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The World Without Rules?

This entry was posted in In Response and tagged Blogging on by

I’m going to return to this one tomorrow when I’ve got a bit more time to write something vaguely coherent but, thanks to @FacesofWayne on twitter, I saw an article on Writer’s Digest about whether writers should blog. And indeed if they do whether there should there be a code of conduct.

My first response was most definitely something along the lines of it covering some useful areas whilst simultaneously feeling completely alien to my own experience of blogging. But then there are certainly times in my life when I’ve been a Blogger who writes rather than a Writer who blogs so maybe that’s where that (not so subtle) difference comes in.

Equally, I’ve never heard the phrase “time sink” before.  Every day really is an education.

It touches something, however, that I’ve been wanting to explore for some time – so I shall return…

Inspirations: Number Two

This entry was posted in Inspirations and tagged Frank Turner Inspirations Music Simon Armitage on by

Somewhere, deep down and not so secretly, if I could rearrange my personality a bit and add in a few talents which I don’t have then I would do so to enable myself to be a rock-star.  I’ve heard Simon Armitage say on a couple of occasions that he only became a Poet because it was the closest he could get to rock-stardom (and the audience which greets Armitage in his live ‘gigs’ attests to the fact that his fame in Poetry terms is nothing short of this). My, I know what he means (with the twist that I’m a Playwright because it’s the closest I could get to Poetry-stardom). Some friends and I have a fictional girlband that, in an alternate Universe, we’re ripping up the charts with. With my sticker-covered guitar and attitude I’m the lead singer who will, at some point in the future, abandon the group for an ill-fated dalliance with solo stardom.

Which is probably a long and winding way of saying how much everything in my life is influenced by music, and how much live music is one of my absolute favourite things in the world. I obsessively create soundtracks for everything I write, turn characters into songs and one day will create some great Nick-Hornby style homage to the songs which have changed my life.

Currently I’m obsessed with Frank Turner and thanks to the wonder of YouTube am wallowing in his live shows. And if any of those shaky videos makes me want to write something epic then this performance of ‘Love Ire and Song’ is it.

Angry, wistful, hopeful, romantic and just a little bit wonderful.

Shunt The First

This entry was posted in Thoughts and Flirtations and tagged Shunt Space Venues on by

Charlie and I are sitting deep under London Bridge Station in Shunt Lounge. We’re about to watch a show which involves a marshmallow and a teddy bear. I’m rather hoping that I might get a marshmallow*.

The Stage Manager closes the black curtains to my right. That’s it; we’re contained in the bowels of the world.

“We’re trapped now!” Charlie exclaims. “Maybe forever”.

I consider this for a moment.

“There are worse places to be forced to spend eternity”.

And oh, there are. Because Shunt Lounge is the type of place where you just stumble upon the unexpected (last night: a room full of taxidermy which we were led to by a path of candles, the candles making me think of sinister fairytale entrapment). It’s the kind of place where I come out with fifteen new ideas for shows which I want to create (and that’s not just the epic portions of vodka speaking). It’s a space that just crackles with creativity and insanity and weirdness and all those other things that make it very special indeed.

But it’s not going to be there much longer what with the London Bridge redevelopment taking over (I heard a rumour – which I hope to be unfounded – that it is to be filled in with concrete as foundations for whatever it is that is being built on top of it. Talk about a flippin’ metaphor). There’s a new venue in Bermondsey Street which I’m sure will be as wonderful and ramshackle as the London Bridge vaults by the time that Shunt have got their hands on it but, well…I’ll miss the magic of this place.

*I didn’t. Bah.

Now Writing

This entry was posted in Thoughts and Flirtations and tagged Adaptations New Writing Now Writing on by

I feel before I write this blog that I should probably attach some kind of disclaimer to it –  the disclaimer being that the thoughts given are very much my own and that everyone is entitled to their own opinion…

Saying that, I do feel that some clarity needs to be given on what we can class as ‘new writing’. Where am I going with this? An example: I saw an adaptation of a well known ghost story the other day in a rather large local London venue. Suffice to say, it was poorly written, wearily acted and would have looked dated in the 1980s. Now, the fact that the script hadn’t seemed to have seen its way past a first draft (at least I assume not) which resulted in many minutes of boredom was not the problem. I have come to the sad realisation that ‘tat’ (in my humble opinion) will get commissioned for the stage.

My problem is that this well known short story adapted for the stage had to be classed as ‘New Writing’. At least, I had to reconcile it in my mind as such. Why this disturbed me so is not because it is an adaptation (I am fond of adaptations myself, and WBN is planning an adaptation of epic proportions), nor is the problem the productions dreadfulness. The problem I had was WHY NOW? Neither the script nor the production seemed to have any relevance to the world we live in today. The only reason I can fathom that this play was made was for financial reasons. In fact, I think the production meeting probably went something like this: … ‘People might know this story – and they def know the author… We could do it with just three actors and a shoddy set! Ooh, let’s pay a small child to write an adaptation for the price of a mars bar!’…

I am not trying to suggest that ALL new writing needs to be based on current affairs. Even I, with a love of political theatre, would get bored if every play on was a Stockwell or an Enron (by the by, if anyone has an Enron ticket they want to give me I will give many pounds or do things for them of a suspect nature). But surely New Writing should be coming from the now – the writer or creator is making it based on the world and life they are living today. If this is too much of a problem (or if this is just my sole humble opinion, and gets shouted down by the masses) could there be some kind of differentiation?

If a distinction hasn’t already been made, may I be so bold as to coin the term NOW WRITING. Writing we can see has been created for now – that resonates with the world today. That doesn’t mean it has to be about the Olympics or Iraq or current affairs but has a sense of today’s world at its core – in its being. Now, that is obviously going to be subjective and my argument may be flawed and problematic. But if we can find a way of separating new writing so the next Jerusalem doesn’t get tarred with the same brush as the inevitable new adaptation of Dracula (because Vampire are SO in right now) then I would be very happy… I’d be nit picking and snobby, but happy.

Charlie

Write By Numbers

Fairy Tales and Everything Afterwards

This entry was posted in Quotes and tagged Fairy Tales Narrative Quotes on by

Bit late to the party but, through a link from The Wicked Stage, I found this over at Derek Siver’s blog and I absolutely have to quote:

Our lives drifts along with normal things happening[…]

“But because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none.”

That’s why people invent fights. That’s why we’re drawn to sports. That’s why we act like everything that happens to us is such a big deal.

We’re trying to make our life into a fairy tale.

It’s Sivers responding to a talk he attended given by Kurt Vonnegut a few years ago. As a long term personal blogger (before I take anything from my life that I’ve moulded into fiction) this is something that I’ve had a creeping awareness of. Organising, structuring, hightening, making life somehow fit a bigger, grander narrative…

Yes. Yes, I most definitely understand that.

New Ways of Working?

This entry was posted in In Response Thoughts and Flirtations on by

To get to the point: the ROH‘s Twitter Opera – genuine attempt at opening up Opera to a new demographic or an easy way to seem ‘on trend’?

Unfortunately I couldn’t get to Covent Garden during the weekend to see the final product and there’s yet to be a film of the production uploaded so I can only go on the initial libretto, and the clips here and here.

The ROH are certainly not the first to harness user-generated content on Twitter; the New York Neo-Futurists regularly get people to tweet a play in 140 characters (It’s not as insane as it sounds given that it would leave plenty of room for Hemingway’s famous  ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’), whist Resonance FM created a (yet to be recorded) radio play with dialogue first posted on twitter. But in terms of the freedom – and the size of the platform,  a performance in the Paul Hamlyn Hall is not to be scoffed at – the ROH’s experiment certainly has something a little bit unique about it. Not to mention that it’s an opera and, well, if theatre has problems about seeming inclusive then Opera is in another league.

The ROH likened the process to those Adventure books you had as a child where you picked which option you wanted to take and thereby created your own story. Only this story had (at last count on its twitter page) 2,134 followers and therefore people chosing to ‘take the path by the river’ (or suchlike). How many of those contributed I don’t know – though I would like to see the stats (and those about the percentage of lines that were directly quoted tweets)- but what is clear from the tweets is that there was real imagination and sense of spontaneity in those who contributed. And let’s be clear – weird stuff happens in Opera and, crikey, does some weird stuff happen in Twitterdammerung (confession time: its name made me chuckle. I am clearly a geek).

Given the fun the creators had with it I suspect that this project will be most successful in the journey rather than the destination. I am willing to be surprised but I suspect the whole process for the ROH has had very little to do with the final result (we are, after all, still waiting for the video of it…).

The test is in what the ROH does next. As a one off stunt it would smack of opportunism (and the ROH have garnered a lot of press from its sheer novelty value), but it does point to a different way to engage with an audience. How might that be taken forward? Could the ROH link twitter creativity to its main house output (stories for minor characters, on a theme etc)? Part of the joy of Twitterdammerung was how open the brief was, but is there ways to structure the brief to provide a less unweildy creation (or would they even want to)? Then there’s the issue of archive and how this is recorded (if at all). Certainly a presence on the main website rather than only the wordpress blog would be a good start.

And then the rather meaty question of whether the ROH believes that something artistically viable can come out of twitter (in the manner which Resonance FM clearly do) or whether it is simply a way of being more inclusive (in which case, a discounted performance for those tweeting?).

I’m intrigued to find out…