Back now and the play performances are all done and dusted.
This play was something of an experiment in a number of ways. Firstly, the material, which broke the mold of the usual farce/murder mystery that a lot of amateur dramatics groups do. We do try and produce more challenging work and David Storey's
Home, set in a mental institution, was certainly that. Both for the audiences and for the actors, who had to learn dialogue that was nonlinear, stream of consciousness style wording, with at least two of the characters having a conversation where neither were really listening to what the other were saying. Apparently David Story started writing the play with no setting in mind, just putting down dialogue and letting it evolve naturally. The end result is that the situation of the characters isn't immediately apparent and the relevance of the title may not dawn on a lot of people until the close of the first act as the hints in the dialogue and the characters grow more pronounced.
So, challenging for the actors, but we also took a chance on the staging.
Usually we hire the local theatre, which holds around 400 people, spend money on hiring the theatre, lavish sets and, for a number of productions, have played to audiences of as few as 40 people.
So, this time around we stripped it bare. Staging the play in the Arts Club Centre, which holds around 35 people maximum, no staging, apart from two chairs and a table (as the play calls for) and a cast of just five. The idea being that filling a smaller venue would be more rewarding than having a small audience rattling around in an expensive-to-stage arena.
And that particular experiment appears to have payed off. We did two performances to pretty much full houses and the intimacy of the venue ensured that, for those of us in the cast, the audience was there with us.
It's interesting to note the differences between the two audiences. On Friday night the audience picked up the (black) humour in the script and were laughing uproarously from the first, ensuring the cast were picked up and carried along by it. There's some very sharp dialogue and, while the subject matter can be uncomfortable as well, with moments of deep sadness, there's plenty of humour as well and the audience on Friday felt comfortable laughing at lines like: "I always think if the war had been extended another thirty or so years, we'd have all felt the benefit."
Interestingly, the Saturday night audience were far more restrained. After some laughter in the first half, it faded away in the second. It almost felt like once the setting had become obvious, people started to feel uncomfortable laughing and felt more of the pathos of the script. Certainly I was trying not to corpse during the Friday night performance when my second-act only role seemed to bring the house down. There was no such reaction on Saturday, so no worries about accidentally cracking a smile.
It was, in that respect, a venue where there was nowhere to hide. The wings, that at one point held four of the cast, our "stage manager" and the prompt, were only about two foot deep before ending in a brick wall. The audience were sat on the same level as us about three feet away from the "stage". Any prompts were audible from the audience. Impressively, given the extremely challenging dialogue, there were very few prompts across the two nights. I avoided it myself, mostly because my role was mostly monosyllabic and down to facial expressions and body language more than any kind of witty dialogue. It was pleasing that the audience were all extremely complementary afterwards and I was hard pressed to get any criticism from anyone, and I felt people were being honest in their opinions. Despite the different reactions on both nights, both audiences seemed to enjoy the material, or, at least, find it thought provoking.
Also nice was a letter from the author, wishing us luck with the performance. Storey, who also wrote
This Sporting Life and numerous award-winning plays, had nice things to say and appeared pleased to see the work performed.
Also pleasing, the excellent, glowing
review by the local drama critic, who didn't appear to have a bad word to say about the performance either.
All in all, a successful experiment. Perhaps not financially rewarding, but certainly, as a performer and, apparently, for the audiences as well.
My next challenge? To shed some of the weight I put on for the role.
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The more I see of mainstream comics currently, the more inclined I am to dive into creator-owned projects. The Image panel at Bristol did a lot to open my eyes to creator-owned - a lot of it down to the sheer enthusiasm of the creators on the panel for the work they're doing - Charlie Adlard on Waking Dead, Ian Churchill on Marineman, Kieron Gillen on Phonogram and so on. That enthusiasm rubs off, but also disillusionment with the direction of most mainstream titles pushes me further and further into digging out more creator-owned material.
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