Great Panjandrum with the little button at top

Picking at the coalface

I have a new writing project - a version of Chekhov's Three Sisters, which I am directing in November.

You might wonder why I would want to do this when there are four or five modern translations on the market, some of them very playable.

I have asked myself this question once or twice, suggesting to myself a certain arrogance and foolhardiness in presuming to rewrite Chekhov of all people.  But in reality,  we are not dealing with the words of the master, but the translator's take on them, which is inevitably influenced by the lugubrious Stanislavskian manner of doing the plays. The acme of this is probably the Olivier/Plowright filmed version which is ponderous and self-important. Even so, I remember weeping through it copiously in the cinema. Yes, reader, we used to watch films in a cinema in my youth.

I want Three Sisters to be light and fast and airy, and incidentally shorter, and free from the drawing-room/naturalistic mode of playing associated with Chekhov. I know I have repeatedly said that it makes no sense to move Chekhov to another era, (I may be wrong about that) but you can play it in another style. Or so we are about to find out. The translations are all linked, in my mind, to the built-set, perfectly-accurate-uniforms manner of playing, which constrict the play. A revered designer came to see a rehearsal of student production in which I played Masha; he said "You're not using that champagne bottle in performance, are you? Champagne bottles didn't have gold on the label at that period."

Misplaced attention to detail, methinks. We worried about getting the champagne bottle right, not about the truth of our performances.

I'm probably being unfair on the translators, but I feel that by making the script my own, I can free my imagination from the shackles of past productions.

Currently I doing prep work. I've being doing prep for a while now.  I could make the prep work spin out for a very long time, giving me the illusion of being very busy about my play, and then at the end, opt for one of the translations.

If I do, feel free to mock me publicly for pretentiousness.

In the meantime I am finding lots of displacement activities, not only rehearsals for our 1950's, Paris Left Bank All's Well (my idea, but that's about all I've contributed to the production so far), but things like sorting out the filing, defrosting the freezer, overhauling out the first aid box, weeding... all worthy activities, which fill me with a great sense of achievement, even though all I've done is clear the shamefully overdue backlog of ordinary living. Amazing how one can keep a tube of antibacterical cream for ten years after its use-by date. And I have discovered a hitherto-unknown species of woolly mammoth in the freezer.

Play wrighting II

I should have known this. After all, I have been a writer for twenty years.

But I read an article posted by Jon Manager's Schedule - Maker's Schedule  which clarifies a problem that has been puzzling me for some time. Why is it that I can start the week (as, for example, this week) thinking "Wonderful - three free evenings - I'll get lots of writing done" only to get to the end of the week gnashing my teeth with frustration at the lack of progress - in fact, sometimes the backwards progression of the work. I will sit down after dinner, look at the current text, tinker a bit, decide it's pretty second-rate, delete a bit, write something, delete it and then give up and go watch television.
But in the same evening, if I were not writing, I would have been very productive and efficient - but that's because the evening I now see is a chunked up like Manager's Schedule period - the two and a half hours between dinner and bed. Great for getting things done, useless for creative work, for which, as the author says, two hours is just the starting period. If one is to be creative, one cannot have a fixed end point. It's slow start, but once you get going, get into the fast lane, you can't afford to meet a roundabout or a set of traffic lights.

So armed with this wisdom - a new approach to the division of time.

Today? Today is on Manager's Schedule. But tomorrow ?

Play wrighting

You have to craft a play, put it together with the care of boy with an airfix model.
It has to have a properly proportioned, properly-jointed skeleton.
If you get the structure wrong, it doesn't matter how fine the writing or brilliant the characters, the thing won't work.
You have to craft a novel, too, but the skeleton is not obvious under all the flesh,  and so any errors in construction or sloppy joints are only visible to the specialist. If the construction of a novel is poor, you may lose the reader in the middle, but if she perseveres to the end she is unlikely to recall the soggy patches, as it is the opening, the atmosphere and the ending that people remember.

In a play however, you have two hours during which you must line up all the pieces in their places. and the ending must lock them all together.

Displacement activities

You can tell when I've got a writing project under weigh.
The house starts to look like an advertisement for John Lewis and the books are in alphabetical order.
It's amazing what reservoirs of energy exist to do things that are not the the writing.

So last night I catalogued the OVO properties. Wow. We have quantities of chain and some nice bits of porcelain. And three decanters, and a very fine antique shaving kit...  And so it goes on.

No doubt, next week I will be inspired to catalogue the costumes, and reshelve the downstairs books.
And then to clear out all my drawers. Such worthy activity. It makes one feel so virtuous and quite expunges the sneaking worm which says "You - a writer? Ha!"

Terrible timing

It looks today as if our dream of an OVO arts base, however precarious, might become a reality. There are many possible pitfalls in this plan, mostly to do with economics, macro and micro.  If the recession lifts, as the pundits tiresomely suggest, then some shopkeeper could cast his greedy eye on our space, and make the landlord an offer rather more in keeping with its supposed true value than our peppercorn.

Or we may find ourselves quite unable to stem the flood of tiny bills for insurance, rates, power, water, and find that artistic effort is all dissipated into maintenance. While I dream of running an Arts' Centre, I do not fancy spending my days paying not playing.

But all the Chocolate and Tobacco Factories, the Chicken Sheds and Kneehighs and myriad other successful arts groups, started small in a back shed somewhere, so why not us?

And knowing there will be pitfalls and tears ahead is no reason not to try. If not now, when?

Timing is terrible though, with the completion at work of the largest project I've ever been near - £50m+, 500 people on the project team, 35 of them supposedly under my direct control - co-inciding almost exactly with the signing of the lease on our premises.

No Emily Dickinson, i.

I don't know whether I am a pseud - someone who talks and writes largely of being a writer, but who gives up at the smallest obstacle, or a victim of circumstance. We only know the biographies of those writers who struggled against adverse events and continued to write, not about those who might have been contenders, but who were overcome by poverty, illness, doubt or disillusion. For every Emily DIckinson, endlessly rebuffed, but obstinately persevering and stuffing her wardrobe with her darling fragments, there must a hundred who have decided they were no good and burnt the lot.
I am ridiculously easily put off. Last night, I got in wild and frustrated after two and half hours struggling the thirty miles from work, about 7:30. There was a bit of a gap till dinner, since Jeremy could not,  tell when I was going to make it home, during which I downed a couple of good glasses of wine to restore my spirits, and chatted to my father, who after all does deserve a certain amount of attention, but gets precious little.  Then before one knows it, it's 8:30, which is still plenty early enough to do some writing. But first we needed to sort out the dates of our holiday (for more complicated than it has any right to be, or I have strengthen to explain) and this resulted in an argument. 
Then I open my nascent script, angry, exhausted, distracted (self, not script). It seems entirely second-rate, and I pure pretension to pretend to be a writer.
I give up and go watch television. No Emily Dickinson, I.

You saw it here first...

July 2nd 2009
It is begun.
This morning I got into work early (7:20) and started on my first play.

Actually not quite true. I wrote a play called, if I recall, 'Mountjoy',  when I was 14. It won the British Drama League Junior Playwriting Competition, but there may have been only two entries. The runner-up was called "Death, a Forbidden Luxury." Why I have remembered that for 40 years, I cannot tell, but perhaps somewhere is a great playwright who harbours a sense of grievance at having been trounced by Mountjoy.
My splendidly-titled play was based on that jolly romp, The Song of Roland. All l I can remember is that it ended with one character turning back to the audience and saying "Ahoy!". (This is how the verses end in the original epic. I think.) Hopefully my sense of the ridiculous has improved since then.

 
The new play is already taking an interesting shape after 500 words. I have also discovered the wonderful secret advantage of writing your own script. You can put the blocking into the text. This saves the back-breaking grind of the early rehearsals. Don't argue about the moves. The playwright has decreed them!

The only pitfall I can see is the temptation to write parts for specific actors, rather than creating independent characters, but I haven't been a character-based novelist for so many years for nothing.

I am absurdly excited, like a teenager with a new chemistry set.

Half a year, half a year, half a year gone

July 1st 2009

Heavens, how interesting to read my last post (Ha!) on March 30th, when I bemoaned the travails of a non-professional director.
As I predicted in that blog, the pain of the rehearsal and pre-production period is already starting to fade, now I am trailing the glories of a successful production. The audiences loved it, and the houses were good. And I was, eventually, very pleased with it.
The few weeks before the first performance were painful indeed. Actors were frequently late for rehearsal or unexpectedly held up, for an inexhaustible list of reasons. I never managed to get two of the comic scenes (the gulling of Benedick  & Dogberry and Verges) properly rehearsed, with the result that the one decent review we have had (in the Shakespeare Revue) criticised my directing as sloppy and lacking in imagination. If only she knew....
Benedick was still on his book at the last rehearsal, and Leonato never did a single performance with his lines right, which makes one feel very village-hall.
But paradoxically, the end result was classy enough to be compared with professional productions, which is, of course, what makes the scruffy patches even more scruffy. If the whole were not of such a standard, one would not notice the few fallings-away.

What have I learnt? 

1. Spend time on the text. When I do a play I am in love with, I spend hours and hours on the text, before we start, and examine it word by word. This time, I falsely assumed the play, which I didn't care for very much, would more or less play itself, so made a few cuts and didn't pay deep attention to what was said, or how it would play. This was a mistake.  If I had cut more heavily we would have avoided the pains of rehearsing and blocking wordy scenes, the whole would have been easier to rehearse, and would have avoided those 23:00 finishes so disliked by the venerable burgers of Great Munden. As it was, I had to make some big cuts before the second dress rehearsal, greatly improving things.

2. Allow more rehearsal time. I have noticed in the past that the real work on any non-professional show is done in the last two weeks, when everyone gets excited and energised. From this I extrapolated that I could afford to reduce the elapsed time of the rehearsal. This was a mistake, as we got into the final stretch with chunks grossly under-rehearsed simply because the actors had not all co-incided at rehearsals. We had never managed a run before the dress rehearsal. Even with gaps for absence, the extra weeks would have made a substantial difference to familiarity.

3. Do not rely on workshopping to derive comedy. I deliberately went into the comic scenes without any gags planned, because I thought that the actors would come up with comic business themselves, and we could simply orchestrate this into a funny scene. This only worked half the time. Some actors naturally invent business; others pick up a suggestion and run with it; others think of nothing beyond getting the lines and moves right. As a result, the gulling of Benedick, which should be funny, was not. I should have gone to the first rehearsal with some basic gags worked out, and insisted on them

4. Be serious about comedy. Allow five times as much time to rehearse the comic scenes as the straight ones, and write it all down, and make it go like clockwork. Ditto with any company musical numbers.

5. Do not be charitable. People one is fond of, or feels sorry for, but who cannot remember their lines or otherwise cut the mustard are not really benefited from exposing them to cruel light of public failure. It also makes the rest of the company irritable and is bad for discipline.

6. Think big. I'm getting better at this. My gags and lovely ideas tended in previous shows to be a bit small and go for nothing. But not so much this time.  I had the idea of having the baddies caught by a parachute dropping on their heads, and persisted in this at Great Munden - and it worked beautifully. I had "Why are we doing this?" a few times, but ignored it like a proper director. So I can do it.

7. Let's face it - it take 6 months out of our lives, but as my friend Sara said, at least we doing something with them.

Next phase: Starting to write a play, based on the novel I was working on before (see Bus). It's about a priest, playing Faustus in a local production, who no longer knows what he believes in. Working title "Acting Faust". Watch this space...

I must remember this...

 Monday March 30th
Every time I direct a play a get to a point in the rehearsal process where I swear I won't do it again - or at least I'll make sure it's never like this again.
Then in the flurry of excitement and enthusiasm that follows a show, I forget all about those dire days and those promises to self.
Now if I have the wit to remember to read this post in the future, I might avoid the endless cycle of stress and optimism. Might, being the operative word.
So what's going badly at the moment? 
On Saturday I had the second drop-out of the show. I always expect one, last time I had two. Will this show break the record? I live in fear.  I was lucky enough to be able to replace the first drop out by doubling the Friar's  role (actually tripling - as the droppee was playing Balthasar and Oatcake). I also got quite lucky and managed to get a replacement for Ursula almost straight away, and the noble actress even came to rehearsal on Sunday.  However I now have a problem over the music, as I'd set my heart on a trio of women.
Then there was the rehearsal on Sunday. I had put down far too much to block - though if we had started on time and stayed on a little longer we might have squeezed it all in. The usual suspects were as usual late. Two people went to the wrong venue - even though I had sent out an email and a text reminding them of the change.
We were rehearsing the St Saviours, in the church, which was very nice, but the Vicar wanted to lock up on the dot of 6, which you can hardly blame him for. I would have pressed on for another half hour, even though exhausted, just to make the schedule.
We now have less than six weeks to opening night and I do not have a band and have not had a rehearsal will all the comics together, two of the things that need decent rehearsal.  I can only pray for a sudden surge of commitment. Oh, and I realise that I have cast an actor with a notorious problem with lines in one of the largest parts. What was I thinking?

March of time

March 23rd
Is it really three weeks since I last added anything to this chronicle?
In my defence, it has been an extraordinarily busy time.
For one thing, I have started rehearsals for Much Ado, and everything that entails: costume meetings, music meetings, tech meetings, hours on ebay looking for props, as well as the rehearsals themselves, and the fiddle-time absorbed sending out emails and texts and generally chasing people.

One top of that we've been rehearsing for Stainer's Crucifixion - a deeply-luscious work, described by J as "religious Gilbert & Sullivan". It includes the wondrous "Fling wide the gates" chorus, which is "Excelsior" in a cassock.

Then I also wrote and delivered an address at the Free Baptists, entitled "Lent through the Eyes of a Writer", for which title I apparently still qualify. I was pleased that I'd spent quite a long time writing this, as they paid me a fat fee - fat for a writer, not of course for an after-dinner speaker.

Finally, my quarterly diary piece for Anglican Taonga fell due, as it usually does in the middle of the turmoil. It will be on line in due course, and I'll post a link to it.

None of this constitutes an excuse - since there is still time enough to write.

Oh, and we had a long weekend in Norfolk - which is another country. Oh happy state to bear the weight of Cotman.