I’m pleased to report, however, that my Riverside Youth Theatre production of Nick Dear’s ‘Lunch In Venice‘ has been entered into the 2009 Elmbridge Drama Festival at the Walton Playhouse in Walton-on-Thames.

The play will be performed on Wednesday 4th March at 7.45pm.

But I’m not going to let it go without saying a few well deserved thank yous.

It was great. Truly brilliant. In fact it was the best show I have ever directed. Such a pleasure. And that for me, is purely down to my enthusiastic and brilliant cast. Sunday afternoons have been so much fun!

Mark, Pete, Rianna, Tom, Chloe and Claire all took to their parts very well and got everything they could out of the characters and the script, and it showed too. Fantastic job!

It is a very well written and clever play and these guys jumped at the challenge of getting that across to the audience. It was a real pleasure to watch every night. Thanks guys and well done!

In addition I used five other RYT actors from the other two plays in ‘Triptych’ to play my ‘Troupe of Acrobats’.

Adam, Fleur, Luke, Daniel and Mike did a great job and even though they were only on stage for 90 seconds, they really put their all into it and enhanced the whole production. Thanks guys!

I also need to thank Carole, Alan, Sue, Clare, Kevin, Ian, Chris, Viv, Janette, Ellie and indeed the Tech Team (Zandr, Beth, Charlotte, Richard, Stephen, David and Sherise) for their work behind the scenes for great costumes, set, props, lighting, sound and stage management. Couldn’t have done it without them!

Oh and Rob too for recording the ‘Carnival of Venice’ on his accordian for us. Thanks!

And finally, a big thank you to Ian, Hels, Jon, Tommi, Frank, Mark, Ciara & Ciara’s friend for coming along and watching. It was great to see you and thanks for your support.

So onwards and upwards (though I’ll be hard pushed to top this one!), plenty more in the pipeline…

The whole cast eat pizza throughout the play and they will need to practice eating and acting at the same time. Not easy.

I had permission to splash out a massive £3.50 on a Tesco’s Value toaster, then decided to the blow the budget and get a 4 slice model instead of the 2 slice, so I could toast twice as much in one go!

Rich and I went over to Brooklands this afternoon and, having spent 15 minutes trying to get a parking space on the M&S side, (Credit crunch? What credit crunch?) we had a quick forage for the Tesco’s toaster.

No such luck. They had the 2 slice model, but the 4 slice had been discontinued. Oh well. I could have gone for the 2 slice, but something was saying said not to.

Anyway, off we went to Curry’s and Argos round the corner. Rich wanted to look at TV’s and guess what, completely by accident, I came across an Argos Value toaster complete with a ‘cool touch’, a ‘variable browning control’ and wait for it, a ‘cancel button’!

Whooppee!!

And to top it all, it was a white 4 slice model at a bargain £6.92!

Naturally I queued up with my little bit of gold coloured plastic and waited!

- Cashier number 5, please!

Two minutes later I was the proud owner of a FREE 4 slice toaster!

FREE????

Yep – courtesy of the marvelous Marks and Spencer!

You see, I bought some underwear there a couple of months ago – though now they are coming unstitched so I popped into the Brooklands branch after I’d parked and asked for a replacement.

They offered a refund, but I think the poor trainee must have got a little confused.

The underwear had come in a pack of three, and I had bought two packs. However, I’d left two pairs at home, since they were in the wash, and so she had four pairs in front of her, which I dutifully pointed out.

“Oh, four”, she said, and promptly typed x4 into her till, refunding me 4x£3 for two packs of value underwear at £3 per pack! So, £10 up since I had two pairs at a pound each at home in the wash, I was able to get a toaster effectively for free and still be £3.08 in credit!

Thanks M&S – RYT will be making very good use of their FREE value toaster, and I’ve got another £3 to buy some more value underwear!

I spent the afternoon in the company of some great young people from the Riverside Youth Theatre. I’ve got to know them well over the past year and have the pleasure of working with a small group of six of them as we rehearse Nick Dear’s Lunch in Venice.

Having spent the previous week on an in-depth script discussion and detailed read through followed by some characterisation exercises, we moved on to blocking this week.

We started by watching a slide show of the various landmarks and views of Venice and it’s culture as highlighted in the script, then worked out all the french scenes in the text and looked a little at some of the beats, then after a quick run round to inject some energy, we started the blocking process.

Normally, I have to say, I tend to use the pre-blocking method, ie: plan everything – or most of it anyway – beforehand and then just tell the actors where they’re moving, changing things as you go along if bits dont work quite as you thought they would. Certainly easier with larger casts; and for smaller less experienced ones too.

Well, with this cast and this play, I have taken the decision specifically not to do any pre-blocking at all. A first for me, since I am heavily relying on the actors to know and understand their characters and the play enough to be able improvise the blocking as we go a long: Finding out what works and what doesn’t.

After a little awkwardness to start off with (where I was seriously questioning if I’d made the right decision: having only covered the first page in the first half hour) I was pleasantly surprised to find that the whole cast took it in their stride and postively relished in the idea of being allowed to be a big part of the blocking process.

Far from the usual: “Where do you want me?” or “I don’t know where I’m supposed to be.” I was generally getting the: “I think I should be here at this point. Is that okay?”.

In fact, it very quickly got to the point of some major discussions on the characters and indeed their status in the positioning on the stage at various times.

Ben: – “I think Harley should be like sat on the other side of Bianca. He’s needs to be on the edge since he’s like really on the outside. Of the group I mean. He’s like trying to fit in but it’s only the start.”

Bianca: – “Yeah. I agree. Also means my line to Conrad makes more sense that way since I don’t have to talk across Harley.”

There were times when I was wondering who was actually directing. But it was a really great feeling! A joint ownership of the production.

Brilliant.

When we put together the first half a dozen pages we’d worked on, and ran it through to see who could remember what, each of them did remember, and it looked a fantastic. Obviously I’ll be working on honing specific detailed ‘business’ but the general positions and moves of the characters looked great.

It was a joint effort and everyone had a say. Whenever we had conflicting ideas about a certain move we invariably tried both and found out which worked and which didn’t. The end result was that everybody felt they moved ‘naturally’, and not simply because they had to.

Bloody hard work, mind!

After a couple of hours of this intense way of working, I was shattered. (Probably why I have a headache today!) We all discussed how the afternoon had gone and everyone commented on how much they felt they had really got into the play and their characters, and so quickly too.

We were all surprised; most of all me, I think. Young people need to be given much more credit and be allowed to experiment more. I can honestly say the results speak for themselves.

This is going be a good production, and we’ve only had two weeks of rehearsal!

So, more actor-led blocking next Sunday.

Lets hope the sun is shining again so we can be down in the park by the river. Being outside was quite a new expereince for us all too. Since the play takes place in a square in Venice in the heat of a summer’s day, it’s very apt that we should be blocking it by the Thames in the sunshine.

–

Lunch in Venice by Nick Dear will run from 4th-6th December at the Riverside Arts Centre in Lower Sunbury. I’ll be setting up a group on facebook to help promote it.

CAST:

• Harley – Peter Williams
• Ben – Mark Forrest
• Bianca – Rianna Dearden
• Conrad – Tom Addy
• Emmy – Chloe Gay
• Vivi – Claire Leonard

(Oh, and since Vivi only appears in the last third of the play, I have asked Claire to be my Assistant Director, which has already proved to be another excellent decision!)

After our summer break the Riverside Youth Theatre met up again last Sunday. It was great to see everyone again and meet some new members too.

I’m looking forward to helping out on the committee (we meet again in a couple of weeks time) and hope I can be of use since I’m going to be sorting some publicity for the group and future productions. As well as writing a few press releases, this blog should help, and I’m sure I’ll be making use facebook too!

So what’s next for RYT?

Well, we’re going to be doing three one act plays on the 3rd-6th December 2008 and I’m directing one of them, Lunch in Venice by Nick Dear.

Lunch In Venice is a great play. I love it!

I first came across it when I began reading the plays for young people commissioned by the National Theatre as part of their New Connections program. The play appears in the 2005 anthology along side Citizenship by Mark Ravenhill and Chatroom by Enda Walsh.

Incidenly Deborah Gearing’s first play, Burn, is also there. Deborah Gearing? Well Deborah went through the very same Nuffiled Theatre Writers Group that I am in. And this play was her ‘graduation piece’.

Oh and there’s also Through the Wire a musical one act play by Catherine Johnson. Who’s she? Well you may not know the name, but you will know the ABBA musical Mamma Mia (now a film) and it was Catherine who wrote it.

So why did I choose Lunch in Venice? Well, basically because it was the first play I’ve read where I had to read it through again – immediately! Here’s what’s said in the production notes:

In a tranquil square in Venice five teenagers eat pizzas and talk. The weather is perfect, the food delicious and the talk engaging. But Lunch in Venice is a play where the realisation of what has already happened to the characters gradually creeps up on the audience and, from the point where the penny drops, they will receive an emotional jolt. Their perception will be dramatically reshaped in much the same way as the characters’ perceptions have been reshaped by the dreadful moment Nick Dear has subjected them to.

It’ll be challenging to direct, but I’m looking forward to it.

In addition Emma Dow and Gill Lambourne will be directing the two other plays.

Emma co-directed our last production Into The Woods and will be directing All’s well that Ends as You Like It by Michael Green.

This as the name suggests, is a Shakespeare parody and is from ‘The Art of Coarse Acting’. Michael Green coined the term “Coarse Acting” in the early 1970s — A coarse actor is “one who can remember his lines, but not the order in which they come. One who performs . . . amid lethal props. The Coarse Actor’s aim is to upstage the rest of the cast. His hope is to be dead by Act Two so that he can spend the rest of his time in the bar. His problems? Everyone else connected with the production.” (Michael Green)

Coarse Acting is now a recognized theatrical skill: it takes a company of highly-skilled and committed actors to master its delicate art. I’m sure the talented bunch at RYT will be more than capable!

Gill directed last December’s production of Cider With Rosie and this year will be directing Stone Soup a morality play by Paul Thain.

In this allegory of modern society, derived from an ancient folk tale, the wise Sophia enters a starving village and declares she will feed everyone with her magical stone soup, and in this way gradually encourages the villagers to share their own hoarded goods for the benefit of the community as a whole. Mr and Mrs North hold a monopoly on the cooking pot and use this fact to try to gain control of the soup. When Sophia philosophizes about peace and justice she is labelled a subversive by the autocratic government figure, General Mayhem, who attempts to nationalize the soup and place it under government control. In the end, however, the spirit of sharing and co-operation prevails.

We had a read through of all three plays last Sunday and since each play offers something completely different for the young people everyone had their favourite.

Auditions will be held this Sunday, and boy is that going to be difficult. With thirty or more young people to cast in the three different plays, it will be very hard for each person to get the play they want, let alone the part they want.

I have six parts to audition for in Lunch In Venice (though additionally there is a role for “A Troupe of Acrobats” so anybody who hasn’t a major part in the other plays can join in if they can juggle! – I knew me teaching them how to juggle earlier in the year would come in handy at some point!) and like most directors, I have a pretty good idea who I want to cast.

Auditions, though, are important because it is then that you find the surprise actor who you hadn’t initially thought of or the actor you thought would be brilliant turns out not to be quite so good and doesn’t fit in with the rest of the cast.

If I’m honest, I hate auditioning.

One has to rely a lot on experience and going by what you know about the person and what you have seen them do before.

It’s always the case that there are actors who can sight read as if they knew the whole script backwards, and who can do a brilliant audition, and you think ‘yeah, gotta have him’ and then you find that he doesn’t take direction well, thinks he’s god’s gift to acting, wont work as part of a team and is basically crap.

In complete contrast, I know one young actor (not at RYT) who is a very slow sight reader. He is very self-conscious and hates auditioning (to the point of almost avoiding it) because he believes he will never get a part. The upshot is, he can act and is a bloody natural, though you’d have a hard time convincing him. I cast him as the lead once, purely based on what I had seen him do in another production, and irrespective of his reading/audition. Needless to say he was brilliant.

My main problem will be getting the good actors who I know I can work with. Lunch in Venice is going to be very demanding. There is a lot to understand in order to convincingly get it across to an audience. The trouble is the very good actors will also be in demand by the other Emma and Gill, so we’ll just have to share them!

Though I do, as I say, have the semblance of a cast in mind, it’ll be fun working with the young people, whoever I end up with.

I’m really looking forward to it. Roll on Sunday!