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...............