Louise Taylor's PlayDay
On October 4th 2009, as part of our New Writing Partnership with The Customs House, director Anne Orwin workshopped plays by Dick Curran and Louise Taylor, getting them on their feet for a public script-in-hand performance to a packed audience at the Customs House the same evening. Here Louise Taylor tells us about how the experience worked for her.
This article was originally published in Cloud Nine's Newsletter no. 30 (February 2010).
I confess to being somewhat apologetic when telling friends and family about the upcoming performance of my play, When the Water. "It's only a reading" I told them, "not a proper play with a stage and props." How wrong I was - not only did the cast and crew come equipped with their own carefully chosen costumes, but our director Anne Orwin and her Cloud Nine colleagues even managed to conjure up the biblical flood and floating pinball machine I'd been expecting to write out!
Gathering bright and early on a Sunday morning, Dick Curran and myself were given a warm and appreciative welcome by Anne, Peter Mortimer and our wonderful cast (Christina Dawson, Gary Cole, Jill Dellow and Sean Kenney).
I was amazed at how quickly Anne got When the Water up on its feet - and discovered its flaws.
It was soon clear that my clever stage directions weren't quite as nifty as I'd thought, but Anne and the cast were there with creative staging solutions and some occasionally painful, but necessary, cuts to keep the story heading in the right direction. I've always had a problem with endings, and had already rewritten the final four pages at the very last minute, so when Anne asked me to justify the rewrite and my answer proved more than a little woolly I realised with panic that work still needed to be done.
But with the generous input of all the company I think we found a fitting finale, with my four characters stepping boldly forward to face an uncertain (but probably soggy) future, accompanied by a rising crescendo of impressively torrential sound effects.
After a spot of Sunday lunch and backstage banter at the Asda café, it was time to move on to Dick Curran's dark, twisty and very funny play, Company.
As passenger ferries drifted lazily past the studio theatre window and daylight began to disappear, all thoughts of a pre-show tea break were abandoned in favour of last minute run-throughs before the doors opened, our sizeable audience piled in and the performance began.
Though strangely exhausting for a day mostly spent sitting, PlayDays are a unique opportunity for a playwright to see their work-in-progress, not only spoken, but performed with real passion and originality. Thank you Cloud Nine for this fantastic experience.
Louise Taylor
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