Well, we did it!
A Space, A Clock, and a Pair of Bloody Scissors! was performed at the Amin House Theatre in Lower Sunbury on Sunday night after a great day of rehearsing.
– Cuckoo! Absolutely, bloody cuckoo!
In the middle of December I had the idea to do a rehearsed reading of the play I wrote three years ago.
I had just seen Room 20, my recently written short play on bullying, performed at Actors & Writers, London, and was reminded that these professional actors, when performing a full length play for a Monday evening meeting of the group, only spend the Sunday rehearsing it.
I thought if these guys can do it then I’m sure I can find a talented bunch of young people to do the same; well some who at least might want to have a go.
Well I did, and what a day!
I knew it could, and indeed probably should, only be done in one day and knew the ideal place in which we could do it – a house in Sunbury. I called my friend Clare and asked her, and was so pleased when she agreed!
We set the date as Jan 4th and I then went ahead and cast the play from some of the young people I have come to know very well from the Riverside Youth Theatre. (Though sadly couldn’t cast everyone!)
The whole idea was to start at 10am, do a read-through, have lunch, block it, with a tea break between the two acts, do a dress rehearsal, stop for dinner, and then, at 7.45pm, perform the play to an invited audience of family and friends.
And it worked! It was great fun!
I spent most of the day Saturday getting together all the props; a newspaper, notepad, wooden fruit bowl, shopping bag and other things, oh and the obligatory pair of scissors – Richard just happened to have a pair of draper’s scissors in the garage (like you do!) and I then started gathering all the specific costume pieces I would need.
The play is set in 1955 and everything about it is all tones of black and white, except for certain key elements that are in red. There is (amongst other things) a red letter, a red tie, a red biro, a red handkerchief, a red rose, red gloves and the now infamous half-knitted red scarf (courtesy of Richard’s Mum!).
I also asked the cast to wear blacks, whites and greys to add to the effect, and it certainly did.
At the Amin’s house in their large (L shaped) sitting room there was, quiet by chance and in hindsight rather spookily, a wing backed armchair, and a table, complete with one carver chair and one matching ordinary chair – exactly as stated in the script!
A large rug became the stage area, various screens/bookcases were used to hide the offstage actors and even more fantastic was the room’s lighting was divided in two, and independent so we even had two front of house lights on one switch and two lights over the stage on another; and these were halogen spotlights too – brilliant!
I had the sound effects on my Mac, we found a spade in the garden, and I even managed to find the time on the Saturday to design and print a programme, and on red paper too!
Having helped re-arrange the room, putting the sofas at one end and the set at the other, I eagerly awaited the arrival of the cast.
I’d had to hastily arrange some replacements a couple of days before to cover the inevitable drop outs but then had a call at two minutes to ten from the lead apologising because he was ill.
Time for a quick recast then!
I gave Adam, who’s house we were in, the lead role of ‘Jay’ and Alex, himself a replacement, took on Adam’s previous role of ‘Jenkins’ to double with his own. Phew!
The rest of the cast arrived, and off we went! Hard work, but brilliant fun.
The day went all too quickly but we finished the dress rehearsal just before seven and had half an hour to stuff down some pizza before the audience began to arrive!
And with about 25 people made up of family and friends of the cast, we had a full house!
The performance was fantastic.
It was so good, you very soon forgot that they had only been rehearsing for one day and had only gone through the script three times including a simple read-through. (Adam, as the lead, had a massive amount to do, but carried it off brilliantly! You’d never have guessed he’d only been given the lead just before we started the read-through!)
In fact, you very soon didn’t even notice they were holding scripts. (Emma, who played Judith sitting in her chair knitting the red scarf, even had her script in her lap which meant you couldn’t see it at all!)
There was some great characterisation and the whole thing was truely believable and highly entertaining. It was lovely to see the characters come to life and to watch everything I had envisaged in detail when I wrote the play.
It must be said, for anyone brave enough to want to read it, there is an inordinate amount of stage direction in the script, which makes it incredibly difficult to read, and I’ll be the first to admit I don’t write like that now – stage direction is a job for the director, not the writer.
But Scissors! was my first play, and I decribed everything exactly as I saw it in my head, not knowing that I should have done it any differently.
It wasn’t just the words and story I wanted to get across, it was the whole image, which is very important for the this particular piece of work, right down to the appearance of the clock-face used in the set.
There is a lot of movement, entrances, exits and general business to get through. All the scenes merge into one another and are all in non-chronological order spanning a monday afternoon in September 1955 right through the week to the following monday morning, as well as flashbacks to 20 years previously!
Sounds complicated, yes, but it’s a real pleasuse to watch as the mystery unfolds.
Frankly, I’m amazed I did manage to write all this in and know exactly where a certain prop or character was at any one time; all crucial since the props as well as the characters in the play are all in the different periods of time spanning the week and indeed the flashbacks.
I was very high at the time of writing it (because of my bipolar) and can remember spending about 48 hours over a weekend beavering away at the computer with little, if any, food, drink or sleep. I could never do something like that again!
Ironically, since every single detail is written into the script, this meant the play was very easy for me to pick up and direct in one afternoon, since all the blocking is written down!
We were able to whizz through it, with the cast making minor notes on their scripts or simply highlighting the relevant bits.
It was great to see that if a character went off through one exit in one scene, then that was the entrance they used in a subsequent scene.
Even the wooden fruit bowl, on the table throughout, is knocked off in flashback scene, and replaced in a subsequent flashback scene a few minutes later. And one of the chairs is used in many of the scenes; it travels across the stage and is always in the right position for the next scene, even getting turned on its side in Act 2. It’s all written in the script!
But no matter how clever the writing, I can’t produce it without a willing cast, able to just trust that everything including their characters will be in the right place at the right time, and that it will work and look and sound very good; and I had such a cast on Sunday.
Many of them hadn’t even had a chance to see the script, let alone read it, and two of them arrived on the day without even knowing what they were going to be doing!
I am so proud of these guys! Their performance was, as I heard many audience members comment, fantastic.
So a big thank you then to Adam Amin (Jay), Nikki Legg (Jennifer), Emma Heaton (Judith), Peter Williams (Joyce), Alex Dowding (Jenkins/Justin), Matt Knight (Johnson), Rianna Dearden (Nurse J), Chloe Gay (Josephine) and Fleur Wheatley (JJ, and sound/light).
Well done guys! You were Brilliant! Absolutely, bloody brilliant!
PS: And a big huge thank you to Clare Amin for allowing us to use the now famous Amin House Theatre!
PPS: There is now a facebook group for ‘A Spade, A Clock, and a Pair of Bloody Scissors!’ so if you join that, I’ll be able to keep you up to date with future productions.
PPPS: Having witnessed the huge success of this venture, I have decided to produce Scissors! as ‘A Play In A Day’ for other amateur dramatics groups with a sense of adventure, a venue, 7/8 actors, 1 table and 3 chairs! It definitely works! Watch this space, or contact me, for details.
