It’s been a good last two weeks as we’ve been seeing the projects that have been discussed excitedly in theoretical terms for a while now, start to take definite actual shape.
Our five attachment writers are continuing work on their collective play. The rather brilliant title has now been confirmed: The Water When It Burns. Since the initial draft, the writers have been working together further to revise and extend the story. It’s about making sure that each character feels fully fleshed out, that each story strand is given time and each point of view is represented; while keeping the essential structure intact, as the play moves towards its fairly devastating climax. We’ll be starting to think about casting at the end of this week. Many of the parts are playing dual characters so we’ll be looking for actors who can convincingly communicate different personalities using the most minimal of tools; and who can conjure the right energy and storytelling verve on what will essentially be a bare stage. In general we’ve been talking a lot recently about how the festival events are ways of seeing what can be conjured out of thin air – that is, how an audience can be drawn in to a performance that involves absolutely nothing apart from a spoken script – and the co-authored play seems a perfect example of this.
Nabokov, glowing from their recent success with 2nd May 1997 at the Bush, have now confirmed with us the nature of the two pairings they are putting together for the festival: one a playwright working with a musician, and the other a playwright collaborating with one or several performance poets. So expect an unprecedented, multi-genre, miked-up extravaganza. More info on the individual artists involved to follow soon.
Our heat&light pairings are moving swiftly: we have now received the tantalising half-plays from Molly Davies and April De Angelis, and two of the young writers are each writing a continuation of one of these stories in their own way. The original workshopping session threw up ideas about fear of the future, the difficulty of being a young person in an uncertain world, and the temptation that arises sometimes just to cut and run. Molly and April have taken these themes and produced two fascinatingly open-ended mini-dramas about money, responsibility and – without giving too much away – individuals trying to take control of their own destinies. Once the young writers’ responses are written, each piece will be further discussed and refined with Molly and April, and we will end up with four daringly different pieces.
The Factory will this week be collecting final submissions of short pieces from the writers who have been involved in the workshop process. We will spend the week reading and assessing the scripts before selecting a final 10 for the festival performances. There are a number of things to bear in mind for this selection process, some of them unique to the “Factory way” – not only how well and how succinctly the pieces tell their story, but how malleable they are, how adaptable to different interpretations and radically different casting decisions. I sat in on a session recently and was struck by how different the characters appear when the genders are swapped over, or when the actors choose a different approach which utterly changes your sense of who has the power in the scene. A lot of work is done on the dynamics of the scene, often working quite counter-intuitively to produce a completely new impression of which character is really in control, which may confound expectations, even the writer’s. It was fascinating as well to watch two actors work with a supposed monologue, teasing out two different voices which after a couple of tries emerged perfectly clearly, one the attention-seeking aggressor and the other the quiet, slightly bullied, brooding fantasist. It makes you realise that there are certain secrets buried within a text, that it is always possible to get to with enough digging and with strong actorly instincts. Again it will be wonderful to see these instincts at work conjuring something from nothing in the festival performances.
And that’s all for now. Many more shapes to be thrown down in the week or two.
Corinne
