Corinne

On Mark Ravenhill, Rhetoric and Honesty

This entry was posted in In Response and tagged Andrew Haydon Edinburgh Fringe Mark Ravenhill Opinions State of the (arts) Nation on by

On Saturday I read something on the internet which made me angry. Which is, in and of itself, deeply unremarkable in as much as the internet is powered by cat pictures and anger (though, thankfully, rarely at the same time). What is noticeable about this one is that I got angry over something which a lot of people I know and respect thought was brilliant and important.

I got angry over the speech Mark Ravenhill gave for the Inaugural Opening Address of the Fringe Festival.

Quite rightly people had jumped in to defend Ravenhill from what I can only assume was a wilful misrepresentation of his words by the BBC and the speech got RT’d in to my twitter stream and a parade of friends “shared” it on Facebook, all indicating their endorsement by degrees of superlatives. And – me? I just got angry.

More angry than the content of the speech merited.

And I did wonder if this was one of those things – like the NT’s Curious Incident… or cheese – where my own disquiet about it is pushed into anger because no one else seems to have noticed what I’m talking about.

But then I came back to it today, as I’d promised myself I would once the momentary flare-up had passed and, free from the initial flame, I could actually see what troubled me.

I think the first thing to note – and this is important – is that it’s very well written. It’s funny – albeit knowingly funny (but then I just tried that with less success by comparing Curious Incident to cheese so who am I to throw stones?) – and there’s a lot of Big Issues contained within and it builds to a satisfyingly rousing conclusion and call to arms. Most of all – it’s hugely flattering to its audience. Us old guys – we did it wrong, but you young ‘uns – you can change all that. And you finish up wanting to punch the air and shout – YES! We shall be different! We shall have a cooperative van company paid for by all our members! (Seriously, we should have a cooperative van company – I totally volunteer to administrate it).

In short: it’s really, really good rhetoric.

And if you want to see what’s the problem with that I should point you towards Andrew Haydon’s own state of the (arts criticism) nation, which is much less rhetorically controlled and much more spiky and obviously problematic but also much more brilliant and risky and angry and important. There’s no getting away from the honesty of that piece. In contrast – and you can only properly see it when you stand it next to something like Haydon’s – Ravenhill’s is curiously sterile in the honesty department. It postures at being honest – the humour and the critique of “the arts sector” and what “we” have done – but that’s not actually honesty. That’s critique dressed up with extended metaphor.

The defence for this then becomes that Ravenhill’s speech actually proves the point he is making. Haydon – free of the “system” in his own blog and without the weight of delivering the Inagural Fringe Address and a contract with the RSC and all of the stuff that goes with being Mark Ravenhill – has the honesty which Ravenhill is lamenting the loss of for those who play within.

Form expressing content – it’s a writer’s wet dream.

Until now the word I have chosen to describe Ravenhill’s speech is rhetoric. If I were being less kind – or if I hadn’t been beaten around the head with examples of classical rhetoric during a particularly ill-fated episode during my BA – I might use the word “spin”. If I use the word “spin” Ravenhill becomes not trapped by the prevailing climate but complicit with the “New Labour” mode he is ostensibly railing against.

And that’s what made me angry. Because the speech raises a number of important, salient points but never properly owns them:

“I think the arts sector as a whole went astray during the last couple of decades.”

“I think they [the arts] weren’t telling the truth”

“most artists are…”

“we were talking about working in the creative industries”

[my italics]

What we actually have there is some pretty broad brush strokes (am I to seriously believe that in two decades no one in mainstream art was telling the truth – whatever ‘truth’ might actually be, subjective as it often is? NO ONE?). And then there’s also a problem with slipping from “the arts” (which, in its own way, is as meaningless and unhelpful as “creative industries”) to individual artists to a “we” I’m not exactly sure who is part of.

The only point I come close to thinking we might get some honesty is:

and after a while for a few years a modest but real terms increase in government funding for the arts. And we artists were so grateful for that relatively modest bit of attention and money that we changed substantially what and who we were as artists.

The first “we artists” in that doesn’t even trouble me too much, it’s a we that seems to have some truth. The second one, however, that’s the sort of generalisation that makes me sad. Because I can’t work out if it’s an inability to say the word “I” – which is fair enough, it would be a difficult thought to say in your head, let alone in a room full of people in your industry – or if it’s because it’s a casual sweeping statement, suggesting something important is being offered whilst in reality being a bit meaningless. Then, just in case there was a risk of an “I” getting in there, we get an imaginary conversation between a mother and a child to send up the point. Which is nice as far as I like imagination and I like jokes, but not something that stands up to any sort of discussion about what truth this speech is based on.

And because there is nothing solid in the speech and no ownership I can only conclude that the speech is a negation of responsibility.

And if there’s anything I’m absolutely fucking sick of then it’s negation of responsibility. Since 2008 we’ve been drowning in the stuff.

But it’s okay – you, this new generation, you’ll get us out of this. You’ll dream up new ways of working.

Yes, me and my £13,000 in student loans (and it makes me blanche that a debt of that amount marks me out as one of the lucky ones) and overdraft and not really remembering what a weekend is and forgetting what normal social lives are and doing everything I can just to stick at this for long enough – just as everyone I know who is still hanging in is – we will imagine and re-design and it will be amazing and we will just have to eat a lot of toast and carry all of our stuff to Edinburgh.

I might only speak for myself here, but I think this particular “we” could do with some help. Help that’s better than a collection of well written words, or to borrow a phrase from some women who knew what they were talking about, “deeds not words”.

You’ve identified the problem (at least as far as you see it), Ravenhill. Now what are you going to do about it? Because my “we” – the disparate “we” I’ve seen doing and imagining and helping – it’s a “we” I embrace my part in. Own it. Own your words.

Cold Writing – Meet The Writers: Caro Dixey

This entry was posted in Cold Writing Theatre.Jar and tagged Babble.Jar Cold Writing Theatre.Jar Writing on by

It’s safe to say there’s been quite a bit happening at WBN in the last couple of weeks. And only 20% of it has involved heavy lifting. Which is, y’know, a positive step. But in the midst of All Of The Stuff the fact that next week – NEXT WEEK – we’ve got our first Theatre.Jar has crept up on us. But we do! In five days time! And, to hold back on the exclamation points for a sentence or two, in only two days time our group of intrepid writers will be taking part in the Cold Writing workshop and Charlie can stop being secretive about the theme and we can tell you all (I’ve been sworn to secrecy, even though there’s a moderately amusing story I want to blog from the theme-deciding committee meeting).

But, for now, we asked our writers if they’d like to write something for this very blog and (drum roll please) first up we have Caro Dixey, complete with something of an analogy first for this blog…

This is the second blog I have been asked to write about my writing and I can’t help pointing out the paradoxical nature of this task. I’m not sure how to write about my writing, my process, my experience as a writer. If I’m honest I’m dying to take the easy way out and tell you to come and see my work and you’ll know everything you need to know about me as an artist (and you should, come and see my work). But in the spirit of ‘doing one thing every day that scares you’ (advise that should never be ignored) I shall persevere if you will afford me the time.

Without sounding trite or “arty-farty” (for want of a much better word) what I’ve said above is true, anything you need to know about me you can find out from my writing. This is because I can only write with the voice, the opinions, the emotions I have experienced and the challenges I have faced.

That said what I write is not solely the concern of a 28 years old single woman, struggling in the arts. Of course not. I delight in transposing  the voice I have been given and the things I have seen, as best I can, into universal issues that will captivate an audience of 75 year olds just as much as an audience of 30 somethings. More over I was recently very flattered by an audience member at a recent play of mine who was most surprised the piece was written by a woman.

I started writing before I can remember: writing poems – “angsty” poems of an average “angsty” teenager. Never in a million years would I have thought I would ever share anything I had written, but now I even share my poetry on my blog.

I decided I had to write for the stage in my third year studying Music with Drama at Anglia Ruskin university as a result of reading  Sarah Kane’s Blasted for my contemporary writing module. Now I know that the hype for Miss Kane’s work has long since passed and she became so fashionable that she is now, in fact, terribly unfashionable.  However, the 21 year old me read Blasted, read about Blasted,  read about Sarah Kane’s dissection of form and content and I began to understand a new way of looking at the world through the theatre, and from then on, I wanted to write for the stage.

It took me a long time to have the confidence to share my writing with the theatre world – despite training as a dramaturg and championing the writing of others for years. I saw my first solo piece of writing at a London showcase last year and this was enough to break free from the shackles of my insecurity and push my writing in front of anyone who would watch/read.

The best piece of advice I was given at the time was:

“Don’t think of your writing as your baby, think of it as sperm – shoot out as much of it as possible and see what happens.”

On the back of this advice I launched a personal crusade (personal because no-one else seems to be getting on board) to submit a piece of writing to a different competition, theatre, agent, writing opportunity anywhere, every single Monday. This is fondly known to my facebook friends and twitter followers as #SubmissionMonday and since I have been religiously #SubmissionMonday-ing I have seen six pieces on my work staged at various London venues this year alone.

And that pretty much brings me up to date. Applying for Cold Writing with Write By Numbers was a #SubmissionMonday affair and I am itching to get started on it. Writing for a brief, to a tight deadline is tough (I recently did exactly this with the fabulous Pensive Federation) but in my experience it can lead to some of the most exciting, challenging and honest work you can imagine.  I just can’t wait.

My website is a great place to start for anything else you might want to know about me or my experience as a writer and dramaturg or you can follow me on twitter @carodixey. Otherwise just make sure you are there on 10th July at Babble.Jar – you’ll probably find me in the bar.

(And if you would like to join Caro – and probably the rest of us – in the bar you can get your name on the all important list by emailing tickets@writebynumbers.co.uk and we shall let you in for £4, which works out at 67p per play)

The One About Ignite

This entry was posted in Beneath the Albion Sky On Tour Performance and tagged Beneath the Albion Sky BikeShed Theatre Festivals Ignite on by

One of the things I’m keen for this blog to do is reflect what it’s actually like for, to use a term I’m sure is a bit waffly, an “emerging theatre company”. By this I mean: the bad stuff, and the dull stuff and stuff that makes you wake up at 2.30am in a cold sweat as well as the oh-we-made-a-show-and-it-was-so-much-fun stuff.

Which is maybe why it’s taken me some time to write this blog post.

“You know that dream you have about festivals…” I said to a good friend who also happens to make stuff. Immediately I saw the look of horror spread across his face.

“No, not the dream where the actor forgets all the lines and there’s no audience except for a solitary reviewer who absolutely hates the show and you end the night vomiting in a gutter having lost a large portion of your clothing, several thousand pounds and all of your dignity. The dream dream. The one that you’re not supposed to believe actually happens.”

My friend nods.

“I think…I think it sort of happened.”

We’ve lived some time with Beneath the Albion Sky and, as I’ve discussed before, it’s not always been the smoothest of processes. Of course when, as a company, you’re writing and making and producing the play there are inevitably moments when putting your head in a blender would come as welcome release. Maybe when the Albion Sky journey is complete (for we still have quite a long way to go with it yet) I will blog about all of those bits.

But, for now, it’s probably a fair representation to say that we had an utterly brilliant time at Ignite. Great word of mouth, lovely full audiences who laughed and awwed and held their breath slightly in all the right places (and, most excitingly, in places which were entirely right but we hadn’t realised were there), an awesome review in Wildfire (the festival’s daily publication), people coming to see the show because they’d seen the scratch back in November and, just when we were back in London and in danger of coming down from our festival-sugar-rush, news that Albion Sky had been chosen for one of the Critics’ Choice awards as one of the Wildfire Five.

(If you’re really, really interested you can see all of that in our storify of what people said about Albion where it’s been handily gathered together for your – and indeed our parents – ease of reference.)

But that’s just half of what made Ignite so special. Chatting in bars with other theatremakers and the wonderful discounted tickets for performers to see shows in the festival and the buzz and excitement and the willingness of everyone to take risks and to see work as more of a journey of the company than as a one off piece and lemon meringue ice cream in the sunshine and Exeter being bloody beautiful and £3 doubles and dreaming up a new play idea at midnight and…I could go on but it would be sappy and it would probably require you to roll your eyes A LOT.

I’m sure I will return to Albion Sky and some of the things – as writers – that we learnt from it over the course of the rehearsal process and the festival and maybe it shall be serious and intelligent and make some sense.

But for now I’m just leaving you with how gloriously, heart-burstingly happy Ignite made us.

WBN Presents…Theatre.Jar

This entry was posted in Cold Writing Theatre.Jar and tagged Babble.Jar Cold Writing New Writing Theatre.Jar on by

We’ve been keeping this under our hats (or, in my case, my headscarf) for a little bit but to demonstrate that we’re doing other things than just creating elaborate visual structure patterns of Beneath the Albion Sky whilst eating biscuits we’ve got some exciting news to announce…

*drum roll please*

On the 10th July we’ll be doing our pop-up theatre thing at Babble.Jar in Stoke Newington. Babble.Jar’s an awesome bar (look! at! the! cocktails!) who are supporting lots of artistic ventures and, because we’re always up for doing something we haven’t done before, we’re exploring what a regular writing-theatre-night (Write By Numbers style) might look like with them. It’s probably worth noting that for once Write By Numbers style doesn’t include sub-zero temperatures, carrying hundreds of chairs, or fixing a broken toilet. Babble.Jar have all of those things in order (also, they have board games and table tennis – literally WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT?).

We’ve christened the night Theatre.Jar (see what we did there?) and we’ll be launching in July with a specially commissioned version of our write-and-make-a-play-in-72-hours-without-collapsing-from-exhaustion strand Cold Writing. You can read our call out for writers here and, if you’re not panicked by over use of capitals and mild panic, you can also find out about what’s exactly involved with Cold Writing in our live blogs from Cold Writing: Reinvent and Cold Writing: The Forest.

Theatre.Jar will start at Babble.Jar at 7.45pm on Wednesday 10th July and you can find directions here. Tickets are £4 if, to borrow a phrase, your name’s on the list or £5 on the door. To get your name on that all important list send us an email to tickets@writebynumbers.co.uk

The One Where We Learn Some Lessons (Life & Theatre)

This entry was posted in Beneath the Albion Sky and tagged Beneath the Albion Sky development Lists Rehearsals The Albany on by

Things we have learnt during rehearsal block two:

1. We really – really – should have aired the orange pop-up tent we took to Latitude at some point in the last 10 months. Not doing this meant a rather pleasant morning in a rehearsal room smelling of Dead Tent.

2. Under rehearsal room, rather than camping, conditions Andy and Charlie can make the above orange pop-up tent pop-down in 25 minutes. TWENTY FIVE MINUTES. Which is a good ten minutes more than our entire get-out time. They both, however, refer to the experience as “bonding” so we let it count as some sort of team exercise.

3. Andy is not distracted at all by the Les Mis soundtrack playing loudly (and on repeat) outside the rehearsal room window. Someone blasting out “The Age of Aquarius”, however, is entirely different.

4. The exercise “Tell the story to Corinne as if you’re both sitting in a pub” makes everything just that little bit funnier. Even when sober. Though also: all that more awkward at the end because, y’know, sober and someone (even though fictional) has just told you Something Important and Secret About Their Life. But it made us think about how we tell the story as well as why.

5. Paul is, as he develops, much more likeable than when we first started. He’s funnier and more self-assured and probably a little more ridiculous. This is all good.

6. Andy now does a little dance towards the end of the play. This makes all of us very happy indeed, particularly as it meant Charlie got to exclaim “Dance Andy, Dance!”.

7. There are lots of ways to tell this story. There are lots of different ways to tell each bit of the story. And some times we need to make clear that how we’re telling the story at a particular moment is a deliberate choice.

8. We spend a minimum of 18% of any break time discussing the relative merits of the available coffee.

9. Andy is some sort of line learning fiend. Those 7, 144 words – IN THE RIGHT ORDER. Though Charlie and I only notice when a line is missed if it is a joke (see: writer ego).

10. (Slightly sappy sentence alert) Despite the time pressures we’re properly, properly enjoying making this play. There have been more group hugs than is entirely seemly.

And we didn’t learn this in the rehearsal room but we did on our evening outing to Greenwich Picturehouse:

11. None of us really like Captain Kirk.

We should also say a big thank you to The Albany whose support meant it was possible for us to have a dedicated rehearsal space for the week. Rehearsal block three (our final extended rehearsal period, eek) is taking place in Bristol (possibly as you read this…). Which means in just over a week we’ll be opening…

The One Where We Try Some Roleplay

This entry was posted in Beneath the Albion Sky and tagged Beneath the Albion Sky development Rehearsals on by

Day two in rehearsals meant a couple of things:

1. We’d already eaten 50% of the biscuits purchased.

2. We were going to look at – big breath please – “character”.

There are characters I’ve created when even before a single line of dialogue has been written I could have told you their potted biography. I don’t tend to write this way any more – partly because I’m more confident in doing my ‘thing’ than listening to the prevailing ideology on how a play should be written (the early to mid noughties was a prescriptive time in literary departments), but also partly because that’s not how my plays tend to work now. That doesn’t mean I don’t research beforehand (secretly, researching a new idea might be my favourite part of the process) – I’ve discovered more about walking, both the practicalities and politics of, than I thought humanly possible for a girl who, much to performer Andy’s bemusement when he took me on a walk, does not own a pair of walking shoes. But I prefer to discover the character details through writing than through the “50 questions you should be able to answer about your character”.

As the initial writing process probably makes clear, the speed with which the initial scratch for Beneath the Albion Sky was created meant that, when I started writing, I knew that the character’s name was Paul, he was somewhere in his late twenties, had a girlfriend named Joanne and a cat named Bob (the cat, though still in the blurb, got culled somewhere between draft 0.75 and 0.925). From this point onwards Charlie and I either independently discovered (read: made up) or quizzed each other about facts of Paul’s life as the script dictated. We came up with some of the answers that we needed to write the script but didn’t disclose them because – where is the fun in that? And, anyway, a lot of them might well be wrong and it’s much more fun to bash them out in a rehearsal room.

Which is sort of how Andy and I ended up sitting in a room and being shouted at by Charlie.

For the sake of all concerned I should probably clarify that WBN doesn’t condone shouting at actors or indeed co-writers (we save our ire for SHUTTERS, George Osborne’s face, and purveyors of bad coffee). Charlie was shouting in the name of roleplay. Specifically a roleplay where Charlie was the Malcolm Tucker of the police force and Andy and I were slightly hapless PCs (one of us slightly more hapless than the other as it turned out) trying to piece together the details of a “missing person” (one Paul from Beneath the Albion Sky). In this set-up Charlie would fire questions at us and we’d have to answer without hesitation or receive something of a Tucker-esque verbal bashing (possibly Charlie enjoyed this element rather too much).

Without the opportunity to either think properly (what with The Fear) or reference something in script we were forced to go with instinct. And if this caused my eyes to go a bit wide then it also worked brilliantly in tapping in to things we didn’t think we knew but really did.

Things we discovered:

We don’t know Paul’s surname.
None of us know where Kidderminster is.
Paul is 26 (on the younger side to the age I’d assumed beforehand) and was born on the 15th August.
Paul went to a Uni near his hometown, which is where he met Joanne.
We’re not exactly sure where this hometown is but we now suspect it might be in Lincolnshire.
Paul likes real ale, is a keen reader, listens to folk music, plays but doesn’t really watch sport, and once went to see Leonard Cohen in concert.
Paul and Joanne live in a rented house, she would like to buy a house, he has been avoiding this.
They do not have a cat, but if they did Andy is very adamant that it would be a black and white tabby named Magic.
Paul’s an only child, his parents split up when he was seven.
All three of us had independently come up with the same explanation for what has happened to Paul’s dad.

Things it forced us to confront:

All the people in Paul’s world who, to varying degrees, skip around, under, and in the gaps of the text.
The funny answer is some times (but not always) the right one.
Our timescale for events which lead up to Paul beginning the walk is a bit hazy.

As we went through the notes PC Furness had made during the session it became clear that often where we didn’t agree on a specific detail which had been conjured we did agree with the sentiment behind it.

And then, happy that we were all going in the same direction, Charlie stopped shouting, Andy put down his prop-handcuffs and we ate some more biscuits.