Last night was the second Short Fuse at The Camden Head. We’d like to thank all of the acts for showing us something new and interesting. Helen Mort’s ‘CarelessTorque’, which has been in the pipeline for Short Fuse for a long time, brought to life one of the scripts both myself and Alex have been the most determined to see staged at Short Fuse so far. At the other end of the evening’s entertainment, in tone although by no means in quality, was the anarchically refined comedy of Burrows, Calvert and Evans, in ‘Death of the Author’ – although I am less convinced by the hygiene issues involved in the on-stage (or indeed any prolonged) handling of raw bacon.
The one thing we’ve realised over and over again during the last couple of years, is that sometimes the biggest surprises can produce the most exciting theatre. It’s the unexpected set-restrictions, necessary re-writes, and all such things, which have created some of the work we’ve done that I’m the most proud of. I know this was the case for some of the acts at Short Fuse yesterday – and I suspect it might be the case for Broken Glass in terms of where we go next: the problems we have to think around.
We’ve realised firstly that Short Fuse needs a change of venue: next time we’re aiming for a larger stage, with a more comfortable audience capacity. The original point of the performance platform, however, remains unchanged: we still believe it is possible to create good theatre without all of the strings – without a high budget, without all of the expensive trappings – simply by virtue of the performances of talented people in works of theatre which matter – we’ve been very lucky to realise this with our own cast. But the one thing we have discovered to be a non-negotiable factor is space – both in terms of the performance platform and in our own performances as a company.
Rachel makes a very true point in her post below: to create the dystopian vision we want for ‘Paul’, space – in terms of staging and I think also the time-frame in which we are working (performance-duration, subsequent narrative development, and the rehearsal process itself) – is essential. As with every new production we are trying to create a new world; this one is more difficult than most, and we need a certain amount of space in which to realise it. In many ways it is a very naturalistic piece: movement, particularly in the first portion of the play, is considerably less stylised than in our previous production; dialogue – although admittedly intentionally odd in places – for the most part is intended to mimic the rhythm of normal speech patterns, rather than beats and musical lines. But this is the essential point about ‘Paul’, and something I hope we can develop for the full production in the summer – it is itself a mimicry: a world in which all looks at first, though perhaps a bit eccentric, a bit hazy around the edges, for the most part fine, familiar, bureaucratically functioning even, but in which all is not fine. It is a world full of absence – a dystopia. But dystopias can be hard to create because these come closer, indeed the closest Broken Glass has ever come, to the real. The world of ‘Paul’ is only a partial fiction, and so it’s comedy is not straight-forward, it is jarring.
Like every play – at least every one I think it’s worth us doing – we are starting out in a new direction. I’m looking forward to working this one out, and creating some space, whereever we can find it. We’ll put a large sign on the door saying ‘Shh now, I’m acting’.
