A lot has happened in the world of Broken Glass since the Edinburgh Fringe, and an update is long overdue. It makes sense to begin in Edinburgh.
We were always aware that ‘Song’ at the Edinburgh Fringe was going to be the ‘hard-sell’. We took a piece of new writing performed by a small student company, about an issue which is neither fashionable nor in any sense capable of giving any light relief, to a comedy festival. For the 2008 Fringe the four major comedy venues (the Pleasance, the Underbelly, the Assembly Rooms, and the Gilded Balloon) joined forces and promoted all of their shows under the name the Edinburgh Comedy Festival. The Edinburgh Comedy Festival was not a separate part of the Edinburgh Festival, but a marketing strategy covering a high proportion of the acts performing at the Edinburgh Fringe. It attracted significant commercial sponsorship and was the most prolific force at this years Fringe, and, some would say, the entire Festival itself. The situation looks to be similar in 2009.
The effect of this on smaller venues and performances outside the comedy circuit was overwhelmingly negative. The 2008 festival audience was first and foremost a comedy audience. The Edinburgh Fringe is no longer a platform in which it makes sense to produce other modes of performance, and it is certainly no longer the natural home of fringe and experimental theatre. That said, the festival underworld did still exist in small pockets, and one of these seemed to be Rocket Venues@Demarco Roxy Art House, owned by the controversial artist and promoter of the visual and performing arts Richard Demarco. Looking at the venue options when we applied, this was the one venue which seemed suited to our play. It was at the Roxy Art House that I think we realised that we were not necessarily fighting a losing battle – and at times it really did feel like a battle – rather that we needed to sit down and define for ourselves the kind of environment in which we wanted to be working.
The performance space itself was something we were all quite excited by. The Roxy Art House used to be Lady Glenorchy’s Church, and in the small section of it, just below street-level, that had been turned into the room in which we were performing, the shape of the arched window has been preserved. It was stark, basic, and entirely perfect for our purposes. The idea of an essentialist approach to staging which has been such a defining aim for Broken Glass was born long before here, but it was really in Edinburgh that it seemed to come truly into practical focus. It was our first chance to really look at our work in immediate contrast to other productions. Richard Demarco, who offered us a great and wonderful amount of encouragement on one of our darkest days at the festival, had a lot to say about use of space. He told us about a Tadeusz Kantor action he had brought to the Edinburgh Festival in the 1970s, and a spectacular use of space, without expensive tricks but with the greatest artistry. This gave us precedent, and I think as such also gave us hope.
The September following the festival we registered as a limited company, and defined our aims for the coming year. The first outside of our own immediate productions was to encourage work with other young theatre-makers making the shift from student to semi-professional theatre. We booked a room above a pub in Camden and advertised for scripts, directors, work from new companies, and were overwhelmed by the positive response. There are a lot of new performance nights in London, most of them poetry, comedy, music, or a combination of all of the above, and although there are writers’ nights at Hampstead and Soho, which are valuable and useful things, there are not the same types of opportunities for new theatre companies – and after all, this was not something we needed any kind of institutional involvement in. Theatre companies are grass-roots movements.
Then the recession came, money tightened, new companies failed, and the new performance platform project, Short Fuse, seemed more pressing than ever. We wanted to prove that it was possible to create and carry through to performance interesting new work, with no expense other than the venue fee. There were no expensive tricks, just a single spotlight and a staging area, open to total re-definition by each act. Short Fuse went ahead, and again, we were (very happily) surprised by the scale of the response. In a venue which held 50, we had that audience several times over, and the night as a whole show-cased an amazing level of creativity. We have information on all the acts still up on the site, and it is definitely worth keeping an eye out for future performances by any and all of them. We hope to run Short Fuse at least once again this year.
For Short Fuse we presented a scene adapted from an early twentieth century novel by Gustav Meyrink, ‘The Golem’. The scene was set in Salon Loisitschek, the seedy underground bar in the Prague ghetto. We tried to present a particular atmosphere through all of the living and tangible means at our disposal (my stated opposition to the use of screens and expensive lighting devices is one I am prepared to defend to the bitter end): rhythmically scripted narrative/dialogue, accompanying movement sequences, dance, live music, and the exceptional talents of Broken Glass’s actors and musicians. Photos of the performance are now up on the site, and a video is soon to follow. We are currently working on a full-length adaptation of ‘The Golem’ for performance this summer.
This is the story of the last few months, and we are looking forward to whatever comes next. Touch wood, and hop around in a circle on one leg (it’s the Broken Glass way).
