week you are sick to death of leaflets and probably fellow thesps - NSFW's cast seemed remarkably happy together but this is probably unusual. But it's hard work being around actors for a long time and you long for the sanity of a quiet space.

At the end of three weeks you try not to count the cost of what you've just done. Very few productions make a profit. It's the experience (and the exposure) that counts.

And then home, with a bag full of ripe washing and a feeling of achievement that it takes a while to come down from.

If you've never been to the festival as audience, go. If you're an actor or director, it's part of any good actor's training.

My highlights of the week!

It's been a thoroughly satisfying week - all the shows went well and were warmly received. And most importantly it looks like all the casts of all the shows had a totally positive experience! That's the most important thing.

But here are my personal highlights of the week - just things that will stick in my memory...

• Fixing the toilet seat in the girls' loo at Sandringham. Twice.
• Looking around at a key point of 'This Is My Elephant' to see 7 grown men weeping (albeit surreptitiously)
• Frankie's accent in 'T.I.M.E' - beautifully observed, great character
• Dom's scary and violent husband - took me totally by surprise and genuinely shocking
• The other side of the coin - poor Megan!
• Emily and Kieran in the cafe - "Show me."
• Overall impression at the end of 'T.I.M.E.' that something really powerful and worthwhile had been created
• Emily as the little old lady in 'Reality Bites' - "Don't leave me!"
• Rediscovering James Saunders' work - love it!
• The massive queues outside The SandPit - lovely to have good houses
• The bling of the foyer, the gold of the stage...
• The lovely sound of a cello in "Oscars" in 'Falling Slowly'
• The lighting up sign thing - fab work Rachael!
• My mispronunciation of 'Best umbrella' during the presentations at the end of 'Oscars'
• Spooky lighting on the swans
• The penguins of course! 
• Generally, the whole 'animated animal casting' scene - that idea has legs I think...
• Especially the line "please follow the horrific trail of blood to the end of the corridor"
• Gareth - the human running order (see picture below)
• Friday yellow's tears as four moved on - seeing them holding hands in the last number
• Sarah's 'pratfall' 
• Elola's alien
• Hertford greenies flying a kite (what a lovely bunch they are)
• The joy in the Hertford bollywood number
• The horrendous pain of my knee at the end of the first Oscars show (and the relief that large doses of paracetamol brought)
• and finally...Louisa's (Freudian?) gaffe at the end of her intro for the Casting Agency scene on Saturday - when you relax too much and you lose concentration for a moment, the subconscious brain kicks in and disastrous things can happen... we did laugh. A lot.

So we move on to Greenwich this Sunday where 'T.I.M.E' is being presented as part of the young peoples festival. And then on Monday the spring holiday courses start. Time for another deep breath...

Tarra till then!