The directors are dead, long live the director!

It’s the cast party that puts a full stop to a show. Any events after that feel like reunions. You usually have a week or so to mourn a show’s end before the funeral. This time, we cut into (and that’s into for all you Players reading) the celebratory cheese about three hours after I got off stage; stage management were still locking up the theatre!

But no sooner is one show buried than the next one rises from its ashes. At eight a.m. on May 20th – the time I hear the last party animals returned to their dens – I became the director.

Since my proposal was accepted in March, I’ve been toying with staging ideas, thinking about original music, polishing the script, but all on a backburner. Auditions for The Mourning Primrose are in ten days. Suddenly this thing is real.

This hit me properly last night when we had a script readthrough with the writing society. Thanks to everyone who came along: I eagerly await your feedback!

Holding a – even non-performance – reading of your own script is always rather nerve-racking. Not just for the author, but also for the people reading. I can’t put it into words, but there’s something about the author sitting there: things always start off a little awkward. But the readers helped neutralise this with the customary silly accents and camp interpretations.

Taking the piss out of our scripts is a tradition. The more a script is quoted, and in particular misquoted, the more successful it’s been. To my mind anyway. At least one of each day’s pre-show line runs in the Bald Prima Donna dressing room was always a ‘cock run’: changing words and intonation to make the script as dirty as possible. So I’m going to take yesterday’s piss-taking as a complement. If people managed to relax enough in my presence to arse around, it can’t have been that bad. Can it? I think. I hope.

These are my notes from scene 10. I start a scene with the stage direction ‘Anacoana is looking at his telescope’, give it to some Finn-Brit Players to read and wonder how I never thought it would come out dirty? Especially when I also have such words and phrases as, ‘tools’, ‘monkey’ and ‘touch without permission’ in close proximity.

But this OMG is nothing compared to the ones for scene 15, in which two men have a glass of rum together and talk about serving under a new captain...

This is looking like the start of new blog serial: follow the trials of a new author/director from birth of script to cast party. And it begins thus:

O .. M .. G .. what have I DONE?