“ The best piece is The Proposition, as a man (Rod Tame), and a woman (Alex Herod) coldy discuss the merits and disadvantages of having an affair. Love and sex are reduced to elements in a balance sheet. As examples of the callous selfishness of the Eighties, the pair are pretty accurate.”
From the not entirely glowing review here. But I’ll take the nice words for a piece I wrote...
I blame @phrynesboudoir for this...
So this one has been a Work In Progress for about 4 years! This is the reading of Act One, which has already changed a fair amount in the process of being imported into my script software. If this goes well, I'll work on acts two and three. The reading is showing as part of Studio Salford Development Week 8.
When you start writing things, you only ever hear the words in your own voice. Eventually, you might persuade someone to read some of it for you, to get an idea of how it sounds. If you’re very lucky the people you persuade might be trained actors...
Long-term readers might recall me talking around Easter this year about a project being put together that was a load of short scripts, and I was one of the people writing for it. I was about two days off the deadline, and I had *nothing*. In sheer desperation I dug out of my laptop storage a written but nowhere near yet ready to be published bit of YACI! I scrapped the identifiers off (’Jack’ becomes ‘Johnny’, ‘Phryne’ becomes ‘Jules’, ‘Rosie’ becomes ‘Susie’), removed anything that wasn’t dialogue and threw it into the submission box.
It got picked up for the show, and has now been through two redrafts. Alas, a character has fallen by the wayside (but when this does eventually go up in fic it will be much more like the original version).
Tonight was the first rehearsal. Bear in mind that my actors don’t know where the story comes from, and only have a *very* brief Dramatis Personae and what’s in the script to go on. I’d set them research overnight, and asked them to consider some questions.
We worked on the background for some time. The stuff they came out with, based on the tiniest details in the written script, was amazing. ‘Johnny’ is, they reckon, a Chief Inspector, although that rank is a recent promotion; ‘Jules’, whose Dad owns half of Derbyshire (!) is the sort of person who has a lot of money, but there is nothing snobbish about her, and she is immensely curious about people and things - she is a Genuine Person. They reckon she is the CEO of a company, and that she arranges a lot of charity fundraisers - one which has something to do with Greater Manchester Police which is where she met Johnny.
It was a glorious few hours, and my actors worked really hard and were very open to a way of working that I’m experimenting with for this production.
Oh, and for reasons that are far too complex to explain, Raymond Hirsch has been renamed as ‘Zanzibar’ by one of my actors! At which my mind leapt to an image of a purple spangly latex suit and glitter... Yeah...
I somehow only managed to see good stuff at this year’s Fringe...
It’s been over a week, and I saw the show on closing night anyway, so I don’t count this as a ‘review’ as such. But this was an excellent show. If it comes back, and you're in the area, I urge you to see it.
Fringe hurts, and right here is where you start paying... your thirty quid admission fee. Don’t expect to get it back...
The view from the back of the performance space for the play I have written. I was pleased with how it went. It needs another draft (which I already knew), but everyone said encouraging things, which was lovely. I'm putting it in a drawer until after Hamlet is done...
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Still tickets available for the production of Hamlet I’m directing in the Greater Manchester Fringe. Performances 29th and 30th July. More here: http://www.greatermanchesterfringe.co.uk/details.php?show_id=351
And I've adapted the script for this one...
I have written a play. It is being performed, as a script in hand, on Wednesday 13th July.
I am currently excited / nervous....
As we head into Fringe time here in Manchester, I’ve been on the radio talking about Hamlet - which I’ve adapted the script for, and Fifteen For Two, which I’m writing as we speak...
It’s OK - the confusion will die down soon....
This then is a copy of a review I did for Starburst a month or so ago...
The observant will note that I have over-hauled my blog…
Moving the furniture around...
Have had an over-haul of my many, many places on the web. Going forward, this will be for writing stuff...
