Theatre Broad open in The Tolbooth, Stirling with Peter Pan Man at 7.30 pm. It’s a nervous few hours for me until the lights go down and Mark Harvey’s wonderful music creates the Barrie atmosphere. Like the man, the music plays with our sense of reality.
I hope the play does too. M’Connachie & JMB Who is M’Connachie? Come along and find out. Come up and say hello.
Saturday 28th April 2012
I took my seat for the final subscription date of 2011-12 at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre on Thursday night, in some degree of nervousness. There had been a lot of hype over the violent nature of Martin McDonagh’s play, the Lieutenant of Inishmore, which is about the disintegration of terrorist groups in Ireland. However, on the positive side, folk were saying, it’s very funny.
Well, there’s plenty of violence, both mindless and coldly calculating, to chill the blood and give the lie to any romantic idea of the fight for ‘freedom’. ‘Freedom’ is different things to different people and, in this play, cats. Not all ‘freedoms’ are respectable or justifiable. As for the humour, my husband, and lots of other audience members found it funny, but I was struggling to laugh. It’s not my kind of humour. I wonder if I ever get satire.
For those of you who do, the run continues until 12/05/12.
It does feature a wonderful set – really, really wonderful.
Puppet theatre is very popular in Sicily and I took the banner photograph above while visiting one in Palermo. The puppets are large and several folk are needed to operate a cast of them.
In my play, M’Connachie & JMB, Jamie Barrie takes issue with M’Connachie for suggesting he can get enough romance from his characters. ‘They’re puppets, M’Connachie. Haven’t you noticed?’ he asks.
It seemed appropriate to set this blog up under the eyes of one or two.
Drama is a collaborative art and on Sunday evening I joined in a great example of this when Citadel Arts Group held a rehearsed reading of Act One of their Work-in-Progress: Leith’s Hidden Treasure. The venue was upstairs in The Granary Bar on The shore – where their production will air in June.
Leith Hospital
The local hospital is way up there with the store, the school and the big employers as a source of long-held and deeply felt memories. Playwright, Laure C Paterson and Citadel Artistic Director, Liz Hare have taken these memories and woven an affecting tale of the early 1960s.
Janey is on the verge of being a big girl, eleven, and she shares with us the stories of her struggling family whose penury, if not poverty, is ever-present. We also meet young nurse, Nurse Williams, who is training in Leith hospital and fighting her youthful instincts to accept the strictures of the training regime. The play brings the two worlds together and human drama, comic and tragic, flows naturally from the collision.
The excellent cast of Citadel regular players held the audience entranced and at the end we were asked to give the company feedback. A really worthwhile evening, encouraging all of us to return to Leith Festival in June to see the finished work performed. Besides wanting to know how the hook at the end of Act one is resolved, there’s the prospect of your comment having being accepted. What more could an audience ask?
I’m reading Jennifer Worth’s wonderful book, Call The Midwife. Last night I read the chapters about her relationship with the nun, Sister Evangelina. Apart from telling the story of this remarkable woman, Worth mulls over the fact that the relationship never became one of trust, or respect or even tolerance. Everything she did prompted criticism and that caused her to be clumsy and awkward in the nun’s presence.
This morning, during that lovely period of being awake but not alert, a possible answer occurred to me. Did Sister Evangelina sense Worth’s writer’s observation and resist it? Did she see that while Worth the nurse and midwife was all she should be, there was another dimension? The standing apart that we all practise while the stories lodge in our brains is evident to many. It’s Barrie’s M’Connachie in us all.
Children love performing their little dramas, sketches and puppet shows for the family. They enjoy the chance to show off to the most important people in their lives and the most important people in their lives love watching.
When does that change? Maybe when the cute factor stops overriding bad theatre. Maybe when only some of the cast have their heart in it. Maybe when the performers stop being performers and begin to be audience.
In my own case, it was when I realised I wanted to create the words for others to use. I wanted to see what movement they inspired in the actors, what subtext they suggested to the director and what questions they aroused in the audience member.
When anyone asks why do you write plays, (as opposed to novels, short stories etc) I used to find it difficult to answer. I still do because creating a play has so many more imponderables than a piece that will become hard copy. In the end, I think it has to be drama because I think mainly in conversations. Over and over they turn as I edit and trim till the right words are spoken by the right person.
Welcome to any passing visitors. This site is under construction. I hope you’ll come by again for news of my joint venture with Theatre Broad; my other plays and my views on the plays of others.