To my shame, I haven’t posted anything on here for about 9 months. This is largely because I’d forgotten I had a personal blog but now I am surfing the web presence highway and will endeavour to update as much as I can – especially in the run up to Edinburgh where Belt Up will once again be setting up home, this time quite literally.
I thought I’d do a catch up to kick start my resurrection in this blog and according to the last post, I haven’t written anything since after Edinburgh 2009.
Autumn 2009 saw The Tartuffe and The Trial being performed at the York Theatre Royal (as part of the Takeover festival) and then transferring to the Southwark Playhouse for three weeks in November. Both were well received by audiences and critics alike though we got our first taste of some scathing reviews - critics taking their blindfolds off to write notes is a prime example of maybe why they didn’t ‘get’ the shows. The run was a great success though and whilst down in London we spent some time at BAC in prep for Dominic J Allen’s show ‘Lorca is Dead’ which mainly involved us asking members of the public to engage in Surrealist experiments.
Spring 2010 saw us stepping out onto the streets of York in a show called ‘A Ghost Walk’ which was intended to be a low impact, intimate piece. The premise was that audiences would go on ‘A Ghost Walk’ but gradually the story came less about ghosts and ghouls and more about the Ghost Walker’s dead father whose memory ‘haunted’ him. What we didn’t anticipate was that 80% of the audience members didn’t know they were watching a play meaning every performance got numerous complaints to the York Theatre Royal for forcing a psychologically unstable tour guide out to work. It surprisingly became our most controversial show.
Over Easter we collaborated with Punchdrunk enrichment’s Peter Higgin on a secret, site specific project for the National Student Drama Festival. Having been at the festival as students only two years previously, it was lovely to be invited back as visiting artists. The ‘show’ involved 14 characters inhabiting a purgatory like B&B waiting to pass on to the legendary Atlantis. The audience encountered the piece via chance meetings with these characters around Scarborough with the lucky ones invited to the B&B to lose themselves in the week long durational piece. It had a great success though being in character literally 12 hours a day in a lofty Victorian house induced insanity pretty quickly. The piece had great responses from those lucky enough to get caught up in it and achieved its objective of demonstrating rather than explaining what theatre can be when you take it out of a theatre.
Post-Easter, via me getting stranded in the Seychelles because of a volcano, saw me latex adhesiving a fake moustache to my top lip to play Salvador Dali in ‘Lorca is Dead’ at the York Theatre Royal in an R&D performance run ahead of its Edinburgh stint this summer. This was before my adaptation of ‘The Tartuffe’ had its final curtain call once more in the main house of York Theatre Royal. Orgon Poquelin was tearfully killed off by accidental suicide (he was determined to die onstage a la Tommy Cooper and Molière but not certain about going through with it) and then ascended like Christ to ‘Zadok the Priest’ – was an aptly self indulgent goodbye to a very self indulgent character.
That more or less brings us up to date on all the writing/directing/acting projects I’ve done since I last posted. Now it’s a case of adapting Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ and finishing my new play ‘Atrium’ ahead of the start of Edinburgh rehearsals for Belt Up Theatre’s The House Above programme at this year’s fringe (Dracula is part of the Edinburgh International Festival).
Will post more soon. Promise.
