The Story of the Play without a Home

Having just joined the many-legged beast that is Elephant Foot (as Producer), I'm still trying to get my bearings. This is complicated by the fact that there's a lot to do. It's kind of like trying to work out where you are in a beseiged city, only not dangerous.......So up until last week, we were merrily gearing up for a Preview performance of 'The Duck, Death and The Tulip' on the 4th of April at the New Red Lion. We were preparing to compile press invites, sponsorship packs, recruit production team members; all for the magic date of the 4th of April. Done, simple.

If only! As is always the way in theatre land, the web proved far more tangled. Having lost our fixed venue (and so grounding all previously mentioned preparatory work) we are now casting the net wide for other options (all suggestions welcome!).

Our rather hysterical production meeting last week involved a lot of a curious dynamic, which I'm finding myself in a lot of the time at the moment. It goes something like this: Creative team member A proposes some amazing, exciting artistic or production choice, Producer raises numerous logistical reasons why said choice cannot be actualised. I kinda feel I'm bursting bubbles all over the place. I'm not looking for sympathy, I'm just voicing the eternal dilemma of the producer. I guess part of this comes from my own past experience, in creative team member A's shoes. Having been in those shoes, now that I have my producer hat on, it feels mean to shoot down someone else's creativity. It's an interesting path to tread, that of a producer, as one has to be part creative, part logistics and detail obsessed.

Moving away from myself and back to the production. I went to a Scratch night last week to check out a prospective venue, very much wearing my producer hat. Instead of seeing the endless artistic possibilities of the space, all I saw was an L-shaped room in which the audience could never see more than half the action at any one time. No go. And so we move on to other spaces...........

We have another production meeting tomorrow so hopefully the next blog, whoever it is by, will provide a happy ending to the story of the play without a home...............

All the Blank Spaces - Exploring Duck, Death and The Tulip

Presentations of workshop tasks are a pretty standard thing. They are by all accounts muted affairs. A 2 minute whirl of what will hopefully be the faintest whiff of an interesting idea. We watch a rough outline of a piece and feedback in a polite and constructive way. Tuesday was different. As all three pairs prepped their ideas we agreed on 25 minutes for each group allowing for a second try and mixing things up. Laura and Harriet went first...

An hour later we stood belittled, giggly and enthusiastically confused. The other two groups would not be showing tonight. The girls transformed a function room above a bar into a totalitarian, unquestioning school house with the only stimulus being one word, 'compartmental". This got me thinking. First of all how certain people do not like being told what to do. Even in a controlled environment amongst friends people still rebel and become to put it coyly, naughty. Exercise caution in control experiments, should you ever decide to mount one. Secondly our experience with Duck, Death and the Tulip really felt that it had stepped up a gear. This sparse, lean and reserved story touches on so much in scope it would be quite easy to fill up all the empty space on the pages with images, questions and our own readings and that's exactly what we're doing. One of the best features of the book when you're coming at it creatively is how it lets you fill in the blanks or, indeed, let you leave bits blank and just accept them as they are. It has a transformative quality and allows us as a Theatre company to go anywhere, anytime, anyhow. That goes for an audience too. Can't wait to see if there is anywhere it can't take us. Gotta do that small presentation first though, politeness and constructiveness and stuff.