Thoughts and Flirtations

The One With Lots of Metaphorical Hats

This entry was posted in Thoughts and Flirtations and tagged Write By Numbers Writing on by

I’m going to talk about hat wearing.

And that’s not just because I like hats (though I do) but because it’s something I’ve been very aware of since, just over 18 months ago, I decided to stop writing in my spare time and decided to do the thing that paid my rent in my spare time and write in my full time. Being a writer means you’ve got a lot of hats to wear.

“What do you do?” is an easy enough question. But how do I answer it?

Well, there’s my Writer Hat. I write plays. I’ve got a half written novel. I write blogs.

Then there’s my plethora of Write By Numbers Hats. I’ve got my Artistic Director Hat. I’ve got my Marketing Hat. I’ve got my Accountant Hat. I’ve got my Tea Making Hat. I’ve got my Planning Hat. I’ve got my Workshop Leader Hat.

I’ve got my Literary Associate Hat. My Dramaturg Hat. My workshop Assistant Hat.

I’ve got my Journalist Hat. I’ve got my Columnist Hat. I’ve got my Reviewer Hat.

I’ve got my Shakespeare Hat. Given that this is the hat that (most regularly) pays my rent I’m reasonably fond of this one. But it’s the one I define myself least by.

And what do all these metaphorical hats mean? Hat- hair I guess.

Having had the luxury of spending a good chunk of January/February entirely wearing my Ovid Reworked – The Brixton Project Hat I’m very aware now that I’m back to the hat swapping routine. Some of that is very exciting – I am itching to get back to work on some of those stories that are floating around my head and commit them to the keys on my laptop. My head is buzzing with new plans, new opportunities which The Brixton Project has opened up for us. But some of the hats are, I know, hats I wouldn’t necessarily choose to wear if choice were an option. They’re hats I wear, to borrow a phrase from Avenue Q, “only for now”.

But I know if I were to go back to Writers School (if such a thing exists) I would tell anyone thinking of writing to get ready for the hats.

On Courage 1

This entry was posted in Thoughts and Flirtations and tagged Mother Courage and Her Children National Theatre Reviews on by

It was pointed out to me this week what an absurd thing it is for people to do to sit in a darkened room with a group of strangers and be transfixed by a person on a stage pretending to be someone else. And I’m sure if you thought about it too hard you’d have to nod and say – yes, it is an absurd thing. Make believe and all that.

But me, I always liked make believe.

And this week I had one of those reminders of how stomach-churning, hairs of the back of your neck raising theatre can be during the last twenty minutes of Mother Courage and Her Children at the National. To be entirely honest I’d gone out of curiousity rather than expectation (in one of those random gaps that occur in theatre-going I’d never seen a Brecht play on stage). The most used word about the production from those I’d asked about it was “long”. And long doesn’t bother me – once you’ve sat through a Wagner opera then “long” isn’t something that scares you – but when the first thing that springs to mind about a production is its length? Not so good.

And yes, Mother Courage is long. With a first half of two hours I don’t think I’m being controversial in saying that it is too long. And, yes, having a live band on stage (and slowing up the action even more) was a little self indulgent. Okay, rather a lot.

But – and this is one of those huge, clunking buts – I was never less than engaged. I loved the invention. I loved the humour. I loved the money I could see had been spent. I loved, loved Fiona Shaw as a Mother Courage that you were at once compelled and repulsed by.

And I would have gone home happy enough with that. Then in one of those moments that only come around every so often everything just came together in the last twenty minutes of the show in such a way that it split my world a little. Brecht’s story, the acting, the directing, the sound, the lighting and then, oh, the music – and I wanted to scream. Wanted to jump up and bang with Katrin. And then in the play’s dying moments as eternity stretched out in front of me I wanted to melt into the sound of the voice, and the drum beat, as Mother Courage continues as she must continue. Wanted this not to finish as I cried and my heart broke a little and I saw something that I can’t articulate but which I understood completely.

Could that moment have been written? No, of course it couldn’t. It compelled me so completely because it was a product of more than words. The effect of light into darkness, of a rhythm in a song, of a quiver in a voice.

Which is probably why I find myself here, writing for performance and not writing a novel because all of the stuff you can’t control, all the places your words can go – that’s what excites me.

Slight Return

This entry was posted in Bloggery Thoughts and Flirtations and tagged Life & Everything Else on by

Just over a week ago I packed my bags, bundled myself into a National Express coach and (once the seemingly never-ending journey had finished) spent what turned out to be a slightly longer than anticipated break in Leeds. I’d vowed to have a work-less, theatre-less week and though I was nearly distracted by a production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle at  an old haunt of mine I actually managed it. Then I ended up re-visiting years gone by first on a friend’s then on my parents’ bathroom floor and, well, nice end to a holiday and all that.

But now I’m back in London and it does mark, I suspect, the moment where I pick up in earnest everything I need to be doing. A year ago this week I started my MA and now, as I returned the last of my library books, it’s another sort of challenge.

First up? The 513 new theatre related blog entries that have collected in my RSS reader in my absense. I may be some time…

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

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…