Mon 30 July
Although I'm back I still have no time to blog! Keen to tell you all about the BBC scheme - though I shall have to choose my words carefully. Plus Mehndi Night had its first in-school preview last Friday, and I almost exploded with pride in those kids. We've also been longlisted for an award. But alas all this will have to wait.
In the meantime, keep an eye on the Society section of Wednesday's Guardian ...
[Comment]
Sun 22nd July
I'm away on a BBC training scheme until 28 July so I'm just going to use this space to shamelessly plug my forthcoming shows.
You can catch my play MEHNDI NIGHT at the Edinburgh Fringe from 2-11 August. You can book online here.
My new play for Half Moon Theatre WE ARE SHADOWS is also currently booking for its autumn tour. More details here.
Bless you all.
[Comment]
Weds 18th July
Very, very busy (again). Sorry.
[Comment]
Sat 7th July
HOORAY!!! I have finally seen a show I enjoyed and can recommend: Baghdad Wedding at Soho Theatre.
It's a beautiful piece of writing, with a fine cast and imaginative staging. Excitingly, it also has an inherent sense of theatrical possibility, with the dead talking to the living, and scenes freezing while outsiders interject, that sort of thing. But most importantly for me it has at its heart a glimpse into a world of licentious, promiscuous, middle-class Iraq, which you just don't hear about very often. Of all the shows I've seen lately this is what made it stand out; it opened a door onto an unfamiliar world, and in so doing told me something I didn't already know. It isn't perfect - the portrayal of the American characters is (perhaps understandably) rather one-dimensional in its fury, and at 1 hour 50 minutes straight through it could do with a trim. But even so it's certainly the best thing I've seen in a long time.
All of which set me wondering about whether I've been looking in the wrong places for the originality of material I so crave in drama. My girlfriend reminded me that the shows we have enjoyed most at the Royal Court, for example, have almost always been the ones developed by their International Department; readings from Cuba and India, or the Russian seasons with plays by Vassily Sigarev and the Presnyakov brothers which were on a few years back. Our favourite show from last year was The Overwhelming, about Rwanda, whilst other favourites like Royal Hunt Of The Sun, or The Pillowman, or going even further back in time Fallout, The Battle of Green Lanes, or Jitney - all located their worlds in either specific cultural groups alien to our own, or fantastical imagined landscapes, or time periods long ago. Whilst in my own work I'm finding it particularly exciting and satisfying getting to grips with the worlds of the Bengalis and the Jacobeans.
Perhaps I know my own culture too well. Perhaps having watched and studied, from A-levels onwards, so many plays chronicling the state of modern Britain, that this is an exhausted furrow which writers need to leave fallow for a while before returning to.
Or perhaps my insistence that theatre should take me to places never before seen is just asking too much. Maybe I should just shut up, pay my twenty quid, and try and take some comfort and enjoyment in hearing the same familiar stories one more time. (It worked for Shakespeare after all.)
But then a show like Baghdad Wedding comes along and ballses that idea up... Once that itch gets scratched it just seems to get stronger.
What a horrible dirty addiction theatre is.
[Comment]
Tues 3rd July
Had a terrific meeting at LAMDA this morning with Matt Peover and Mark Bell of Liquid Theatre, one of our fortnightly sessions to thrash out ideas for our modern Jacobean play. Interestingly enough, given the recent debates on this blog, we were looking at Character.
I love working with Matt and Mark because, like me, they work from the ‘outside in’ (see previous post for more on this). Again, I’m not for a moment suggesting this is the only way, or inherently better, but it’s the way I work and it’s been causing me problems of late as it doesn’t seem to be an approach that makes commissioners feel very safe.
I think this was our fourth Liquid meeting, yet this was the first time we had considered Character. The previous three times we’d spent in wide-ranging discussions comparing the Jacobean world with our own, and trying to find where the core Jacobean themes of Power, Love and Revenge might be located. On the way we’d taken in the Russian mafia, Baudrillardian hyperreality, global warming, cannibalism, Heat magazine, the Third Reich, atheism, Rupert Murdoch, the Mills-McCartney divorce, and the Olympics. We looked at how human structures create the conditions to destroy themselves. We read scientific reports about depression in chimpanzees. We talked about how gambling undermines economics and even the very concept of money itself. We considered making our audience eat until they were sick before the start of the play. We drank a lot of coffee.
Only then did we turn our attention to Character. (These are my kind of theatre-makers).
I’m a particular fan of John Webster and I was delighted to find the following quote about him in an essay by Simon Trussler, which we examined in today’s session:
“In the Poetics, Aristotle, arguing for the pre-eminence in a play of action over character, declared that a man’s happiness or otherwise is decided by the choices he makes – especially ‘when those are not obvious’. And this comes close both to Webster’s Jacobean view of ‘character’ and to what we would today call ‘existential’ choice, by asserting that our individuality is shaped not (as in ‘realist’ drama) through the deterministic effects of heredity and environment but, as with the character here [in The White Devil] through the sum of our own actions and the choices determining them: truly, existence preceding essence. While reasons or ‘motives’ can be found for Flamineo’s actions, it is probably more helpful to understand him through his behaviour and his attempts at a kind of self-definition: he becomes what he does.” [Italics in original]
As you can imagine, this was very exciting to me. It’s the total antithesis of the character-led psychological-realist approach that so exasperates me. It led on to a fascinating discussion in which Matt pointed out that the Jacobeans were writing long before the advent of modern psychology. They thought purely in terms of storytelling and action. This is what makes their plays so compelling – almost every character possesses a driving, obsessive, primal urge of one kind or another, which not only transcends rationality, but during the course of the play comes to commandeer the character until they are indistinguishable from the action itself. Everything else about them, in particular their brutal, visceral language becomes defined and subsumed by it. There’s something almost magical realist about engendering something so abstract on stage in this way.
This begs the question, can action be divorced from character? In life, perhaps not (though the existentialists might have something to say about that). But in deconstructing life and reassembling it, otherwise known as playwrighting, there is no reason why life can't be reduced to its constituent parts in this way, and abstract action alone become not just the starting point but the defining characteristic of a human being.
I find it fascinating that in a world without modern psychoanalysis, this could well have been how almost every play was written. And not only that, but without any public subsidy such plays were financed entirely by popular demand. Directors, producers and audiences were entirely comfortable conceiving of the world around them in this way.
You’ll find me on eBay looking up Time Machines.
[Comment]
30th June 2007
I was once told by someone (I forget who now, but they seemed authoritative at the time) that David Hare once observed a fundamental difference between British and American playwrighting styles. Hare posited that Americans write plays from ‘the inside out’ whereas the British tradition tends to write from ‘the outside in’. What he meant by this is that the Americans begin with character groupings – families, workplaces, friendship groups – and tell their personal stories, allowing any issues or themes to emerge organically from those stories. The British (and certainly Hare himself, and many of his generation) by contrast largely start with the theme – postcolonialism, female emancipation, the state of the judiciary – and then populate the drama with the characters best placed to explore this theme.
Now I don’t want to get sidetracked in a big comments box discussion pointing out all the exceptions to this broad rule of thumb, because whether it’s true or not of those particular countries and their playwrighting traditions is irrelevant. It’s the distinction itself that has always interested me, as it does seem to encapsulate two very distinct approaches to playwrighting and play commissioning with which I myself struggle.
There are advantages and drawbacks to each approach, of course. At their worst, plays written from the ‘inside out’ can avoid hitting on any interesting issues at all, even accidentally, and can turn out to be narcissistic affairs about the writer’s immediate circle of friends, without any insight to offer about anything much at all. But they may also be great examples of writing psychologically watertight characters, with all the messy urges, contradictions, and nuances of fear and longing that characterise the human condition.
‘Outside in’ plays at their best can be political epics of Homerian scope and Shakespearean complexity, offering devastating critiques of the world around us and the forces at work in it. But at their worst they offer weak one-dimensional characters, who act as mere ciphers for the playwright’s transparent agenda, parroting ideology uninformed by human complexity or heart.
There are fine (and terrible) examples of both, from both sides of the Atlantic.
My natural tendency when thinking of new ideas is to use the ‘outside in’ approach. It's not a choice, it's just how I work. Characters in plays very rarely occur to me as the initial seed. When I’m sitting in those meetings casting around for an exciting way to sum up a play idea that is at that stage a mere feeling in my guts, I never start ‘Well, it’s about this guy whose marriage breaks up …’ Instead I usually try to sum up something at the heart of the idea that I feel is far more important than the mere people involved. ‘Well, it’s about what happens when you unleash market forces into the public sector…’ or ‘Well, it’s about whether choosing to remove oneself from society is the ultimate pursuit of freedom or the ultimate death wish’ or ‘Well, it’s about the logical effects of consumerism and where humanity as a species is likely to be in fifty years time.’
You can see commissioners eyes glaze over. Sometimes they’ll lie and say ‘Hmm, sounds interesting’ then just not call. Other times they’ll gently reveal their subtext ‘Do you think this could be done with a lighter touch?’. Occasionally they’ll come right out with it: ‘No-one wants to think about that, it’s too depressing. How To Disappear was really funny, can't you do something like that again?’.
Actually, How To Disappear was bleak as fuck. It’s just that I know how to make bleak subjects entertaining, because I work hard at my craft and I know what I’m fucking doing. I just can’t tell you prior to the first draft all about my main character’s love life, favourite food, happiest memory and the colour of his garage door. But I know I’m onto something important with what the play’s really about. I just need you to take a small leap of faith and commission that draft so that I will have a roof over my head while I show you how it will work. Trust that I will pull it off - I’ve done this before.
Commissioning from the inside out drives outside in writers up the fucking wall. Does anyone else have this problem? What's to be done?
[Comment]
19th June 2007
Honestly, will you people not let me relax? I'd just laid out my towel for a well-earned sunbathe when all these comments come flooding in requiring me to explain my self-censorship. Well, so be it. If this is the beginning of another two years out of work then I'll hold you all personally responsible. My site stats tell me where you live, you know ...
David, bless you for your concern. Whilst that row back in January (no I'm not going to link it) did of course make me sit up and take notice, it isn't the main reason for my current gloom. However, what it did do is make me realise that people actually read this stuff, and that there's no reason why I shouldn't take every care to formulate my thoughts here just as carefully as I would if I was writing in the pages of a national paper (not that I'm flattering my humble stats but you take my point; this is a public arena and I'm no less accountable, or exposed). And I have had some very positive social encounters with a number of writers and others in our biz since then that make me grateful to be involved in it, and glad to have colleagues (in the broadest sense) who are so interested in ideas, zeitgests and debates about proper intelligent stuff.
But it just puzzles and exasperates me that this is so rarely translated into our theatrical output. I honestly don't know why this is, but it drives me mad. Maybe I'm just not seeing enough stuff. Maybe my standards are too high. Whenever I start a new playwrighting class, I usually give the following little speech to my students (so long as they're adults and above a certain level of competence). I may have said something similar here in the past, but here it is again:
"When considering what it is that you want to write about, look for the nuggets of originality at all times. The hardest question I have ever been asked about my own work, and the question I now ask of all plays I see or read is: Why are you telling me this? What is so pressing about what you have to say that you have devoted 3, 4 or 5 months of your life to getting it down on paper, probably for no pay? In theatre you have a far more demanding contract with your audience than in any other art form. Why does the story you have to tell justify £20 of my hard-earned money, me giving up my evening, running the gauntlet of British weather and public transport, then sitting in the dark without talking for two hours or more, then risking my life making my way home in the dark? Not to mention the thousands of pounds and man-hours it will cost to produce. What you have to say has to be pretty damn devastating. When I come out of that theatre after seeing your show, I want to be totally blown away. I want to go out into the night saying FUCK! I had no idea that went on!!! Or, I had never thought of it that way before!!! The trick is to shine a light into hitherto uncharted areas of human experience. Or, if it is a subject that has been done before (which is most of them) then what is the totally unique angle that you are going to bring to it? Nothing less justifies my time and money - especially if you are writing in the subsidised sector and your commission fee is made up of this nation's taxes. Go out, meet the people who have lived through the experiences of your play, interview them, read about them, hang around where they hang around, immerse yourself in their world and lives. You are panning for gold. Find the nuggets of originality. You will know them when you find them by the bolt of pure excitement they send through your guts. Gather them together, wash off the crap, and polish them till you can see your own face in their reflection. Only then can you start writing your play."
I'm sure my comments box will fill up with all kinds of objections to this doctrine, but frankly, I don't really care. In a nutshell, as an audience member, that's what I expect of playwrights who are being professionally produced. And recently, I ain't been getting it. And at a time when our industry is under threat from Olympic idiocy, it depresses me hugely.
Why can't every play be fucking great? I don't think that's too much to ask.
I don't want to slag off theatre. But when you have friends who aren't involved in it, who used to go a lot, but who now say they won't bother again because they've been stung once too often after a hard day in the office with dire, dull, overpriced shows (which sometimes you have erroneously taken them to see after reading some promising blurb) - when you can physically see your audience drifting away before your very eyes and you can't blame them ... well, that does rather affect my mood. Especially when a certain loyalty to my own profession prevents me from letting rip about it here.
I read a lot of apocalyptic books about global warming and peak oil. I am utterly convinced that as a species we are going to hell in a handcart. And what's more, we'll have been such ignorant selfish brats that we'll deserve everything we get. But I don't see that reflected in our theatre. We still have a plethora of plays looking at boy-girl relationships and other minor domestic upsets. Where is the rage? Where is the terror? Where is the passion that should be unleashed by fact that we are now living through the beginning of the end of the human species? We're fiddling while Rome burns!
I'm not saying that all plays should be about global warming. Just that in the light of this extraordinary, unprecedented sword of Damocles hanging over every one of us (not to mention geopolitical complications) there's increasingly little excuse for navel-gazing plays about nothing much at all. Theatre, like the rest of the world, needs to get some perspective.
I don't entirely blame writers. As ever, it's what gets commissioned that gets through. And I have indeed tried and failed to get plays and screenplays commissioned on these very subjects. But that just adds to my sense of despair about the whole industry. I don't want to spend my life as some outsider peddling doom-laden but unfortunately truthful dramas that aren't deemed 'entertaining' enough to commission. In fact, part of the problem is that despite my recent successes I'm still not deemed skilled enough to make plays about Big Ideas suitably engaging and accessible.
I suppose I just want to be trusted enough to get to write what I think is important, and to be supported enough throughout the process to make a good job of it. Writing is the only means that I have at my disposal to actually affect the things that I know we have coming to us. Without it, I'm impotent. And that makes me unhappy.
Anyway, enough. I have a towel on the balcony and an increasingly hot sun calling my name.
Oh, it's started raining.
[Comment]
15th June 2007 - update
Ha! Not 90 minutes after the post below and I have just had an excitable email from Poland about said show...
Honestly, this fucking business. It's enough to give you manic depression.
15th June 2007
I'm not feeling especially bloggy at the moment.
It's partly that I'm still busy finishing a number of different writing and teaching jobs. It's partly that it's been a long year and I'm ready for a holiday. But I think it's also that I'm feeling a bit restricted in what I can and can't talk about.
I've seen a string of duff shows lately, ranging from mediocre to appalling. But I can't discuss them. After dipping my toe into these waters last time and getting a nasty nip, I got some sage advice from trusted quarters that those in the business of producing art shouldn't criticise it. It's not that we're incapable, or that morally we should avoid doing so, or that we have an unspoken oath of solidarity towards our colleagues (though there may be something in this). It's more that when deconstructing other's work and finding fault with it, there's no getting away from the awful unavoidable subtext that you are somehow saying: I can do this better than them, I don't make these mistakes.
Even when you're not.
So I have given up theatre criticism, at least until I see something good (recommendations welcome). And anyway, there are bloggers out there doing a far more intelligent job of assessing the nation's dramatic output than I could ever be bothered to.
I could blog about how, for a variety of diplomatically-sensitive reasons I again can't discuss, a certain well-known play of mine now looks exceedingly unlikely to make it to London. But a foot wrong in that minefield could finally finish off a career that's already been brought back from the brink once too often for my liking. (And that's a howl of frustration directed southwards rather than northwards, for anyone from the fine city of Sheffield reading).
I could blog about the whole depressing Olympics situation but (apart from the fact that this has been done to death in the blogosphere of late) after my initial burst of rage-fuelled letter-writing I've become rather defeatist about the whole thing. Apart from a dismissive email from my MP, and an incoherent statistic-strewn letter from one of Tessa Jowell's minions, the net result of my missives has been a resounding bugger all. David Lammy, Gordon Brown and Peter Hewitt have all ignored me, and I'm not really a joiner in the shouty protesty let's-have-an-arts-sports-day sense (though I wish them all the best.) The blogs and mailing lists and meetings all rail about how 'We must let them know they can't get away with this', but the depressing truth is that of course they can. They're the government. They can do what they like. If they can go to war with millions of people protesting against it they can sure as hell nick some cash from us and bulldoze half of east London for their pointless corporate javelin chuckathon.
So I might take a bit of a break from blogging for a while, and try and catch some sun. Chances are that now I've said this publicly, something extraordinarily dramatic will happen and I'll be back in 24 hours to eat my words and tell you all about it. Then again, it might not.
See you on the other side.
[Comment]
10th June 2007
Mehndi Night has been tipped by Lyn Gardner as one of her picks of the Fringe! I'm really chuffed. Thanks Lyn!
[Comment]
31st May 2007
Right then. I'm back.
Been hard at work on a first draft of Mehndi Night, which is going to be fucking great if I do say so myself, so I hope you enjoyed the half-time entertainment. I thought I'd share some early scribblings from my research for We Are Shadows, my new series of monologues for teenagers. None of those speeches will actually appear in the play, but they did form the stimulus for a workshop day at Half Moon some time back, which fed into the main piece. They've been sort of dormant since so I thought I'd dig them out. Needless to say, please don't perform without permission and all that.
I'd like to indulge in a little non-theatre foray for a moment, if you'll permit me. Long-time readers and friends will know that political hip hop is one of my great passions, and which I had a great time exploring on stage in last year's play Locked In. I'm also fascinated by the political situation in France at the moment, which has reached a head with the recent election of Nicolas Sarkozy. What interests me most is the approach that this parallel society just across the Channel has taken to immigration and multiculturalism in relation to our own. Whilst on the surface, Liberte Egalite et Fraternite (how do you do an e-acute accent on here?) seems a great idea, far from uniting people this otherwise honourable notion appears to have come to define a very narrow vision of 'Frenchness' and required newcomers to French society to give up their roots and ethnic identities in order to assimilate into a united vision of the country. The film La Haine, an extraordinary and depressingly prescient portrayal of doomed Parisien youth locked into a deadly cycle of revenge with the forces of the state, was perhaps the first time French popular drama addressed the subject. The 2005 riots were like that film come to life, and things are only going to get worse under Sarkozy.
However, one good side effect of a sort, has been the explosion of truly brilliant French political hip hop and vibrant banlieu youth culture which this civil unrest has given rise to. My MC of the moment and hot tip for future greatness is a French-Moroccan rapper from Lille called Axiom, who is so new and exciting he hasn't yet got a Wikipedia biog I can link to. However you can check him out on MySpace here and watch some of his videos (turn it up loud for best effect). The site also contains links to the other movers and shakers of the French hip hop scene, who I'm in the process of checking out.
Now my French isn't up to understanding every word but I can catch enough of Axiom's lyrics to feel reassured this guy is about more than the usual bitches and guns. His track 'Ma lettre au Presidente', set to a sarcastic sample of La Marseillaise, is a heartfelt lyrical protest from the disenfranchised youth of the Lille slums. Apparently he also wrote it down and sent it to the outgoing Jacques Chirac as well as releasing it as a single, but the French media promptly banned it. But the internet being what it is it's been doing the rounds, and rightly so. It's a great track and a great album.
There is a spurious theatre link to all this, and that is the forthcoming talk at Soho Theatre From Brixton To The Banlieus about disenfranchised urban youth on the move. I feel strongly that modern writers should be in touch with debates like this within sociology, so it's great that this is on in one of the leading new writing venues.
Funnily enough in Mehndi Night the girls came up with the idea (completely independently of me) of an estranged middle sister who was kicked out of the Bengali family home for hanging out at pirate radio stations and largin it with the black boys, so I've had great fun this week writing some lyrics for her. In the middle of a blazing row with her mum one of the older characters steps to the girl's defence and pleads with the parents:
"Allow your children their identity crisis. There is so much for them to carry today. They are Bengali, they Muslim, they are British, they are East London, they are young, they are women. Is it any wonder they can’t manage it all at once? Allow them to drop a few. They will come back for them when the time is right. You just have to wait ... Allow them to celebrate who they are, piece by piece. We are lucky that we are in a country that allows them to do that."
It's a moment of clarity for which I am grateful to Mulberry trainee teacher Noorzahan Begum for pointing out to me.
I spent a large part of my early life hating the stuffy old UK and only ever seeing what was wrong with it, and plenty of aspects of it still exasperate me at times. But as I've got older and wiser, I've become increasingly proud of our country, in particular its tolerance and celebration of diversity. Our version of multiculturalism, in London at least, is something we can rightly be proud of, particularly considering the alternative mess across the Channel. I'm not saying it's not without it's problems, or that there's no work left to do (winning the hearts and minds of the white working classes is the next big step), but overall I think the good outweighs the bad. If my own recent experiences as an accidental chronicler of East London life are anything to go by, the tabloid scare stories about immigration are the same old blinkered bullshit they always have been. Multiculturalism is our own home-grown good news story.
It perhaps means that we don't do political hip hop quite as well as the French, but I think I can live with that.
[Comment]
Tues 29th May
Trouble Next Door
Been trouble round our way lately
I mean there’s trouble round our way a lot
But this kinda trouble’s gone burstin my bubble
And it’s suttin I haven’t forgot
Been trouble round our way lately
New family moved in next door
This pale lookin lady with a couple of babies
And a boyfriend who’s been in the wars
Been trouble round our way lately
Been things that go bump in the night
At first it was plates that started to break
As the two of em started to fight
Been trouble round our way lately
The screamin it keeps us awake
There’s trouble next door at flat number four
Our windows have started to shake
Been trouble round our way lately
I said: One of us oughta go round
It sounds like she’s scared, but nobody cares
My dad turns the telly up loud
Been trouble round our way lately
The babies have started to scream
It goes on for ages during his rages
But dad he just stares at the screen
Been trouble round our way lately
Everything’s gone a bit quiet
Mum feeds the cat, goes: Thank God for that
Goes back to her magazine diet
Been trouble round our way lately
No-one’s gone in or gone out
I said: Should we go –
And dad he goes: No
And looks like he’ll give me a clout
Been trouble round our way lately
Postman can't open the flap
Been ringin the phone but nobody’s home
My nerves about ready to snap
Been trouble round our way lately
Suttink has started to smell
Dad says it’s my breath that smells like death
Mum says she doesn’t feel well
Been trouble round our way lately
The police came and broke down the door
Took the bodies away on these three metal trays
Then came round to ask what we saw
Been trouble round our way lately
We all had to fill in a form
As we gave them the facts
They said: Didn’t you act?
And we go quiet and look at the floor
Been trouble round our way lately
I mean there’s trouble round our way a lot
But this kinda trouble’s gone burstin my bubble
And it’s suttin I haven’t forgot.
[Comment]
Sun 27th May
The Crossing
So it’s Community Awareness week in school
It’s your Opportunity
To help da Community
That’s what they keep sayin
On all posters and that
With pictures of smilin people mowin each other’s lawns
Like anyone has a lawn round here
Or a smile come to that
So I ain’t really thought much about it
But it musta stuck in there somewhere
Cos that night
I’m waitin to cross the main road next to the estate
On the way to Spyda’s place to play a bit of PS2
Blow some stuff up
And it’s peltin it down
Proper little bullets
Like suttink outta da tropics
And there’s this old lady standin there
Clothes hangin heavy
Soaked to da skin
Waitin to cross
And I’m stood there thinking
I ain’t been that good this week
Detention after school every single day
Except the day I bunked off
Sparked two other kids
Though they was bad mouthin my sister
Sat outside da Head’s office twice
Letters home what I never gave
Plus I took twenny quid outta Mum’s purse
Which I still ain’t put back
I better do suttin good quick
Case anyone’s watchin
(Indicates God)
Y’get me
So I turns to the old lady and I goes:
Can I help you?
And she looks at me like I’m gonna merk her
The fear in her eyes
An I’m like: Na na na it’s alright
Just cos I gotta hood don’t mean I’m no good
And she seems to like my rhyme
My little lyrical miracle
Cos she smiles
And I take her arm
And we dodder across
And it’s nice
Takes fuckin forever mind you
Halfway over I swear I see a snail overtake us
But I don’t mind
Cos she’s started chattin
Tellin me about when all this was rubble
From being bombed in the war
By the Germans
And I’m like: Yeah man I heard about that
Was it suttin to do with losing the football?
1066 and all that
Talk about bad losers
But she ain’t listenin
Cos she’s talkin about how her brother
And her auntie
And her cousin
And her husband
All died
We get to the other side
And I say goodbye
And I walk off to Spyda’s
Feelin
Feelin
I dunno
But I don’t really wanna play PS2 no more
‘What’s da matter with you?’
Shut up I say
Ain’t nuttin
I sit on his bed
And look out the window at the rain
[Comment]
Fri 25th May
The Minicab
Yeah I get all sorts in here
Make a crust innit
Work all hours me
Got a baby on the way
Y'know how it is
So it'd be nice
If you could sort us out wiv a tip
Knoworramean?
Yeah I'm knockin off after you
Past my bedtime innit
But I took pity on ya din’t I
Standin there
White as a sheet
I thought: There’s a man as needs his bed
I’m perceptive like that
See things no-one else sees
Little bit psychic my wife reckons
I say: Yeah right love
You mean psycho not psychic
Hahahahahahahaha
Hey you feelin alright?
Look if you puke its fifty quid straight up
Only had them seats done last month
Bloke pissed hisself
Serious
Not funny
Shit
Jumped a red there
Woops
Don’t say much do ya?
Silent type is it
That’s alright
We all got our secrets
Take this town for instance
That spot yeah
That spot where I picked you up
Massive pile-up there only last week
Serious
Lorry jackknifed doing sixty
Maniac
Similar time of night too
People think they own the road in the small hours
Honestly
Horrific
Multiple deaths
Claret all over the shop
‘pparently the driver
The driver yeah
My mate Ricky reckons anyway
The driver
Got his head cut clean off
Serious
Bam
Whiplash or summing
Bam
Clean off
Brrr
Makes me go cold just thinkin bout it
‘pparently the firemen
Had to wash the blood down the drains with the hose
Wouldn’t know nothing lookin at it now wouldya?
Secrets see
I’m tellin ya
He’s full of shit though is Ricky
He reckons
The night after that accident yeah
He stopped to pick some bloke up
At that very same spot
At that very same time
Pale-lookin geezer
Didn’t say much
Sat in the back
Where you’re sittin now
Silent as the grave
So Ricky’s chattin away
As you do
Half a mile later
Turns round
Geezer’s gone!
Honestly
What does he take me for
Full of shit is Ricky
Now then
Where was it you said you was goin?
Mate?
Mate?
Mate ...
[Comment]
Fri 18th May
I've been being a critic again this week, watching some fringe shows for Resonance FM's theatre magazine show On The Fringe.
Last night I saw the opening of Phil Willmott's new version of Gorky's The Lower Depths at the Finborough, and the night before that I saw an improv group called The Institute at Canal Cafe Theatre. I'm pleased to report that both shows were rather good, which makes reviewing them a whole lot more fun. You can tune in to my inane ramblings on Monday night at 9pm on 104.4FM (so long as you live in London).
In other news, I've discovered the curse that is Facebook. I predict that it will be the death of all self-employed people attempting to work from home.
[Comment]
Tues 15th May
Well, where do I start? I've had one of those gaps again where the amount of stuff I could now talk about makes blogging seems a bit daunting.
The good news is I've finished my first draft. It was a commission from Half Moon Theatre, a series of monologues for young people called We Are Shadows. You can read more about it here, and if you run a venue you can even book it. I think it's turned out rather well, though I always think that about first drafts and have sometimes been wrong. It's hard to see the wood for the trees after a while.
I'm now flat out on my next one, which is the new play for Mulberry School where I'm writer-in-residence, and which we are taking to the Edinburgh Fringe this year. It's called Mehndi Night and I've created a page about it on my main website here. It's a serious challenge to write authentically about a community so far removed from my own, but I'm really excited about it, and the girls themselves have just been a joy to work with. It's one of those projects where they could never do it without me and I could never do it without them. The result is going to be something totally unique and brilliant, the kind of play which could only ever be born out of working in this way - and which I'd never get the chance to tackle working in isolation. It's been such a privilege to be trusted enough to have been taken into their world with such openness and honesty. The revelations about the reality of trying to juggle all the facets of a third generation British Bengali identity have been by turns poignant, hilarious, tragic and compelling - effortlessly the stuff of drama. I'm seriously excited about the show.
I've also updated my main website to include some more general information about my residency at Mulberry. On that same page there are also links to some scripts by my Year 10 (that's Fourth Year for everyone over 25) students, all of whom completed my playwrighting course with flying colours. We had a reading in school with professional actors hired for the occasion, which went brilliantly. I've just started a similar course for staff in the school, the first time I've ever done a course like that, and we'll probably have a public showcase of their work towards the end of the summer term.
What else?
Oh yes, I'm this close to getting my first radio commission. I'm being supported by a lovely producer at BBC Manchester, but even so the process is rather involved. I won't say any more cos I don't like to jinx these things, but I should hear in a week or so.
Also had my first meeting this week with Matt Peover, Mark Bell and Chris Moran of Liquid Theatre about our modern Jacobean project. It's a real luxury to have the time and cash for some considered creative thought on a play of this size - it speeds the whole process up no end to have four minds working on it. All those conversations you would normally have in your own head about abstract concepts and themes and thrashing out possible storylines are suddenly brought out into the open and held up for such a thorough four-way scrutiny that it's immediately obvious if you're barking up the wrong tree or not. When you're used to working on your own it almost feels like cheating. So I'm having quite a collaborative year what with that and Mehndi Night, and I have to say I'm really loving it.
No news yet on How To Disappear having a London outing, but you'll be the first to know.
I've also been getting some responses to my letter writing campaign about the Olympic arts cuts, but I'll save that for another post soon...
[Comment]
Fri 4th May
Please sign this petition on the Downing Street website against the Olympic arts vandalism.
Still flat out on first draft. Back next week. Hopefully.
[Comment]
Sat 28th April
Flat out on first draft. Back soon.
[Comment]
Mon 23rd April
A big Thank You to the West End Whingers for a great bash on Saturday night. It was fascinating to meet some of the faces behind the blogs, including JMC, Lance, John, Stephen, Natasha, Ben Y, Ben E and of course the Whingers themselves, as delightfully irreverent in life as they are in print.
In the end I was having such a good time I lost track of it, and had to rush for the last train back to provincial Greenwich. So apologies to anyone I failed say goodbye to.
JMC and I had an interesting chat about how long it would be before theatre marketing departments take bloggers seriously enough to put them on the press night list (not that that's why we do it of course). It was great to feel part of a burgeoning group of like-minded people, and to consolidate a bit of a network of what felt like the nearest thing to 'colleagues' us freelancers get. I think these sorts of links are going to become increasingly important if we're not going to be divided and ruled by the looming Olympic-sized juggernaut ...
(More on that soon - I have been ruminating. Is that what cows do?)
[Comment]
Tues 17th April
Is anyone else going to the West End Whingers theatre bloggers party this Saturday? Just curious.
[Comment]
Sun 15th April
My friend the theatre critic Aleks Sierz once described to me the feeling of deflated ordinariness at having to go back to normal work after all the fuss surrounding the release of his seminal first book In-Yer-Face Theatre. Being flown round the world and having conferences held in his honour ended as quickly as it had started, and it was back to the bread-and-butter routine. He said that it made him realise why so many famous musicians turn to drugs. They just can't get used to living normal everyday life between gigs.
While I wouldn't say I'm feeling quite like that, his words have been on my mind since How To Disappear closed last night. It was a terrific send-off. The play was the best I had ever seen it; the timing was impeccable, every laugh and every gasp fell in just the right places, technical cues were all second-nature, and everyone had relaxed into their parts. The audience were in the palms of their hands. I've seen this before towards the end of a run, having been away for a time and then come back. The company suddenly seem to be 'wearing' the play, like a familiar comfy old jumper they've owned all their lives. It's gone from being mine, to being ours, to being theirs. It's a joy to behold. I was so proud of them all.
Anyone who's followed this particular play's history will know that this is the end of a long and at times emotional journey for its writer. I've talked at length about that elsewhere, but suffice to say that the same piece of work effectively ended my career, and then revived it again. It's been a rollercoaster of a journey, and one that's ended with neither a bang nor a whimper ... just that inevitable flatness. There is talk of a London transfer, but as nothing's signed and sealed, and not being one to count my chickens, I won't say any more at this stage. But given that even 18 months ago I thought I would have to do this play myself above a pub somewhere for no money, everything's a bonus.
I wish I had some pithy words of wisdom, or profound lessons to pass on from the whole experience. But the only one that springs to mind is - hang in there.
Anyway, back to work.
[Comment]
Mon 9th April
I've been truly shocked by the hatred towards artists being expressed over at the Guardian blog by Peter Hewitt. I've left the following comment. I would really urge you to get over there and have your say if you feel the same. I would imagine it's a thread being read by all sorts of influential people.
"What this whole thread has revealed for me is that the most pressing issue seems to be in getting across to the general public what it is we artists actually do. The hostility here to 'my money' being used to fund 'lazy artists' is on a par with some of the tabloid debates about 'our money' 'our jobs' and 'filthy immigrants'. This level of bitterness and resentment is only ever borne out of ignorance of the facts, but is no less shocking for it. It should be a clarion call to Peter Hewitt and all those in the creative industries that, alongside campaigning against cuts, we also urgently need to explain in far greater detail what it is we actually do, and why it is important.
I'm a self-employed professional playwright, and besides writing scripts every hour of the day I also have to effectively set myself up as a small business. I spend much of my time working like an investigative journalist, interrogating the world around me through interviews, field trips and endless reading and other specialist research, to allow me to bring to the stage areas of human experience of utter orginality. This is my side of the bargain - I feel very strongly that if my commission fee is from the subsidised sector then I have a duty to bring to the table unique investigations into subjects of collective importance which I think as a society we should be giving time and headspace to. I don't write self-indulgent plays about my own life and love affairs for exactly this reason. So far I've done plays about social workers, religious gang conflicts among teenagers, missing persons and identity fraud, plus I'm working on new plays about the looting of the Iraq Museum, and another on hoodie culture and middle class fear. I then package all this up into a well-structured story, garnish it with crackling dialogue, and pitch it at a theatre to whose audience I think it will be relevant, important, and gripping.
I've worked long and hard over many years, and endured many knockbacks, before i got where I am today. I'm not from a wealthy family, or one with theatre industry connections, I went to an ordinary state school and did the rest myself. I put far more hours into my work that anyone in a 9-5 job. All artists, if they are to survive, have this same entrepreneurial spirit. There are plenty of government tax breaks and incentives for small businesses but you don't hear the same prejudice and rage spewed at self-employed plumbers, or furniture makers, or greengrocers. Why? Because people know what it is they do, because the mechanics of their trade are on display, and because their product is a tangible material thing.
The arts, by contrast, remain this mysterious elitist bubble where the product is created by somehow 'loafing around' and then only lasts for the 30 performances it is on, and because it is made up of ideas and images can't then be turned over in the palm of the hand and quantified. It doesn't matter that we might move people, change perceptions, shed light on areas of human existence hitherto shrouded by prejudice, or crystallise truth into simple beautiful forms, because if you can't see and hold it then for many people it simply isn't there and therefore isn't valuable. This is simply wrong. It's like saying that philosophy or political science or economics haven't given the world anything. Thinking and then creating is what human beings do. It's what sets us apart from the animals.
There has always been a mistrust of abstraction and intellectualism in the pragmatic UK (compared to the embracing of philosophers and artists in continental Europe). This isn't always bad - as Jeremy Paxman pointed out in his book The English, it has saved us from Communism and it has saved us from Fascism. But let's not allow it to scupper one of the world's most enterprising and self-sufficient hubs of human endeavour and originality. Not everyone may want to think about the world around them, and that's their loss. But for those of us who do, artists and non-artists alike, it's time to start explaining how we do it, and why its important in a society which cares about itself."
[Comment]
Sat 7th April
The Arts Council's chief exec Peter Hewitt has finally made a public statement in today's Guardian about the Olympically-motivated cuts to the arts announced in the past couple of weeks.
I can't decide what troubles me more, the lack of fire in his belly or the wankers in the comments section saying this country's arts and artists are all talentless losers who don't dserve funding anyway.
Get over there, people, and give them what for.
[Comment]
*
Is there something in the water in Romford? This unprepossessing town seems to produce quite a few playwrights. First there was David Eldridge, then James Martin Charlton and now Ben Musgrave.
Ben is a fellow graduate of the MA Writing for Performance at Goldsmiths College, and was last year's winner of the inaugural Bruntwood Playwriting Prize at the Royal Exchange Theatre. His play Pretend You Have Big Buildings is being produced there later this year as part of the Manchester International Festival. I've heard from reliable sources that it's rather good.
Ben's also started a blog about the process of building up to such a momentous event, which I will be reading with interest. Welcome, Ben.
[Comment]
Fri 6th April
Really interesting comments thread about new writing over at the Guardian, following on from an unpromising blog entry about Sam Mendes. Big respect to Anthony Neilson for getting involved, and for defending himself with such wit and good humour in the face of yet more anonymous abuse. It seems writers who wade into a debate on whatever subject are somehow subject to different rules. Why is it always seen as cynical self-publicising to express an opinion on phenomena taking place in our own industry? I wish people would give writers a bit more credit.
[Comment]
Wed 4th April 2007
Mr Peter Hewitt
Arts Council England
2 Pear Tree Court
London
EC1R 0DS
Dear Mr Hewitt,
I'm writing to express my dismay at the recently announced 35% cut to the Grants for the Arts scheme, and to voice my concern about the future of arts funding in the face of the spiralling costs of the Olympics. As a young professional playwright working exclusively in the subsidised sector, I am becoming increasingly concerned by the situation.
Despite government assurances that there shall be “no more boom and bust” in arts funding, the recent announcement that £675m of lottery funding will be diverted from the arts to the Olympics belies these promises.
The cut to the Grants for the Arts scheme (of which I have been a beneficiary twice in the past year) will hit new and emerging artists such as myself the hardest, and is likely to have a disproportionate impact on small scale, regional and touring theatre companies (particularly those with a community or minority ethnic slant), whilst the big institutions such as the various opera houses will of course be protected.
I am also very concerned at the level of advocacy for our cause in which your organisation is engaging. It seems from the outside that you are worryingly quiet in the face of these measures. We are relying on you Mr Hewitt, to make our case to government, and so far I am not satisfied that you are shouting loudly enough. Why were the G4A cuts announced so quietly and at such short notice? Why isn’t there any mention of this or the larger cuts that are coming on the Arts Debate section of your website? Why aren’t you making high profile statements in support of the arts to national broadsheets?
I worked extremely hard over many years, and had many rejections before I got where I am today. Much of my success is down to the G4A scheme and other funding pots such as the John Whiting Award for New Theatre Writing, of which I was the surprise winner last year. That award single-handedly revived my career, yet only a year later when I was asked to present this year’s winners with their cheques, the award was under threat. I made an impassioned speech urging the industry to save it, and as a direct result of that a consortium of theatres stepped forward to take on the funding and administration of the prize. So speeches can make a difference! But it shouldn’t be up to individual artists and theatre companies to have to rescue themselves in this way when we have a lavishly funded advocacy organisation in our midst.
So I urge you to please start fighting our corner. The Olympics will come and go, but British art and artists are the family jewels. Are you really going to sit back and let the government auction off our professional futures for the sake of a one-off sports festival which many of us didn’t choose?
Yours sincerely,
Fin Kennedy
CC. Tessa Jowell MP, David Lammy MP, Nick Raynsford MP
[Comment]
Tues 3rd April (continued)
Just noticed this thread over at Guardian blogs about the 35% cut to ACE's Grants for the Arts scheme. I'm about to become a beneficiary of this scheme through the grant recently awarded to Matt Peover and Liquid Theatre for our Jacobean project, so I feel moved to write.
I've left my own comment because it didn't seem like anyone was taking David Jubb up on his kind offer of space at BAC to host an industry meeting to formulate a response. Maybe I'm out of touch and some sort of meeting is planned (if anyone knows, please tell me). But if nothing's being done, then I really think it would be timely to look into forming some sort of rapid response group within the industry to protest about these cuts as they happen.
This first one is just a shot across the bows. As the Olympic juggernaut thunders ever closer, there'll be a lot more like it, and we should be prepared.
[Comment]
Tues 3rd April
Three stars in today's Times, and our first 'literalist' review from Jeremy Kingston.
I hadn't blogged about this before because I didn't want to upset the people involved, but the night when The Times were in suffered from a technical hitch which meant that two short scenes from Act Two got cut. The professionalism of everyone involved was superb and they carried on regardless, and unless you knew the play I don't think you'd have noticed. But it does account for Kingston's criticisms of Act Two, which has a much more satisying shape than he actually got to see.
It doesn't, however, account for his problem with the metaphysical side of the play. His 'serious puzzlement' demonstrates which side this reviewer's theatrical bread is buttered. It reminds me of comments I got from the former head of the theatre where the play was first developed, during the meeting where she turned it down: 'Is he dead or is he alive? Make your mind up.'
No! It's about the thin membrane between life and death ... Baudrillardian hyper-reality ... going missing as an existential metaphor for ... oh forget it. Go and watch Mamma Mia and leave us all in peace. Or would you rather we all wrote plays like Eastenders?
Still waiting on the Telegraph, Independent and Observer. Come on guys, the battle lines are drawn, dare to show us where you stand.
[Comment]
Mon 2nd April 2007
A good friend of mine, who lives in Manchester, regularly complains about the London-centric bias of the UK's print media. I have to say that until now I hadn't taken his complaints all that seriously.
But now, having had the experience of opening a world premiere in a regional theatre, I have to say I can see his point. Press night was almost a week ago, and we are still waiting for the majority of the national reviews to come out. Whilst those we have had (The Stage and The Guardian) have been raves, a quick flick through the arts pages of the other broadsheets does indeed show a distinctly Southern bias. Even a fringe play which opened at the Kings Head after we did, and which 99.9% of the UK population won't ever come remotely near to seeing, seems to get more coverage. And that despite the critics mostly slagging it off!
It's not so much that we need the publicity to sell tickets up in Sheffield - word of mouth and some great local notices have ensured we've almost sold out already, and audiences are regularly standing at the end. It's more a question of respect for work that is easily of a London standard, but which due to its geographical location simply isn't given priority.
Come on arts editors - if you work for a national paper, your responsibility is to a national audience (and I don't mean that place on the South Bank.) I've long argued that the centre of gravity for new writing moved beyond London some time ago, and there are now several regional hubs of identical if not superior quality to a lot of the dross that passes for 'ground-breaking' on London's own tired stages. Do your homework, show that you know the landscape of your own industry, and start giving non-London shows the respect and column inches they deserve.
As it stands, you're in serious danger of looking embarrassingly out of touch.
[Comment]
Sat 31 March 2007
Four stars in The Guardian today, in an intelligent and insightful review from Lyn Gardner.
Still waiting on others.
[Comment]
Fri 30 March 2007
So I've caught up on my sleep but most of the critics evidently haven't, as the national reviews are taking a painfully long time to arrive.
We've had a great notice on The Stage website today, which I guess will be in the paper edition next week. And the local press in Sheffield have been raving too, according to my director Ellie, but despite scouring The Sheffield Star website I can't find the review she read to me over the phone ... I hope she wasn't making it up.
Thanks also to Natasha Tripney for pointing out this online review.
As for the rest, maybe they're holding fire till the weekend. Will let you know.
[Comment]
Tues 27 March
Nice piece in The Guardian today by Maddy Costa. What a nice woman.
Press night tonight. Oo-er.
[Comment]
Sun 25 March
Just got back from this weekend's previews of How To Disappear, and all I can say is Wow. It seems perverse to review your own show so I shall leave that to other people, but all I can say is that everyone's done such a brilliant job and I couldn't be happier. Sell-out audiences for the previews too!
We were Pick Of The Week in the northern version of the Guardian Guide again this Saturday. I'm getting a bit scared about all the attention now. It's a bit like when you're five years old and everyone sings you Happy Birthday and it makes you want to run away, or burst into tears, or wet yourself. Or all three.
So if you spot a strange man at the back of the stalls quietly rocking backwards and forwards in a little puddle, be nice to him.
[Comment]
Tues 20 March
Just got back from recording an interview with Mark Lawson of Radio 4's Front Row about How to Disappear Completely & Never Be Found, which opens in Sheffield this weekend. I was on with Lucy Caldwell whose play Leaves opened at the Court last night.
It was an odd experience (nothing to do with Lucy, who seemed very nice.) Mark Lawson was nice too, but he seemed rather preoccupied with the mechanics of changing your identity, which of course is one of the things my play deals with. I answered his questions but didn't feel that I'd done much justice to the underlying philosophy of the play, which the identity business is merely a tool to expose. Nor did I get much of a chance to rave about the truly fantastic production Sheffield are giving me. Maybe I should have been more assertive in directing the course of the conversation. Or maybe it's best not to over-explain the work, or gush. Or maybe Mr Lawson is planning to do some sort of runner and has a need to know these things. You heard it here first.
But perhaps most bizarrely of all, they got me to read out a speech from the play! So no taking the piss out of my shitty acting, they put me on the spot ok? It seemed like a good idea at the time...
Anyway, you can judge for yourselves tonight (yes, short notice I know, that surprised me too) at 7.15pm. If you miss it, or you live outside the UK, apparently you can listen again on the BBC's website. I'm not going to put in a link until I've heard it and feel satisified I don't sound like an arse.
[Comment]
Tues 13 March
So I finally have five minutes to myself, and I choose to spend it with you. Aren’t you lucky? You’d better not squander it by making a fuckwitted remark in the comments box.
There were a couple of requests from two posts ago about certain things I have been up to which I have kept you waiting on for a while. They were: RADA workshops, Sheffield rehearsals, and the Edinburgh project. Here we go.
The RADA workshop was via a tutor there called Lloyd Trott, who I met when he taught me on the Goldsmiths Playwriting MA. It was my second workshop there, and this time it was on a play I have in development called South Of The River (the first was on How To Disappear, so he must be doing something right).
It’s a great exercise called Exploring Character, which Lloyd developed initially as an actor’s exercise but which works equally well as a dramaturgical ‘sounding’ of a play in development. It’s essentially quite simple, but the results can be fascinating. I don’t want to give too much away in case it’s copyrighted or something, and I haven’t sought Lloyd’s permission to describe it, but in essence, it’s based on half the group reading the play and being ascribed a character, and half remaining in the dark (they make up the audience for the session). The actors are then asked to write monologues for various specific time periods before, during and after the play takes place. Some carefully chosen scenes from the play are then read (the RADA students are brilliant at this, as you might expect – they even learn the lines and this time round one group had even built their own set!) and then some hot-seating takes place, again at carefully chosen points in time. It works because half the group don’t know anything and don’t get to see the whole play, so have to work things out through asking the characters questions. That in itself is like a bright white light shining if not on the script, then on the idea, and the psychological reality of the characters involved. It can reveal holes, but more often than not these are filled in by the instinct and creativity of the actors, which throws up all sorts of great new details. Most satisfying of course, is when it reinforces the whole idea by confirming that it is essentially watertight, and of interest to actors and audience. The exercise is run three times over one morning with three different groups, so you get to see not only three sets of audience reactions, but also three different actor’s interpretations of the same characters. In South Of The River, what starts out as a domestic black comedy about the Time Out-generation of Londoners steadily becomes darker and nastier and sicker until it isn’t funny at all and the stage is covered in blood. The atmosphere in the rehearsal room also followed this pattern as the events were uncovered, and the result was a bit shocking, but very exciting to have the potential of the idea confirmed. So if any literary managers are reading, I’m looking for a home for that one.
Sheffield rehearsals are going well too. The cast are lovely and seem to be having a ball – they get on so well, and a couple of them are such natural comics that often rehearsals are reduced to gales of brilliant helpless laughter. Which is quite odd for such a bleak play, but I think ultimately will give it that lightness of touch which it probably needs. The director, Ellie Jones, is a revelation. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with anyone so thorough and methodical, whilst maintaining a calm, unhurried air of confidence. She’s done wonders for the script, which we did have a little wobble with last week, which is why I had to go up at short notice. Whilst Act One of the play has always been pretty tight, and one of the pieces of writing I’ve been most satisfied with out of anything I’ve done, in Act Two the tone and pace change significantly. This is to do with the pressure cooker build-up of Act One providing the impetus for Charlie to make the final desperate decision to change his identity. By the start of Act Two, he has become Adam, but the terrible price he pays is lifelong loneliness – which is true to life but quite hard to dramatise. I think I always knew deep down that the middle section of Act Two wasn’t quite right, but I was hoping no-one would ask too many questions. But actually, I’m much happier that Ellie and the cast did, because if they hadn’t then the next people to spot it would have been the critics. The essential problem was that after the driving Mamet-ian inevitability of Act One, by comparison there was no particular reason for the chronology of the scenes in Act Two to take place in the order they did. The character was simple drifting. And while this may be what starting a new life is like, it’s rather unsatisying to watch on a stage. So I had to go back and give him a greater motivation to pursue a particular line. Luckily there were a number of unused scenes lying around from some development time spent on the play with Mehmet Ergan and Lloyd Trott at the NT studio, so I resurrected and adapted a couple of those and it finally feels, after three years, like the play is fully formed. That final push was a truly collaborative effort and I’m really grateful to everyone involved. I marked the moment with a milky cup of Builder’s Best and a Rich Tea biscuit in the Sheffield Theatre green room.
Meantime, the Mulberry school Edinburgh Festival project is shaping up well. We’ve been working collaboratively, so it’s taken a while to settle on an arena for the action. The main thing we had to deal with was the fact that Mulberry being a girls school we haven’t got any male actors, so the story idea would have to account for the absence of all male characters. I wrote some rough possible scenarios for the group, everything from the men having all been arrested in an anti-terror raid, through to them having gone off on Hajj, none of which particularly excited them. Interestingly, they seem to have no interest whatsoever in discussing terrorism or Islamic extremism, which in my cynical media-savvy mind I had already ear-marked as a sure fire USP to get press and audiences interested. But despite running some articles by the group, about the demonisation of Muslims in the media, and asking them if they wanted to answer back, they really didn’t seem bothered at all. The girls seem to feel that that whole debate is something that isn’t relevant to them, and doesn’t involve them. It’s a conversation a whole load of boring older men from the fringes of their community are having with a load of boring old politicians and journalists. To them, it feels like another world. And in a collaborative project like this where they’re putting forward ideas, I have to be true to that spirit and respect that. And also, as my brilliant girlfriend pointed out, no matter how honourable the intention of the terrorism idea, the bottom line is that we’d still be conflating the idea of Islam and the idea of Terrorism in the mainstream consciousness, and do we really want to perpetuate that association?
So we knocked some other ideas around, and it occurred to me that actually, doing a project like this with a group of young Muslims from east London, choosing not to tackle the subject of terrorism at all is in itself a subversive political statement. Far better, far more interesting, would be a play looking at their ordinary lives as young women – something emphasising their essential humanity and foregrounding the similarities we have across cultural and political divides.
And of course, they are just ordinary teenage girls. When you ask them what genre they’re interested in working in they tell you Comedy or Horror. So we may yet end up with a Bengali version of Scary Movie 4.
In fact, the idea we’re working with right now is a Bengali Mehndi Night, the equivalent of a hen party. It’s an all-female space, there’s singing and food and dancing and henna hand-painting and blessings bestowed on the bride. It’s the one idea where they all got excited and bubbled over with anecdotes and suggestions, and it feels really right as an arena in which a story can unfold (we’re working on that next session). It also has great potential for transforming the performance space into an actual Bengali celebration, and to treat the audience as guests, so it’s like an installation piece before the play even starts, with everyone getting flower garlands and samosas on the way in. It finally feels like we’ve settled on something which has come from them, but which under dramaturgical guidance will work brilliantly as a setting for an original drama.
Right then. Now I’m behind. Piss off and stop bothering me.
[Comment]
Wed 07 March
I have thought of a new phrase to describe a phenomenon within the new writing business which bedevils many a budding playwright.
When a professional theatre company, director or literary manager expresses an interest in a play you have written, and encourages you to write draft after draft without actually paying you any money, or fully committing to a production, or indeed anything at all, this shall henceforth be known as 'being a script-tease.'
There's a free pair of tickets to How To Disappear for the first reader to use this phrase in a meeting with a literary manager. (The independent verification of which shall be, of course, that they never work with you again.)
[Comment]
Fri 02 March 2007
Ooh I’ve been referenced in an article on theatre bloggers in this month’s Writernet magazine. Welcome, if that’s how you found me.
I’ve had a bit of an absence lately due to workload, but I’ve found that a bit of a vicious circle has begun. The longer I leave it to post a blog entry, the more stuff builds up that I feel duty bound to tell you about, and hence the more daunting the task becomes of doing a huge post with all my news. And so I put it off. And then more stuff happens. And then the bigger the job becomes, and frankly the logical outcome is that I never blog again. But a little plug from Writernet has been just the tonic, because the last thing I’d want is lots of excitable new readers coming along to see what I’m about only to find the blog equivalent of a playwright in a Persistent Vegetative State.
So here I am again, wide awake. It’s a miracle.
Having said that, I am still quite busy and not really in a position to give an exhaustive account of everything I’ve been up to because that would quite easily wipe out my weekend. So what I thought I’d do is put this interactive internet thing to good use and give you all a summary of what I’ve been up to, and then you – yes, YOU – can choose what you’d like to hear more about by leaving a request in the Comments box. Of course none of it might interest you at all in which case we’ve saved ourselves a job and we can all go home.
Right then, let’s see.
I saw An Oak Tree at Soho Theatre. I saw Stars In The Morning Sky at the Union Theatre. I went on Resonance FM and reviewed both of these. I taught a playwrighting class for Dan Rebellato’s 3rd year Drama students at Royal Holloway. I finally got to see Coram Boy at the NT courtesy of a Mulberry School trip. I had a meeting with the new head of the Red Room, Topher Campbell, and heard all about his vision for the company. I completed a series of two-minute monologues for teenagers for Half Moon Young People’s Theatre, which they had commissioned from me as stimulus pieces for their forthcoming Careers In Theatre day. I read a play by Geraldine Aron called the Donahue Sisters, which one of my A-level classes are rehearsing. I had a workshop on a new play of mine called South Of The River with 2nd year RADA students, courtesy of the inspirational Lloyd Trott. I went to Sheffield Crucible for one day of rehearsals of my new play How To Disappear Completely & Never Be Found. I had an occupational health appointment at Tower Hamlets Borough Council. I experimented with the idea of a pre-nuptial Bengali Mehndi Party as a possible location for my new play for Mulberry School, which I am writing for the students to perform at the Edinburgh Festival this summer. I signed a contract with Venue 45 in Edinburgh as the theatre where we will perform it.
There. Take your pick.
[Comment]
Sun 25 Feb 2007
Oh dear. My site stats tell me I'm hemorrhaging readers. Well I'm afraid you'll just have to wait. A combination of skyrocketing teaching offers at short notice, and an old friend visiting from Australia means I'm a bit preoccupied.
If you love me, you'll be back.
[Comment]
Sat 17 Feb 2007
I've been asked to review some theatre for Resonance FM's theatre magazine show On The Fringe. I was a guest on the show last year when my play Locked In was touring, and now they've asked me back as a critic.
This week, they have sent me to see Stars In The Morning Sky at the Union Theatre, and An Oak Tree at Soho Theatre. They show is going out live this coming Monday at 9pm.
In the spirit of what I have learned on this blog, I shall be trying my best to be generous.
[Comment]
Tues 13 Feb 2007
STOP PRESS: The Arts Council funds some art
Yes, you read it right. Just had the fantastic news that an ACE application put in by my friend and director of Liquid Theatre Matt Peover, to commission me to write a full length modern Jacobean play, has been granted in full! And with not a BME teenager or a workshop in a deprived area in sight.
As Matt himself so eloquently put it in the application:
"We want to create a big, bold play, which engages with the tone of our uncertain, violent, commodified times, and we want it to speak a theatrical language that can express these themes with an emotional and vivid immediacy. And we want our play to be an accessible and exciting experience even while it charts these difficult waters. It was for these reasons that we looked to the Jacobean plays for inspiration – grand, adrenalised, dark plays of violently effervescent language, which dealt with an era of corruption in which many thought the end of the world was nigh."
So there you go, it is still possible to get money for this sort of thing.
In other news, I've noticed that another friend, writer and dramaturg David Lane, has come up with a novel idea to raise money for his latest show, which has even been picked up by Guardian theatre blogs here. It's sparked off an interesting debate about fringe funding too.
Go and give the man a pound.
[Comment]
Thurs 08 Feb 2007
Okay okay so maybe that was a bit much to digest and comment on all in one go. I know you're busy people. The debate's still open if you want to have a stab, but in the meantime, I have discovered some excellent labour-saving websites which might interest you...
My very good friend and dramaturg extraordinaire Sarah Dickenson has nudged me into action on an issue that had been on my To Do List for some time. Some of you will recall Lyn Gardner's (I'm not obsessed with you Lyn, you just keep touching on issues that mean a lot to me) timely post a few weeks back on the rumours of arts funding cuts in the next Arts Council spending review.
Now I know this is a bit boring, which is why it lingered on my Chores List for so long, but it really isn't something any of us can afford to ignore. The Arts Council have just posted this press release on their website in an attempt to galvanise our lazy artistic arses into some sort of action, and this is my attempt to do the same. I've just emailed my MP about it, and I'd suggest you get on the case too if you still want there to be money circulating in this business to pay your commission fees.
To make it easier, you'll be pleased to hear that i have discovered the following brilliant online resources which, through the magic of the internet, finally make Political Activism for The Lazy (or Cynical) a wondrous reality.
They are:
www.writetothem.com - amazing site which searches for your local MP just by you typing in your postcode, then takes you through an easy step-by-step process allowing you to email them directly. So no printing, stamps, trips to the post office or even standing up if you don't want.
www.theyworkforyou.com - similarly genius site which holds all the facts and figures on your MP including how they voted in every parliamentary vote since 2001, transcripts of everything they've ever said in Parliament, which Early Day Motions they've signed, and even their expense accounts.
BUT! The best bit is the alert facility. Just enter your email address and the keywords you're interested in, and you'll get notified every single time those words or phrases are mentioned by anyone in Parliament! For real. I've asked to be notified about 'Arts Council' and 'playwright' (in case any of us get a mention).
Now go and start lobbying. You really have no excuse not to. It's that or go and get a proper job by this time next year.
[Comment]
Tues 06 Feb 2007
I'm flattered to discover that Lyn Gardner has responded to my comment on her Guardian blog about Arts Council priorities. I've noticed that Guardian blog authors normally don't get involved in their Comments box debates, so I'm pleased that she's taken the time to respond.
It's timely in that it links in with my recent theme on this page about the power (or lack of) of theatre to change things in the world. I've reproduced our exchange below, not simply as an easy blog entry (though I am having a busy week) but because I've been quite impressed with my readers' quality of mind here lately and I'd be interested to get your opinions. I haven't had much contact with the Arts Council recently so I'm also curious to hear any anecdotes from those who have. I've reproduced their current listed priorities at the end of this post to get you thinking. Do you agree or disagree with their focus? What would your priorities be and why?
Here's what I said to Lyn:
"Whilst I can understand some of your disquiet about the balance of this equation Lyn [between funding the arts for their own sake and funding participatory/community arts projects] there are a couple of important points which I think you've overlooked.
The first is that for the arts to truly flourish at a professional level, artists themselves need to be drawn from as diverse a range of backgrounds as possible, in order for the art that they make to provoke and challenge the society it is for and about. Theatre is a telling example: ten years ago playwriting was an almost exclusively white middle-class activity. Nothing wrong with plays by and for this group, and I speak as one of them, but if that's the only group from which stories are being drawn then the possiblities for ongoing originality and provocation are necessarily limited. Artists, of whatever stripe, are important gatekeeper positions within our culture - we are the progenitors of stories, and as such decide what people, subjects and aspects of human experience are worth putting a frame around. This is an extraordinarily powerful position to hold. The people who hold it should come from as representative a range of backgrounds as possible. But holding these positions and getting to make art isn't something people usually just jump into at a professional level; it takes a lot of training, and young people's projects are the first step in this. Many will be inspired to make important original art of their own later in life.
[Apologies to regular readers who are sick of me banging on about this next bit:] I'm currently working as playwright-in-residence at Mulberry School for Girls in Tower Hamlets, a state school which by its location is made up of 99% Bangladeshi Muslim girls. I'm running an after school playwriting club, and I'm struggling to find them plays to study with characters even remotely drawn from worlds they would recognise. I've found a couple - by Tanika Gupta and Amber Lone - and great as those two are, the scarcity of material from this particular group is still a bit of an indictment of where we recruit our playwrights and how we train and support them.
But more importantly, Mulberry have also asked me to write a new play exlusively for the school, for and about their students, which they want me to take to the Edinburgh Festival this summer. This is an amazing opportunity and I'm proud and privilieged to be given the opportunity to do it. Mulberry is a visionary school with specialist arts status and this is all part of their philosophy - that artists and educational establishments should form a sort of symbiosis, where the students obviously benefit from working directly with arts professionals, but where the school, through supporting local artists, also inspires them and puts them in touch with groups with whom they would never normally have contact, and for this to go on to create new original art which couldn't happen in any other way. (Incidentally, the money for this is coming from the school itself, not the Arts Council, but I've long argued that education is rapidly taking the lead in innovative working models of this sort and that the arts could learn a lot).
As a playwright, initially the difficulty in making a regular living in theatre pushed me to find education work, particuarly with young people. I found myself working with kids in care, teenage mums, young offenders - all the groups the government want to target through the Arts Council agenda - and absolutely loving it! Before, if i had wanted to break out of my white middle-class bubble and write about pirate radio and a clash of faiths in the UK grime scene I'd have had months of painstaking research to do and contacts to make. Now, I just offer to run a few workshops for specific organisations and I have instant access to the people I want to write about, all of whom get something out of it too. The theatre companies adopting this approach, such as Half Moon, Birmingham Rep, Liverpool Everyman and several others, are actually producing some of the most exciting and relevant work in the UK, and are the theatre companies most in touch with their audiences. What's wrong with that? My play for teenagers Locked In, which toured last year, was a direct result of this approach and couldn't have been written in any other way. I've just been commissioned to do another on the back of it and I can't wait - through Half Moon I have the opportunity to access a whole range of subjects I might otherwise never write about.
So don't dismiss working in this way. At its best it can inspire art and artists to explore new areas in the infinite variety of human experience, and surely that's a good thing for art, artists, audiences, critics - and even the government's happy. I think that's a pretty positive outcome by anyone's standards."
And here's Lyn's response:
"Fin, I can't argue with anything you're saying. I'm not for a moment trying to suggest that participation, access and education are not important. What's the point of art which is only elitist, made by the cultural establishment for the cultural establishment? We all know from Gramsci how power--whether social, political or cultural--is maintained by deneying access to those who are not part of that established power base. You only have to go to something even as wonderful as Devoted and Disgruntled--probably a pretty representive cross section of people working in theatre today---to see how few black people have a foothold in theatre.
In many ways I think that despite all the schemes access has actually diminished in theatre over the last 20 years as funding has been eroded and production costs have risen. Young theatre makers today often not only need talent, skill and dedication, they also need £10,000 in the bank to get that all important first production up and running.
So yes access and participation are crucial. The scheme you're currently working on at Mulberry school sounds fantasic, and I've certainly had experience of other schemes which have produced extraordinary art and just as extraordinary social benegfits. I am thinking of companies such as Quarantine whose White Trash was a remarkable and moving piece of of dance theatre created via workshops with a group of young, white working class men in Manchester who'd never done any theatre at all. I'm thinking of the work done by Action Transport-- I recemtly saw a terrific show which was wriiten by no less than 15 young people in collaboration. Or a LIFT project I was involved in a school in Stoke Newington when the children turned their very lives into art.
What I think marked out these projects was that they are not afraid to find new ways of working (after all most of British theatre--both institiutions and individuals-- shies away like at a frightened horse at the prospect of working collaboratively) and that they always placed art at the centre of the project.
My point is simply that I don't think that the government and the Arts Council see the purpose of art in that way any longer. The value of art is increasingly being assessed for its value as a branch of social work. They are only interested in the use to which art can be put and see it as a tool of social policy and social engineering. And that's worrying.I believe that good art almost always turns out to be transforming and has huge social benefits for individuals, communities and the country as a whole--witness the projects I've mentioned above. It may be called the Arts Council, but increasingly its agenda suggests that art is really secondary to other priorities."
And here are the Arts Council's current priorities, as listed on their website:
"For 2006 to 2008, we have six priorities:
- Taking part in the arts
- Children and young people
- The creative economy
- Vibrant communities
- Internationalism and celebrating diversity.
Right. Over to you.
[Comment]
Fri 02 Feb 2007
Very interesting debate starting up over on Lyn Gardner's Guardian blog today. I've had my say.
[Comment]
Wed 31 Jan 2007
Spotted this in the Guardian this morning:
Europeans fear US attack on Iran as nuclear row intensifies
Now I know I'm usually quite strict about this being a theatre blog, but it's at times like this that I wonder whether I shouldn't have gone into something else entirely.
Just after I graduated (almost a decade ago now) I had a long conversation with a good friend, who had also just completed a Drama degree, about what difference we could possibly make in the world. We went round in circles for a while trying to find examples of when Theatre had had a political impact that History had actually acknowledged, and couldn't come up with very much. My friend was more of an idealist and less of a pessimist than me (and had done a slightly more leftfield degree) and he kept banging on about Augusto Boal and all that grass roots type stuff. That's all well and good; I've read some of his books and admire some of his ideas, but the bottom line is that he achieved more through writing political literature and eventually standing for election than he ever did as a writer or director. I know there are such a thing as 'soft outcomes' and working as I do in education I do value those personal changes in individuals, such as increased confidence in young people, that involvement in theatre can bring about. But when it comes to the big political stuff, I feel powerlss, and more than a little frustrated.
I wondered at the time whether I was just a fresh-faced graduate without the facts at my disposal. But ten years on, five of which I've spent as a playwright, I still struggle to point to a single play or season of plays which Unequivocally Changed Something - such as stopping one country bombing another.
Maybe that's asking too much. Maybe theatre's political effect can only ever be a drip-drip one, carving a small but steady fissure down the cliff face of society's perceptions. There are the cliches: we hold a mirror up, we are one of the few remaining spaces for collective consideration of aspects of ourselves. I value all that, and I acknowledge that this in itself can indeed slowly bring about change in small ways. But when I see headlines like the one above and just feel that sudden yearning that This Isn't Right, and Will The Idiots Never Learn?! then that the next feeling is always I Have To Stop This. But I can't.
I know there are people who have tried. Harold Pinter springs to mind. I've just (belatedly) finished reading Billington's biography of him. Alright, he speaks his mind and has a platform and is taken as seriously a playwright probably ever will be in political circles. And he got kicked out of the US embassy in Turkey, along with Arthur Miller, for asking the ambassador if he'd like to have his bollocks electrocuted. Big up. But what difference did it make in terms of preventing torture in that country?
Could we as theatre-makers make more of a difference if we didn't waste so much energy making theatre? I know that might sound like a stupid question, but think about the amount of time and extraordinary mental effort that goes into writing a play - for me, 3 months or more of full-time research, plus another 3 of full-time original creative thought to make the play (and that's just the first draft, then there's everyone else's efforts to get it to the stage) - and then think about the outcome. It makes me rather depressed. All that work, which stretches me to the very limits of my capabilities, and for what? A round of applause, a few people nodding and going 'Hmm yes, how interesting'? Then going home feeling entertained and mildly better informed. Sometimes this doesn't feel like enough, and I wonder whether this energy couldn't be better spent. If I put in the same level of exertion into, I don't know, working for the UN, or Amnesty, or The Red Cross, or as an investigative journalist - wouldn't the actual net result in terms of lives changed be so much greater?
Obviously, I'm a bit stuck now. To do that stuff I'd have to go and re-train and start over and throw away years spent working towards where I am today. Or is that just an excuse? I could do it if I really wanted to. Maybe not in time to stop America bombing Iran, but there might be plenty of other future events which my efforts could be put towards avoiding, which writing a play about them would never prevent.
But I'm stuck wasting my time with this indulgent middle-class career-hobby. Sometimes I wonder why.
[Comment]
Sun 28 Jan 2007
I went to see Carmen at the Royal Opera House last night. It's only the second opera I've ever been to. (I don't count Jerry Springer The Opera.) The other one was The Magic Flute at the ENO, which I absolutely hated, even though it was directed by Nick Hytner and had got good reviews.
I'd heard good things about Carmen too and had high hopes that maybe this would be the one where I finally managed to understand what all the fuss was about. Unfortunately, I was again disappointed. It wasn't awful, just boring.
I did try. After the lessons learned on these very pages, I went along in a spirit of warm smiling generosity. Oh yes. I really wanted to like it. I liked the idea of opening myself up to other forms of performance, and seeing what their tricks were. I wanted to be able to sound all clever now and again by dropping in conversational references like "Of course in the 2007 Carmen at the ROH..." when talking to directors. (I've noticed directors seem to like opera.)
I was even in good company. I went with a very good friend who loves his opera, in a genuinely impassioned rather than ostentatious way. So I suppose apart from anything else I sort of didn't want to let him down, a bit like when my Dad used to take me to classical recitals. But I can't hide it when I don't like something. And if I'd lied he knows me well enough to tell.
We discussed it afterwards in the pub, and my main objection was that the story was simply rubbish. Apart from being rather a well-worn love triangle setup, the characters were little more than archetypes (and I'd argue that even that was crediting them with a complexity which wasn't really in evidence). Character development was so thin that at no point was there any chance to feel particularly strongly about any of them, nor care what happened to them. And to top it all, in a three-and-a-half hour evening there was really only enough material to justify perhaps one hour of plot. The rest of the time was taken up by everyone singing the same line to each other four or five times in a row. Sometimes, I wondered whether the surtitles had got stuck.
"But what about the music?!" I know, I know, it's all very impressive and they're highly skilled and world famous and train very hard and earn more per second than I do in a year. I could tell they were good at what they did, but that didn't make me like it. Again, I did try. It's partly a taste thing; I just find the sound of opera rather pompous and self-important. But I also found it difficult to concentrate on the music because I was so distracted by all the onstage comings and goings, like a real live donkey and a child doing backflips. All very impressive but no amount of smoke and mirrors can make up for a deficient plot.
"But it isn't about the PLOT!" Well, why have one then? If it's just a reason to write some songs and play them, why not just hold a concert? In fact, the few classical concerts I have been to I've actually preferred, and been able to concentrate on, precisely because there aren't any livestock or acrobats to distract me. I just don't feel that opera as a genre very successfully integrates stagecraft and musicianship. For me, they somehow seem to both detract from one another.
My friend and I eventually realised that perhaps my background as a playwright somehow precludes me from getting into the spirit of it all. He plays the piano to Grade 8 and so was coming to it from a different angle. Whilst he was floating on a blissful cloud of treble clefs and arias, I was down a dramaturgical pit fuming at the slow pace and poor characterisation.
Still, it was better than The Magic Flute, which was like a really patronising panto, replete with god-awful gags, huge chunks of appallingly bad dialogue, and a 'hilarious' man in a bird suit. Perhaps it is just a matter of taste. I don't like musicals either. But I can't help feeling that perhaps I'm a terrible philistine, or that I'm missing out on something amazing. But I'm not sure what else I can do.
That said, it's not a massive priority for the coming year. But if anyone else out there likes opera, I'd be interested to hear why.
[Comment]
Thurs 18 Jan 2007
Lyn Gardner has made reference to the (now rather infamous) row which kicked off on this blog after the 05 Jan entry below. I think she has missed the point. You can read her whole post here, though the bit relating to us is reproduced below.
I have left the following Comment for her on her Guardian blog, but some of you may well want to contribute too. But please play nicely - remember we're representing our profession here. I don't want the whole world to think we're like Jade Goody ok?
My Comment to Lynn:
"Those theatre-makers who sincerely believe that it's easy being a critic as well as a friend and colleague have only to take a peek at the row that erupted on playwright Fin Kennedy's website just before Christmas to see what happens when the boundaries blur."
Whilst this point may be true, the row which erupted on my blog was not about this. It was started by an Anonymous commenter making a below the belt remark about another blogging playwright's girth, and drawing a catty analogy with 'flabby plays'. This playwright rightly saw red and responded in kind. He was then vilified for (wrongly) being perceived to have responded with violence to a criticism of his work.
Whilst the resulting furore was indeed gruesome reading at times, in amongst it all was an interesting and important debate about how playwrights in particular are writtten off as oversensitive 'difficult' old buggers the moment they take issue with something someone has said, even if it isn't about their work. We are always in a position of weakness because once we have written our plays and had them performed, everyone else has the last word. For a writer to take part in any ensuing debate is seen as defensiveness.
The traditional balance of power between theatre-makers, critics and audiences has always served to effectively neuter the theatre-makers. The internet and particularly blogs are changing all that, and it is making some critics very uncomfortable. But surely the more people that take part in debates about plays, and the more numerous their views, the more likely we are to get to the truth of a piece of work through being able to see it from all sides, and thereby reach a more accurate (or at least democratic) consensus on its value or otherwise?
Of course, this does mean a bit more work on the part of audiences. They will have to read through comments boxes in more detail to get to the heart of the matter, rather than rely on one critics opinion. But we already consult comments when we buy electrical equipment from Amazon, or Tripadvisor before we book a hotel, or decide whteher or not to trust an eBay seller - why not plays too? One man's Royal Hunt Of The Sun is another man's Love And Money...
[Comment]
Tues 16 Jan
Sorry for the gap. I've been a bit swamped because I've started as writer-in-residence at Mulberry School this week. Although it's part-time, it's full-time this first week as I have to recruit a whole ton of kids into various after-school clubs I'm setting up.
One of the things they've asked me to do is to devise a new show through wokshops, script it, rehearse it, and take it to the Edinburgh festival this summer. I've never done this before, so I'm afraid this is rather a selfish blog entry to ask for your help. That's right - yours. It's the least you can do after your recent misbehaviour.
Does anyone have any insider's tips for Dos and Don'ts at the Edinburgh Festival? My brief is to take a group of perhaps 10 Bangladeshi girls aged between 14 and 18, for about a week, in a one-act show maybe 40 mins long.
Here's some of the questio
