The Waiting Game

In this lead up to Christmas, liturgically the season of Advent, waiting becomes even more affecting and thought-provoking. I am waiting for news of this, of that. Communication becomes complicated, especially when three or four parties are involved. Decisions are slowly reached until a consensus of all views is negotiated. As each revelation becomes a fixed arrangement, the process of waiting becomes dense and implicatory.

I am looking forward to presenting at the Sacred and Secular Symposium in January but am waiting to hear if I have been successful regarding the Missing Performance Symposium at a later date elsewhere. And then there may be the further waiting to see how each presentation is received...

My review of the extraordinary and very funny Peter Pan Goes Wrong has been published on the One Stop Arts site and quoted by the Pleasance Theatre but One Stop Arts itself is, as an online site, becoming defunct from January 2nd, 2014. So no more waiting there for review submissions to be uploaded...

It is like waiting for inspiration. As a creative writer, I value Jung's concept of the unconscious mind's ability, in self-regulatory mode, to work out the creative answers to most of life's problems. Don't be in a hurry, wait and see... It will all come out right in the end. Even if it doesn't - or does, but not as you expected -  at least the element of surprise might be revelatory enough.

Pennies from Heaven

Delighted to report that I have the first (small) tranche of funding for my practice-as-research play, scheduled to be performed at Goldsmiths in July. And a director, too. And a choreographer, possibly.

The money was awarded from Goldsmith's Graduate School Fund and very grateful I am. Now to look for further small donations to add to the fund...

The cost of a gun hired from Bapty costs about £50.00 upwards. And I don't want actors, technicians and the director to work for nothing.  Although it's a university project, I know they'll be doing it for love as much as anything else. As indeed am I. So every little helps to stage what I hope will be a really exciting production. It's based on a notorious British murder case, but will reveal more about that later.

Meanwhile we'll be looking for a male child actor (playing age: ten years) to play a pivotal role. And a female twenty-something actor to play the protagonist. Oh, and the play's in verse.

That Certain Feeling

Yesterday, while in a queue waiting to be served at a trendy Pets Parlour in Gloucester Road, the lady in front of me, with her young daughter, said. 'Let the young man be served first while we make up our mind.' The fact that I am almost seventy seemed to go unrecognised.

That certain feeling of not knowing if the woman was being mildly sarcastic or perfectly sincere took hold of me for a second or two. Smiling, I said thank you and moved forward to be served. I find this ambivalence about age typical of London: either I'm being addressed as 'young man' or I'm being offered seats on the tube by twenty year olds because 'You look as if you need it, sir'. Kindness and thoughtfulness rule the day in London, I find frequently. In Devon, I get asked to show my passport by suspicious bus drivers before they let me use my Freedom pass.

Favourite Off West End Theatres

Not wishing to retread an article I wrote for One Stop Arts explaining my favourite Off West End Theatres, I'd like to pose the question: Is the excellent Jermyn Street Theatre Off West End, West End or something in between? I could not make up my mind about this as I have seen and heard it described as both. All the productions I have seen there have been very good. So I did not include it in my survey. 

I would vote for The Print Room anyway as the most enterprising and consistently good Off West End venue, even if I was not bowled over by their recent offering Amygdala, performed in their cramped balcony space. But Arthur Miller's The Last Yankee and Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter, given in their main auditorium, were superb productions of two classics of twentieth century drama. Both plays revealed a topicality and societal relevance which perhaps the writers could not have foreseen. 

That The Print Room, like other Off West End venues such as the White Bear, Old Red Lion, Brockley Jack and Riverside Studios, is prepared to take risks with new work is commendable.

Finding the Right Words...

Reviewing theatre as I do for One Stop Arts and What's Peen Seen, I have become more aware of how difficult it is to assess a performance, particularly of new work, which is technically brilliant, very well acted and directed but is essentially an unconvincing, predictable piece of writing.

I had this problem with Coward which premiered at Kennington's White Bear Theatre recently and, lately, with Amygdala at the Print Room's Balcony. Both plays were beautifully performed and directed, with great technical support. But, for me, their plots were predictable, with a lack of dramatic surprise. At the risk of seeming mean I decide to go with my honest response to how the play strikes me at first viewing.

Of course, even with this honesty of response, one can often be proved very wrong.  And if that it is the case, so be it and good luck to the writers!

Deadlines

Well, the last of the six workshops went off very well in the George Wood Theatre. A really talented cast (all ten of them!) and director. It was wonderful to see the play come alive on a real stage, with lighting doing its magical alchemy.

We videoed three sequences to be transferred to DVD as evidence of the process. Aim now: to finish the first draft of both acts by early September and workshop the whole play next academic year culminating with a performance of some kind.

As a new verse drama it fared well onstage and demonstrated some of the theories I am using in my thesis.

Lost books

Do you ever, like me, mislay books which you have been reading avidly, even perhaps need for ongoing research? Every so often they seem to magic themselves away... James Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology is the latest book to mysteriously disappear. It seems to be nowhere in the house. Did I leave it on a train? On a bus? In a cafe? What would Jung have made of this? Probably that I'm not meant to be reading it as keenly as I thought?

The good news is that I've finished redrafting the Eliot chapter so don't need it anyway at the moment, but perhaps when I come on to write the Sarah Kane....?

But, hey, April's here and the sun is illuminating the blue sky like a blank computer screen. Anything is possible. Even, perhaps, the book turning up literally out of the blue.