Twitter site: @LearFringe2012
400 followers and counting!
Sunday, 29 April 2012
Sunday, 15 April 2012
Diary of a Director, There and Back Again.
So where were we?
The last couple of weeks have been manic! No sooner had we finished celebrating the fact that we had a complete cast/ family again, we were straight onto more organisation stuff...
Monday 2nd April was time for a marketing meeting with the lovely Segolene Scheuer in our local Milgi's, complete with vegetarian quesadilla (have I spelled that correctly?) and hummous. I'm not vegetarian but it was flippin' delicious. Oh, and the marketing plan went well! The twitter site currently has almost 350 followers. I'm kinda aiming at 540 followers by August, because that's the number of people we need to sell out the run, but I'm secretly hoping to reach 1,000. You can follow us at @LearFringe2012.
Tuesday 3rd saw me jetting off to 'burgh to visit the venue. That was fun. I managed to choose the morning where Scotland got assaulted by the elements. We landed in a storm almost worthy of Lear, with low cloud and driving winds that rocked the plane from side to side right up to the point where we landed. The venue is based in a Church, and I got shown around by the caretaker 'Kenny' - a friendly man in his later years who seemed not to get what I was doing there: "every year they come, but it's completely different by the time the Fringe arrives..." I needed to see the place though to get some idea of what the space felt like. It's smaller than the YMCA theatre we used in February. I knew we'd have to re-block quite a bit of the performance due to the performance space being a thrust, with audience surrounding you on three sides, but moving around in the room gave me some idea of how we'd have to achieve this. Re-designing the fights will be an important part of the new design of the piece.
Strange to be in Edinburgh standing on the Royal Mile when there weren't thousands of other visitors jostling to watch street performers or gather as many flyers as they can from promoters. It felt a bit like being on the edge of a precipice, knowing that in several month's time, the spot where I was standing would be flooded by people, arriving live a tidal wave from the Firth of Forth. The sense of anticipation was palpable. I wonder if Edinburgh is ever really able to get away from the Fringe. I also managed to find time to pay an impromptu visit to Edinburgh castle and, in particular, admire a statue of one of the Duke's of Albany standing in the Esplanade.... Looked very different to our Albany...
Then it was back to Cardiff to finish the edits to the script. Editing was definitely one of the most time-consuming parts of organising the original play. Our February version of Lear ran at about 1 hour 50 mins - 2 hours... we now have to perform it in 1 hour 15 mins. That's quite an ask. Madi had already edited the script once and sent it to me while I was galavanting off to Scotland. When I got back I spent a day reviewing the entire text again and re-editing her version. I was such a skank - didn't get out of bed until early afternoon but was focussed solely on the edit. In the end I needed to get up to escape the fug, as my Mum would say. By the end of the day I had re-edited the script, and sent it back to Madi to consider again. She got back to me with comments and ideas, and we combined our work to produce the final script.
It's looking sharp. Not to give too much away, but we've had to play around with one of the sub-plots and get rid of some of the 'continuity' scenes, adjusting for them by re-structuring and re-writing substantial parts of the play. We've also worked on making the text pacier. In the end, we're hoping that this will just improve the accessibility of the piece for new audiences, which was always one of our aims with Lear.
Time will tell.... this week we've been focused on finding accommodation and re-writing our submissions to the Fringe webpage and catalogue. Our newbies are hard at work learning their lines (well, they'd better be); our oldies are basking in the fact that they don't need to (although don't like being referred to as 'oldies'). Our first read-through of the new edit may be next weekend as everyone starts to filter back to Cardiff after the Easter break. It's going to be a tight schedule over the next couple of months, but we're feeling good.... Roll on the Summer!!
The last couple of weeks have been manic! No sooner had we finished celebrating the fact that we had a complete cast/ family again, we were straight onto more organisation stuff...
Monday 2nd April was time for a marketing meeting with the lovely Segolene Scheuer in our local Milgi's, complete with vegetarian quesadilla (have I spelled that correctly?) and hummous. I'm not vegetarian but it was flippin' delicious. Oh, and the marketing plan went well! The twitter site currently has almost 350 followers. I'm kinda aiming at 540 followers by August, because that's the number of people we need to sell out the run, but I'm secretly hoping to reach 1,000. You can follow us at @LearFringe2012.
Tuesday 3rd saw me jetting off to 'burgh to visit the venue. That was fun. I managed to choose the morning where Scotland got assaulted by the elements. We landed in a storm almost worthy of Lear, with low cloud and driving winds that rocked the plane from side to side right up to the point where we landed. The venue is based in a Church, and I got shown around by the caretaker 'Kenny' - a friendly man in his later years who seemed not to get what I was doing there: "every year they come, but it's completely different by the time the Fringe arrives..." I needed to see the place though to get some idea of what the space felt like. It's smaller than the YMCA theatre we used in February. I knew we'd have to re-block quite a bit of the performance due to the performance space being a thrust, with audience surrounding you on three sides, but moving around in the room gave me some idea of how we'd have to achieve this. Re-designing the fights will be an important part of the new design of the piece.
Strange to be in Edinburgh standing on the Royal Mile when there weren't thousands of other visitors jostling to watch street performers or gather as many flyers as they can from promoters. It felt a bit like being on the edge of a precipice, knowing that in several month's time, the spot where I was standing would be flooded by people, arriving live a tidal wave from the Firth of Forth. The sense of anticipation was palpable. I wonder if Edinburgh is ever really able to get away from the Fringe. I also managed to find time to pay an impromptu visit to Edinburgh castle and, in particular, admire a statue of one of the Duke's of Albany standing in the Esplanade.... Looked very different to our Albany...
Then it was back to Cardiff to finish the edits to the script. Editing was definitely one of the most time-consuming parts of organising the original play. Our February version of Lear ran at about 1 hour 50 mins - 2 hours... we now have to perform it in 1 hour 15 mins. That's quite an ask. Madi had already edited the script once and sent it to me while I was galavanting off to Scotland. When I got back I spent a day reviewing the entire text again and re-editing her version. I was such a skank - didn't get out of bed until early afternoon but was focussed solely on the edit. In the end I needed to get up to escape the fug, as my Mum would say. By the end of the day I had re-edited the script, and sent it back to Madi to consider again. She got back to me with comments and ideas, and we combined our work to produce the final script.
It's looking sharp. Not to give too much away, but we've had to play around with one of the sub-plots and get rid of some of the 'continuity' scenes, adjusting for them by re-structuring and re-writing substantial parts of the play. We've also worked on making the text pacier. In the end, we're hoping that this will just improve the accessibility of the piece for new audiences, which was always one of our aims with Lear.
Time will tell.... this week we've been focused on finding accommodation and re-writing our submissions to the Fringe webpage and catalogue. Our newbies are hard at work learning their lines (well, they'd better be); our oldies are basking in the fact that they don't need to (although don't like being referred to as 'oldies'). Our first read-through of the new edit may be next weekend as everyone starts to filter back to Cardiff after the Easter break. It's going to be a tight schedule over the next couple of months, but we're feeling good.... Roll on the Summer!!
Sunday, 1 April 2012
The family is complete once again...
And so... After twelve grueling hours on Friday... I can formally announce to the world...
We have a complete cast!
It was a long, long process. We wanted to make sure we got the right people for the parts we had to re-cast. Most of the actors who performed in the original version of Lear are also involved in the Fringe version, but there were a few who could not make it, so their roles were up for grabs. We started at 10 am in the Large Chemistry lecture theatre in Cardiff University and ended at 9 pm in the front room of Dom's student house in Cathays, but we're very, very pleased with the results.
The re-cast parts are:
Cornwall: James Sidwell;
Edgar: Nick McAndrew;
Oswald: Katrina Grier;
France: Flora Woodruff;
Lear Jr/ Gentleman Cambridge: James Paine.
The decisions were so hard to make - particularly for Cornwall where there were three outstanding candidates for the role - but it was great to have the other actors present to voice their opinions too, and see how they reacted to each of the auditionees. Nick probably has the largest task to fill the boots of Oli Ferriman, who was outstanding as our original Edgar.
For the time being, however, we have a budget, we have a venue, we have a cast. Next: finish editing the script (which we hope to have done by next Friday). Things are starting to move...
We have a complete cast!
It was a long, long process. We wanted to make sure we got the right people for the parts we had to re-cast. Most of the actors who performed in the original version of Lear are also involved in the Fringe version, but there were a few who could not make it, so their roles were up for grabs. We started at 10 am in the Large Chemistry lecture theatre in Cardiff University and ended at 9 pm in the front room of Dom's student house in Cathays, but we're very, very pleased with the results.
The re-cast parts are:
Cornwall: James Sidwell;
Edgar: Nick McAndrew;
Oswald: Katrina Grier;
France: Flora Woodruff;
Lear Jr/ Gentleman Cambridge: James Paine.
The decisions were so hard to make - particularly for Cornwall where there were three outstanding candidates for the role - but it was great to have the other actors present to voice their opinions too, and see how they reacted to each of the auditionees. Nick probably has the largest task to fill the boots of Oli Ferriman, who was outstanding as our original Edgar.
For the time being, however, we have a budget, we have a venue, we have a cast. Next: finish editing the script (which we hope to have done by next Friday). Things are starting to move...
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