Wednesday, 23 March 2011
The one where Frank finds out he doesn't know everything
You may have picked up in a couple of my previous posts that Two Bins Towers doesn’t always reverberate with harmony when designers come to visit. As a breed, they’re usually the opposite to me in most of their habits, practices and philosophies, and this makes me nervous around them. I find it hard to ‘click’ with a designer. I’m uncomfortable with the fact that they always seem to have ‘designed’ themselves pretty comprehensively (usually as frighteningly accurate clones of Jocelyn Herbert – why??). To a jeans-and-trainers man, that kind of sartorial cohesion is alienating.
However, life is nothing if not a learning curve; an opportunity for ones ideas and preconceptions to change.
I have a designer for the re-vamped production of ‘Ten Men…’ (or ‘Ten Men – Rebooted’ as it will never, ever be called). She is young – I’d think around twenty. We met in London to discuss some design ideas. Mainly mine. She seemed to understand what I as driving at, and have a good grip on the themes of the play itself. So far so good.
A week or so after our meeting, she emailed me. The basic tenor was that the ideas I’d proposed, the basis on which we’d agreed she would work, weren’t right. She referenced my own text to back up her case (how chastening it is to have someone put you right on words you’ve written yourself) and outlined a very persuasive argument for changing our thinking on the design. Her replacement idea is much better. I mean, a few thousand miles better. Which is why she’s a designer and I do what I do instead.
Do 20-year-olds do that these days? I’d’ve never have had the bottle at her age. It’s impressive that she had the self-possession and the courage of her convictions to push back. She knew she was right. And now, so do I.
However, life is nothing if not a learning curve; an opportunity for ones ideas and preconceptions to change.
I have a designer for the re-vamped production of ‘Ten Men…’ (or ‘Ten Men – Rebooted’ as it will never, ever be called). She is young – I’d think around twenty. We met in London to discuss some design ideas. Mainly mine. She seemed to understand what I as driving at, and have a good grip on the themes of the play itself. So far so good.
A week or so after our meeting, she emailed me. The basic tenor was that the ideas I’d proposed, the basis on which we’d agreed she would work, weren’t right. She referenced my own text to back up her case (how chastening it is to have someone put you right on words you’ve written yourself) and outlined a very persuasive argument for changing our thinking on the design. Her replacement idea is much better. I mean, a few thousand miles better. Which is why she’s a designer and I do what I do instead.
Do 20-year-olds do that these days? I’d’ve never have had the bottle at her age. It’s impressive that she had the self-possession and the courage of her convictions to push back. She knew she was right. And now, so do I.
Close, But No Cigar
As a result of October’s production of ‘Ten Men…’, I’ve recently brushed shoulders – fleetingly, theoretically – with mainstream success. An opportunity that fell out of the sky, and looked for a while like nesting in Two Bins Towers, eventually took flight again for good.
It started with a phone call from the manager of our venue in Brighton. “Some American bloke has been trying to get hold of you…” I was clueless as to who this might be, (other than possibly someone from 59E59 in New York calling to say “we found your talent underneath some mouldy old dustsheets – do you want it back?”) but I rang the Los Angeles number that had been left for me in order to find out.
I can’t do the details here (it’s sensitive) but the voice at the other end of the transatlantic phone line was unmistakeably British. Specifically English, actually, managing to be both enthusiastic and reserved in that unique Home Counties manner. Cool and geeky in equal measure. Which is in itself a trick that manages to increase both coolness and geekiness. A former BBC man, as a Google search soon revealed. This made me trust him somewhat more than I would otherwise have done, which is absurd given that Aunty Beeb is crammed full of vain, aggressive, self-serving, bullying arseholes (“in my opinion”, for legal reasons).
However, Home Counties Man (hereafter known as HCM), who I quickly decided must surely have thin-rimmed spectacles and a fine collection of Jermyn Street ties, seemed genuine and honourable and – I know this is an odd word in context - kind. He worked, as it turned out, for a movie company in the US. More frantic Googling informed me that they made very, very good movies indeed. Movies I like. Movies with big, famous people in them and budgets greater than all the money my friends and I combined will ever earn.
They were “interested in the subject matter”, and had seen a review of the show online (thank you, eternally, to Bella Todd, then of Latest7 fame). HCM asked if he might see a copy of the script, on an informal, no-strings basis. I agreed. Well, he sounded kind.
He liked the script. Suddenly it was ‘doing the rounds’ at the company in the US. We talked further, about the possibility of them staging the show in London and the US – they have a couple of things happening on Broadway at the moment, so are well versed in theatre production as well as film. Our conversations soon reached the money-where-your-mouth-is juncture, and (it seemed to me, at least) things were very finely balanced in terms of which way a final decision might go.
To HCM’s great credit, things didn’t meander into nothing, as they so often do in similar situations. The final decision, taken after numerous communications, lay with his boss, a successful Hollywood producer (in my mind a cigar-chomping, bear of a man). It came quickly, after a rather agonised weekend’s wait.
With a clear and unequivocal finality, Le Grand Fromage, he say no. His reasoning, while mundane, unromantic and utterly prosaic, did make perfect sense. The production wouldn’t fly commercially in the US, he thought. I can see his point – I’ve described it numerous times myself as quintessentially a studio show, the epitome of Fringe. He was right.
What’s more, HCM had behaved in a way one wouldn’t necessarily expect, if the stories we hear from ‘Showbiz America’ are to be believed. He’d been the perfect gent, enthusiastic and clear at first, then magnanimous and generous when the coup de grace came. Of course, I may revise my judgment when my jokes start appearing in his movies, but I honestly don’t expect that to happen.
My reaction to this disappointment surprised me. Mainly because it didn’t feel like a disappointment at all. An opportunity I had done precisely nothing to engineer had come a lot closer to becoming reality than I’d expected it would, and a very successful international production house had blown some magical Hollywood smoke up my derriere for a bit. What’s not to like? It was a shot in the arm, a validation, an enormous encouragement to re-mount the show with some proper budget and a greatly improved ‘spec’.
In short, it made me take my work seriously. And I can’t put a value on that.
It started with a phone call from the manager of our venue in Brighton. “Some American bloke has been trying to get hold of you…” I was clueless as to who this might be, (other than possibly someone from 59E59 in New York calling to say “we found your talent underneath some mouldy old dustsheets – do you want it back?”) but I rang the Los Angeles number that had been left for me in order to find out.
I can’t do the details here (it’s sensitive) but the voice at the other end of the transatlantic phone line was unmistakeably British. Specifically English, actually, managing to be both enthusiastic and reserved in that unique Home Counties manner. Cool and geeky in equal measure. Which is in itself a trick that manages to increase both coolness and geekiness. A former BBC man, as a Google search soon revealed. This made me trust him somewhat more than I would otherwise have done, which is absurd given that Aunty Beeb is crammed full of vain, aggressive, self-serving, bullying arseholes (“in my opinion”, for legal reasons).
However, Home Counties Man (hereafter known as HCM), who I quickly decided must surely have thin-rimmed spectacles and a fine collection of Jermyn Street ties, seemed genuine and honourable and – I know this is an odd word in context - kind. He worked, as it turned out, for a movie company in the US. More frantic Googling informed me that they made very, very good movies indeed. Movies I like. Movies with big, famous people in them and budgets greater than all the money my friends and I combined will ever earn.
They were “interested in the subject matter”, and had seen a review of the show online (thank you, eternally, to Bella Todd, then of Latest7 fame). HCM asked if he might see a copy of the script, on an informal, no-strings basis. I agreed. Well, he sounded kind.
He liked the script. Suddenly it was ‘doing the rounds’ at the company in the US. We talked further, about the possibility of them staging the show in London and the US – they have a couple of things happening on Broadway at the moment, so are well versed in theatre production as well as film. Our conversations soon reached the money-where-your-mouth-is juncture, and (it seemed to me, at least) things were very finely balanced in terms of which way a final decision might go.
To HCM’s great credit, things didn’t meander into nothing, as they so often do in similar situations. The final decision, taken after numerous communications, lay with his boss, a successful Hollywood producer (in my mind a cigar-chomping, bear of a man). It came quickly, after a rather agonised weekend’s wait.
With a clear and unequivocal finality, Le Grand Fromage, he say no. His reasoning, while mundane, unromantic and utterly prosaic, did make perfect sense. The production wouldn’t fly commercially in the US, he thought. I can see his point – I’ve described it numerous times myself as quintessentially a studio show, the epitome of Fringe. He was right.
What’s more, HCM had behaved in a way one wouldn’t necessarily expect, if the stories we hear from ‘Showbiz America’ are to be believed. He’d been the perfect gent, enthusiastic and clear at first, then magnanimous and generous when the coup de grace came. Of course, I may revise my judgment when my jokes start appearing in his movies, but I honestly don’t expect that to happen.
My reaction to this disappointment surprised me. Mainly because it didn’t feel like a disappointment at all. An opportunity I had done precisely nothing to engineer had come a lot closer to becoming reality than I’d expected it would, and a very successful international production house had blown some magical Hollywood smoke up my derriere for a bit. What’s not to like? It was a shot in the arm, a validation, an enormous encouragement to re-mount the show with some proper budget and a greatly improved ‘spec’.
In short, it made me take my work seriously. And I can’t put a value on that.
Underneath the Arches
This year’s Brighton Fringe features a couple of Two Bins productions – Ben Keyworth’s new play ‘Cuckoo’ (so wrong, it has to be right) and a re-vamped version of my own show ‘Ten Men – The Lives of John Bindon’. Since the latter production ran in October, there’s been a lot of ‘traffic’ around it, from film people as well as theatres, and the re-run will, I hope, help turn encouraging feedback into solid offers. The work everyone has done on this deserves a long life.
You can tell when a show has ‘legs’, by dint of one criterion – people offer to contribute to its development and future success. Out of the blue, audience members (often expert professionals in their own right, of course) become potential collaborators. Enthusiasm turns into a tangible output.
One such collaborator, who saw the workshop version of ‘Ten Men…’ back in October, is film-maker Martin Malone. Among other appealing ideas, he offered to create a 30-second trailer for the show. I almost bit his hand off.
So, a couple of weeks back, I found myself under a railway arch in Hove, watching Matt Houghton reprise his terrific work as John Bindon in front of a camera. The results looked astonishing, as much a testament to Martin and his DOP as it was to modern technology. I’ll post the trailer once it’s edited.
It occurred to me that film-making has been democratized enormously by technological advances. Cinema-quality work can be produced on equipment costing no more than the average family holiday, or a second-hand car. Film-making skill is of course a necessity in order to produce work of the highest quality, but science and technology have raised the bar considerably in recent years.
Are there any similar advances taking place in theatre production? I don’t know of any, other than a gradual quality in the improvement of lighting equipment since the ‘70s, which has meant that stage make-up is almost obsolete now (and let us thank God for that).
Theatrically, what is going to be The Great Leap Forward? It would be good to hear your thoughts...
You can tell when a show has ‘legs’, by dint of one criterion – people offer to contribute to its development and future success. Out of the blue, audience members (often expert professionals in their own right, of course) become potential collaborators. Enthusiasm turns into a tangible output.
One such collaborator, who saw the workshop version of ‘Ten Men…’ back in October, is film-maker Martin Malone. Among other appealing ideas, he offered to create a 30-second trailer for the show. I almost bit his hand off.
So, a couple of weeks back, I found myself under a railway arch in Hove, watching Matt Houghton reprise his terrific work as John Bindon in front of a camera. The results looked astonishing, as much a testament to Martin and his DOP as it was to modern technology. I’ll post the trailer once it’s edited.
It occurred to me that film-making has been democratized enormously by technological advances. Cinema-quality work can be produced on equipment costing no more than the average family holiday, or a second-hand car. Film-making skill is of course a necessity in order to produce work of the highest quality, but science and technology have raised the bar considerably in recent years.
Are there any similar advances taking place in theatre production? I don’t know of any, other than a gradual quality in the improvement of lighting equipment since the ‘70s, which has meant that stage make-up is almost obsolete now (and let us thank God for that).
Theatrically, what is going to be The Great Leap Forward? It would be good to hear your thoughts...
Friday, 10 September 2010
Through the Pain Barrier
I think I might finally have done it.
The great envy of my theatre-directing life has been to witness those rare calm, controlled and emotionally stable directors going about their 'thing' in perfect tranquility. No self-doubt, no sleepless nights, no wrangling with personal demons. Soft, pliable shoulders and a fully functioning sense of humour, even at 'tech' time.
Paint the opposite picture, and you have an idea of what I used to be like in the final throes of rehearsal. The muddy waters between rehearsal and performance can run tempestuous, and all too often in the past I've all but capsized.
Not this time.
I vowed after the toxic levels of tension involved in my trip to New York with Red Sea Fish last year never to allow myself to get into that state again. I genuinely lost my marbles for a while. Well, two months actually.
After several conversations on this theme with people cannier and longer in the directing tooth than I, I realised that existential and mental 'struggle' do not equate to better work. Giving yourself an awful time in the pursuit of excellence does nothing but alienate others and debilitate the one person who needs clear and rational thought - the director.
'Ten Men - The Lives of John Bindon' opens in five days time. I have pursued with concertedness my new policy of, actually, caring less. By doing so, things are working as they should. I'm sleeping, enjoying myself, and above all BEING EFFECTIVE.
Artists of all persuasions are prone to the belief that something cannot possibly be truly worthwhile if they haven't suffered for it. I think it's one of the gateways to maturity as a creative person to acknowledge that this is utter balls.
It only took me twenty years...
The great envy of my theatre-directing life has been to witness those rare calm, controlled and emotionally stable directors going about their 'thing' in perfect tranquility. No self-doubt, no sleepless nights, no wrangling with personal demons. Soft, pliable shoulders and a fully functioning sense of humour, even at 'tech' time.
Paint the opposite picture, and you have an idea of what I used to be like in the final throes of rehearsal. The muddy waters between rehearsal and performance can run tempestuous, and all too often in the past I've all but capsized.
Not this time.
I vowed after the toxic levels of tension involved in my trip to New York with Red Sea Fish last year never to allow myself to get into that state again. I genuinely lost my marbles for a while. Well, two months actually.
After several conversations on this theme with people cannier and longer in the directing tooth than I, I realised that existential and mental 'struggle' do not equate to better work. Giving yourself an awful time in the pursuit of excellence does nothing but alienate others and debilitate the one person who needs clear and rational thought - the director.
'Ten Men - The Lives of John Bindon' opens in five days time. I have pursued with concertedness my new policy of, actually, caring less. By doing so, things are working as they should. I'm sleeping, enjoying myself, and above all BEING EFFECTIVE.
Artists of all persuasions are prone to the belief that something cannot possibly be truly worthwhile if they haven't suffered for it. I think it's one of the gateways to maturity as a creative person to acknowledge that this is utter balls.
It only took me twenty years...
The Birth of Scuzz - The Final Edict...
And the winner is... the venerable Martin Bryn Nichols, whose suggestion for edict 10 of the Scuzz manifesto reads:
"10) All of the above shall be done with beauty and with truth."
Which is a marvellous notion. It also undercuts the rather unromantic stipulations that precede it. It'll do nicely.
"10) All of the above shall be done with beauty and with truth."
Which is a marvellous notion. It also undercuts the rather unromantic stipulations that precede it. It'll do nicely.
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