Talking to myself

Given that life is short, events are pressing and people here don’t read my maunderings there, this is something that also appears on the Daylight Robbery page on the 24:7 Theatre festival website. Since I wrote it, I’ve been at a costume session with two of the actors who talked about the show with such enthusiasm and insight that it made me feel like a proper playwright.  Or, as its hero Jerome Caminada would say, merry as marriage bells. 

Out of all the things I thought I’d become – rock star, best selling novelist, interestingly wasted absinthe addict haunting the gutters of Montmartre – I never dreamed that I would become a hyphenate.  But as writer-producer of Daylight Robbery, a hyphenate is what I am.

It’s an odd role, since traditionally a producer develops and steers a writer’s work, and a writer relies on a producer to be a wise guide, sharing the vision but standing back and pointing out how the rickety bits can be reinforced, or indeed whether sections need to be removed or replaced.  When it works well, then it’s a rewarding relationship on both sides.

So here we are, just days before opening night, and the producer is thinking – should I have encouraged the writer to be less ambitious, and the writer is thinking – it would be brilliant to have a producer to hold my hand through the inevitable moments of doubt.  Writers really want to be loved and reassured, and self love isn’t at all the same.

Fortunately there isn’t time to wobble because there’s a lot to be done, and while the police whistle has been bought, and major props secured through the kindness of Library Theatre, Caminada has still to attend his costume session at the Royal Exchange and, most important, the play has yet to be run through from beginning to end with all the cast in attendance. Sunday is the moment of truth when the brain has to split and the producer must talk encouragingly but firmly to the writer if flaws become apparent.  The key to successful writing is rewriting, and I’ve never been involved with a script which couldn’t have benefited from more work. 

 As a writer, I’m extremely fortunate that 24:7 saw enough merit in the draft I submitted to invite me to take part.  The play has developed a lot since then, while still retaining the original plan of having a small number of actors playing multiple roles in short, fast-moving scenes, juggling costume and props to reflect the different people and settings.  Three people have described it to me as Brechtian, which is quite a heavy weight to bear.

 As a producer, the whole thing has been an adventure and a really useful exercise in discovering how to mount a play on the fringe.  I’ve always preferred to learn through experience rather than instruction, doing it rather than being told how to, which of course can be risky or even foolhardy, but at least I can say at the end that it was my vision, transformed to a higher level by our very talented cast, our exciting director Darren R L Gordon, and considerably supported by our ‘foot in the door’ assistant producer, Nicola Holt, who now has both feet well into the room.  

 In my television days I was able to call on a specialist for every task – a production manager to look after all the practicalities and manage the budget, a set designer, an art director, a costume designer – and at first thinking that I needed to cover all these specialisms was more than boggling.  But doing one thing at a time, ticking off to-dos on a list, has made it all manageable, and enabled me to move from boggled to excited, albeit that the butterflies have now set up camp in my stomach and there is still more than a week to go before we move into New Century House.   

 However, a show without butterflies isn’t a show at all, merely an exercise in misplaced confidence.  Bring on the Red Admirals.

 

 

It’s playtime, 24:7

So I wrote a play, submitted it to the 24:7 theatre festival without either hope or expectation, and got on with other things.  It was a surprise, then ,to learn that the play had been selected, particularly since my last dramatic production had been in my schooldays.  Apparently one of the things that made it attractive was its Brechtian aspects, of which I hadn’t at all been aware, but which I now claim have been absolutely integral from the very beginning.

The play is called Daylight Robbery, and is a comedy-drama police procedural set in 1888, featuring Manchester’s first celebrity detective, Jerome Caminada. I first came across Caminada while delving into Manchester history, and deepened my knowledge with his two volumes of memoirs.  He comes across as intuitive, dogged, rather pleased with himself (as he should have been, given his clear-up rate), and a man who balanced locking up villains with concern for their post-prison welfare.  In many ways a man of his time, he was also rather ahead of it.

Instead of drawing on one of his real cases, I made up a new one, while drawing on the memoirs for texture and colour and language.  Caminada has two mysteries to solve, a series of robberies of single gentlemen in the leafy suburb of Didsbury, and a tall dead man in a too-small suit fished out of the open sewer that was the River Medlock.  Characters include an informer, a musical hall singer, a dodgy landlady, a proto-feminist, and a mysterious widow.

What makes the play a little unusual is that it involves around 20 characters in 26 scenes across forty five minutes, with a cast of six and a musician, and thus presents a challenge to the cast, and to the director, not to mention the writer and producer, ie me.

When I heard the play had been chosen, I hadn’t looked at the script for three months, and reading it was a revelation.  I’m either a glass full or glass empty person, and when I came back to the piece, it felt that the glass was entirely empty.  Could I really have written such a simplistic story?  What was I thinking when I put in those embarrassingly unfunny jokes? Why were many of the characters so thin?  Having advised writers over the years to tuck away the draft they like and then revisit it, I experienced just why that advice is so sound.  With some distance, it felt like someone else’s script, which allowed me to approach it and make notes from a neutral basis.

My first step was to recruit another pair of eyes, someone whose script notes have always been both solid and inspired, so I asked my former colleague Katherine Beacon if she would help.  She agreed.  It was reassuring when we met that the notes I had made for myself were notes that she had too, but she also had immensely useful and fundamental things to say in terms of plot and character, which made a second draft more enjoyable than challenging.  Rather than writing a draft immediately though, I did a new storyline, on which Katherine commented, and then a script, received more notes, did another script, and so on.

Meanwhile, I wanted to find a director who could realise and add to the eccentric vision.  I really wanted Darren R L Gordon to do it, but when we met he needed to be convinced with a new draft, which gave me further impetus to get the script right. His work on one of last year’s 24:7 plays made me feel he was the right choice and now, happily, he is on board.

24:7 runs an excellent ‘foot in the door’ scheme by which a drama student is attached to each production.  Having met them all at a scary but necessary production briefing day, there was one in particular who I thought would be exciting to work with, and who would, I hope, gain from the experience, so now I have Nicola Holt as my assistant producer.

Darren, Nicola and I are meeting next week to thrash through all the practical and creative things that need to be agreed and done, as we move on towards the show week of 19 to 26 July.  But I was greatly reassured to go to Oldham Coliseum on Friday night where short extracts from all of the festival plays were staged in the studio.  Everything felt as if it was moving in the right direction.  But there is a long way to go, and there are more drafts to be done as Darren considers his staging and actors bring their own insights to the piece.

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this, I’m working with the gang who used to be the Sketch in the City players and are now Cafe Society towards a ‘pop-up, site-specific’ sketch event in Chorlton at the end of June.  Of which more later.  Emboldened by the play, I have written my first sketch, but that may be a step too far.