The production came together really well this year for me, with the biggest bonus being the time we were able to get into the theatre.  It’s the third time we have used the Hebden Bridge Little Theatre and clearly they are starting to trust us more than previous years.  In the past we have had to arrange with them to be there to let us in each time we needed to be in the theatre, and to stay until we had finished so that they could lock up again afterwards.  This proved a real restriction on the time we had to do our get in.

For me this is of course a real problem – it takes time to rig and focus the lights, as well to work out a dimmer patch and do any programming I wanted to do.  In fact, in previous years, I haven’t had time to do much programming at all – I’d just run the show of some hastily put together scenes on submasters and busked through each night.  This year I was able to do much more and the difference was noticeable.

We got into the theatre on Tuesday night. We were met at the door by a member of the theatre who left us with the keys and code for the alarm.  I took responsibility for them, knowing I would be wanting to get into the theatre at slightly more unpredictable times than everyone else.  The director had arranged for some of the cast to turn up to run through some scenes on the stage a little later in the evening.  This turned out to be a bit of a pain for me as it meant they wanted both light and stage space – we couldn’t rig on stage and we couldn’t whip though the focussing as quickly as I wanted to.

I had planned out my design from what I knew of the theatre previously, and things looked like they would work out when when I saw where the fixtures were in the theatre, but it wasn’t quite as straight forward as it first appeared.  The fixtures on the FOH bar nearest to the stage were just not far enough away to be able to get a good clean coverage of the whole width. There were four lamps along the front bar which I suspect had been used previously as just a straw wash, but as I needed both a straw and steel wash I was going to have to make do with just three fixtures to cover the whole width of the stage. Sadly this meant moving the front line of profiles back onto the second FOH bar. I ummed and ahhed about this for a while – those profiles are heavy and access to the bars is bad at the best of times – but was convinced by people that if we needed to do it, we needed to do it. So we moved them. It was the right choice. Unfortunately by the time the cast had cleared off stage and we got the front of house bars rigged and focussed all the people who had come to help with the lighting had started to lose interest. It was heading towards midnight, so with only the stage lamps to do we called it a day. I could finish those and do the colour call myself the next day.

So I arrived back at the theatre on Wednesday at 11.30 and set about rigging the lamps on stage. I didn’t really have a clear idea of what I wanted to do here.  I knew the key lights which we needed but from there it was a matter of seeing what stock was available and doing whatever I could with it. I dropped all the best lanterns the theatre had into the rig for the most important effects until I had only two very old PC lanterns and a pair of Strand Patt 123s. These I coloured orange and green and used to throw lighting across the set from either side. I was very happy with this. By the time I had finished the rig and cleared my mess away it was 3pm and the director turned up. He had offered to come earlier to help me but I didn’t think there was much which he could have done – I was happy working by myself without having to worry that someone else was spending the day getting bored. I quickly explained to him what I had done and left him to play through the sound while I went through to the bar to work out a patch.

With the patch done and everything plugged in we had an hour and a half before the cast turned up. I spent this hour programming the desk (a Strand GSX) with scenes. I’d never done that before at this theatre because of the lack of time we have had in the past. It made running the show so much easier than ever before and allowed me to be much more creative. I didn’t program in any fade times or blackouts – as I hadn’t seen the play before the dress rehearsal that night I didn’t know quite how things would work out, and I didn’t want to risk that being the reason things went wrong. I ran the whole show on the A-B faders.

The three nights of the play went very well. It’s the first time this company had done a three night run, and I’m not sure they will want to do one again – while there was no problem for the cast,  and it allowed it to be much more polished the third night, there were only about 25 people in the audience on the Thursday night. Talking to the director after the Thursday production we decided we would class that as a preview production, with the full run being Friday and Saturday. We also included an interval on the first night but it was decided this should be dropped in order to keep the pace of the play up despite the first night audience saying they liked having it.  They were wrong.

I think everyone was pleased with the way the production had gone when it came down on Saturday. I escaped pretty quickly, having said goodbye to everyone. It’s a shame there was no curtain party, but I probably wouldn’t have stayed long if there had been. The rest of the company are going out for a celebration meal on Wednesday. Sadly I have to head back and work for people who actually pay me money…

I did discover one thing though – I’m no good at networking. This causes something of a problem in my industry.

ISTA is the International Schools Theatre Association. My old theatre school hosted one of their festivals from the 28th to 31st October, 2010. I was invited to shoot the week.

I stayed with my parents and decided to travel up on the Tuesday before so that I had a day off before. The students were due to register at 4pm on Thursday, and I’d agreed to arrive at about half 2.30pm so that I could have a look around the school (the festival was based at Calder High) and get a good handle on what was going on. I arrived a little early: I had been in Halifax in the morning with my parents, and so got the bus from Halifax bus station through to Mytholmroyd, and I wanted to arrive in plenty of time as I’d never been to the school before. I waited in the school reception for a while until Jez arrived. (Jez is a teacher at Calder High who was also a member of Calderdale Theatre School. He, along side Gillie, had done most of the organising of the festival.)

Shortly after Gillie turned up with all the ISTA staff who had been having a tour of Hebden Bridge – as part of the festival the students were taken around a number of sites around the town in order that they may draw inspiration from them for their final performance pieces. I was introduced to them, and joined them on the tour of the school and their work spaces. Now, Calder High is a maze. My old high school was pretty straight forwards – one straight corridor on each floor with the classrooms off them. Calder High is much more complicated than that. It has corners and junctions all over the place. Some signs had been put up, but that didn’t stop me not being able to find the music rooms for the first session. I think, by the end, I could just about work out where I was going, but I certainly couldn’t give directions. Sam can testify to that.

Sam arrived on the Friday to get some video. He is working is ISTA itself to improve their marketing. Part of this task is using the Calderdale festival to put together a short video for their website showing what the festivals are like. Personally I found his style of working a little bit too intrusive. By that I mean that he would go out and put himself right in the middle of the activity he was filming; for example often getting between the group leaders and the students. This is not the way I work – I spent the week on the sidelines of the action with long lenses shooting past people, but trying to make myself as invisible as possible. (This method gets me the shots I want – real candid action shots – as people don’t know where or what I’m shooting, and seems to have been appreciated by the group leaders as well. Two of them commented on it as we were leaving, the first telling me that I was “discreet but still involved” and that it was “everything you would ever want from someone doing your job”, the second thanking me for handling the event “sensitively”.  Those two comments mean a lot to me. Now I have to hope they like the finished product!) I know that photography and videography are different arts, but I still felt he was a little too intrusive. Perhaps this is partly because he kept getting into my shots. I suspect when I finally work through the photos there will be quite a number with him in the background.

Friday was the day out and about around Hebden Bridge and Heptonstall. I went in the car with Gillie and David, the festival AD, and hopped around the different groups. I’m glad that worked out because I was concerned that I wouldn’t get to see all of the groups. As it was it was perfect, I got shots of Jess’ devising group in Hebden Bridge town square, Ruth’s movement group in the town hall, around the old packhorse bridge, and in a graveyard at the top of the ‘butress’ (the old trail from Heptonsall to Hebden Bridge), and the music group around in and around the church in Heptonsall. I even did the walk from the river in Hebden right up to Heptonstall at one point. And the weather held off wonderfully. I spent some time on Friday afternoon with the ensembles back at the school. It was interesting to see things coming together.

The students had a set of workshops on Saturday morning from some of the ISTA staff and some local practitioners. This was interesting – a number of the local practitioners are CTS regulars and it was interesting to watch some of the workshops I’d done before from the outside. There was also a trapeze workshop as well as a workshop from Ryburn Long Sword on traditional Yorkshire Long Sword dancing. All good fun.

After all these things in the day, there were a number of evening events for teachers and staff. I was invited to them all, but made excuses to avoid every one of them. I still think I had a good reason not to go to the meals and things, but I wish I’d gone to the wine and cheese evening on the first night. It would have been a late night, but I think it would have been a good networking opportunity. This is something I think I need more practice at. I’m not the best at talking to people I don’t know, and even when I do know people well I’m not the best person in big groups. I’ve noticed these things always seem to occur to me when I’m back up north. This is my homework for next time!

The festival finished on Sunday. The culmination of the event was a performance by each of the groups, put together into one piece of about 45 minutes, based on what they had been working on in the previous few days and the inspiration they had drawn from the day out around Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd. I wasn’t expecting a huge amount, but as I’d been lead to believe previously it all seemed to come together remarkably well at the last minute. I got to shoot the ‘dress’ rehearsal as well as the final performance which was a relief as my position wasn’t great and the lighting was pretty low during the final performance. It’s always hard to really follow something when you’re shooting it but the performance was well received (although given the audience was made up of parents and supporters, that’s perhaps not a huge surprise).

With the close of the performance came the close of the festival. There were many emotional farewells and, as expected with drama students, lots of tears. I hung around to get some choice shots of those too before quietly heading off home.

In the spirit of my previous post, and because I’ve already released a couple of these photos under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence, I’ve decided to post a few of photos I took at the West End Live event last weekend.  I’ll try to do this more often when I take my camera out just for fun.

All photos are Copyright 2010 Jonathon Wardman.  Indicated images are licenced under a CC-BY-3.0 licence (attribution to ConfuzzledDuck, please), for licencing of other images (as well as details of further images) please contact fluttphotographic.com.

That inspired tweet came as I was on my way home from the closing party of ‘Stranded’ and, while I might have had quite a lot to drink (it started off as Southern Comfort and Lemonade but there wasn’t much of that and quite a few people drinking it, so it soon became Archers Peach Schnapps, and when the Lemonade ran out the mixer became tonic water) I really kind of mean it.  It’s been quite a long time since I made new friends like that.  Of course I make new friends down here, but it takes quite a long time simply because of the way I meet people and the chances I get to interact with them — mostly it’s work related, and obviosuly work has to come first — and the other friendship groups they already have.  With this group it was different.

As a company, Grim North Theatre have been together for something like 3 years.  While some of the company members are the same now as they were when they started, each year they lose some people and gain some others.  I guess it helps that I’m old friends with the company’s artistic director and that I know quite well a number of people involved behind the scenes, but this year I found it really easy to get to know the people who I met for the first time.  Maybe it’s because I was there for longer this year — usually it’s just a flying visit, while this year I was there for a week — or maybe I’ve just changed.  Where once I would have sat quietly in the corner, done my work thing, and then gone away again, this year I felt like I was much more outgoing and that’s got to be a good thing.  I do think I’ve gone that way in the last few years — I think I’m much less shy than I was. Although maybe this time it was just the drink.

The play went suprisingly well too.  From being really worried at the start of the week that we didn’t have any time booked into the theatre to do any tech, to really getting into the stride of it by the end of the week, I’m pleased with how it went.  Another few hours to plot and program and another couple of nights for performance and the show would have been technically pretty sharp.

I nagged the person who booked the theatre over and over about getting into the venue before the final dress on Friday night, and kind of got what I was after.  We went in on the Tuesday night to rig.  While this was interesting, given I’d not seen the play by this stage, it went very well.  It helped that I knew the theatre this time around — I had a rough idea of their stock and how things worked which really helped.  I met with the director on Monday night and we talked through the script.  He gave me an idea of what he wanted where, and anything special he had in mind.  From those notes I spent Tuesday daytime working up a design and rigging plot.  I designed the grid in a three stages — the key lighting (ie. stuff we couldn’t do without), effects and things which would be great, but we could miss out if we didn’t have time.  All in all it came to a 28 fixture design.

I’d based the stock on what we’d had the previous year, and assumed that fixtures would mostly be in the same places.  I assumed they wouldn’t often move much, expecially from the front of house bars, as the access is a bit of a nightmare, and last year’s setup seemed to offer pretty standard coverage.  This assumption was wrong; a lot had been moved FOH.  A quick rethink of the fixtures we could use to light the stage as we needed it later, and we got on with it.  Starting on the FOH bars and finishing on the stage we completed the rig almost completely, bar a few on-stage effects, in just over 3 hours.  I was very pleased.

Wednesday was spent working up a patch design (the Hebden Bridge Little Theatre was kitted out in 1993, and rather than have hard-wired dimmers patched on the desk, they have traditional hard patch dimmers up on a balcony beside the stage).  Thanks to the planning the day before and the notes I took during the fit up this was remarkably easy, as was actually carrying out the patch on the Friday night.  (One thing which irritates me a little about the patch bay at HBLT is the mess people leave it in.  It was the same last year — there’s a rack for the bar tails, but no one seems to put anything back in it when they are finished.  When you’re pressed for time, as we always are, sorting through the rats-nest of cables is a bit waste of resources.  I suppose it doesn’t dawn on them as much as they have much more time to sort things out, but a bit of consideration would be really appreciated.  I sorted it all out before starting my patch, and left their cable rack tidy when we left both this year and last year.  I’ve no doubt it’ll be a mess again next time we’re in there.)  Wednesday night I sat in on a rehearsal with my notes.  I was pleased that pretty much everything was as I’d expected it to be.  They didn’t quite make it through the final act.  We went to the pub afterwards.

The pub was interesting.  I went last year, but didn’t really talk to anyone.  Last time I went I was just getting over a very nasty bout of gastroenteritis I’d picked up off my parents and wasn’t feeling great.  Added to that I didn’t really know anyone, and it wasn’t much fun.  This time around was different.  When we got there I met someone I used to go to school with.  We were never really good friends, but he seemed to want to talk to me all evening and catch up.  I was quite happy to oblige (although when it came to going for a curry with him, another semi-friend and the karaoke man at the end of the night, I bailed).  After a while he suggested we did a karaoke song together. I’m not really one for doing that (now I say that, but I do sometimes wish I did do things like that more often), but after about 45 minutes of him keeping on at me I agreed to join him to sing Sting’s Englishman In New York.  The whole event was filmed on a phone camera, but thankfully doesn’t seem to have appeared anywhere on the internet.

Thursday was the only non-theatre day I had in the week, and so I agree to meet an old School / University friend.  The plan was to go to a reasonably quiet bar and just have a chat.  After looking around for a while to see if there was anywhere suitable open, we settled on a small bar not far from my parents house.  The clientele were generally older, but that didn’t matter.  We sat in the corner with our bar-style fruit juices (Appletizer and an Orange and Pomegranate juice) and had a good catch up.  It was good to find out how he was doing.  We suggested meeting up again at the weekend, but that didn’t work out for one reason and another.

I spent most of Friday in bed — I’d moved into my parent’s room for the week while they were away as it’s slightly more made-up than my old room / their spare room, especially as they’d had the electricians in to re-wire the house for the last few weeks and everything was covered in dust — just relaxing, watching things on iPlayer and generally being lazy.  It was nice to have a day with nothing really to do, knowing that everything was reasonably well on track for the evening.  We were in the theatre 6 – 10 that night, so I set off to get the train which would get me there about half past 5.  While the theatre is only a few minutes walk from the station, the next train would have got there too late.  Tiffany rang while I was on my way to the station and we had a catch up while I walked.  Once I got to the station I met up with Scott and his girlfriend (now fiancee) Jessie.  Jessie was in the play and Scott had agreed to help out with whatever I needed doing backstage.  Once we arrived at the theatre we got going with the remaining backstage tasks, hindered only mildly by the control room being locked and no one being around with a key for about half an hour.  I asked Scott and a few others to mark out the set location with glowtape and fix the tabs while I set to doing my patch.

Once the rehearsal was underway things went relativly well.  There was one slipup nearish the beging when I missed a blackout because the pen I wrote my initial notes in couldn’t be seen under the light of the control room (this was intentional in fact — I wrote my initial notes in pink so I didn’t get distracted by them and translated most of them into black before the tech run, this one I forgot), but other than that it went pretty well.  I was happy with the general design and control which meant any time we had after that could be spent  improving on what I’d already done.  After rehearsal I joined people for a quick drink then headed home.

So came Saturday and the night of the first performance.  The show was due to go up and 7.30 and we couldn’t get into the theatre until 6, so I’d arranged to go and visit the Artistic Director of my old theatre school for a catch up.  I headed for Hebden in the early afternoon and gave her a call on the way to make sure she was available (thinking about it, I’m not sure what I would have done for a few hours if she’d not been available, but thankfully I didn’t need to worry about that).  I spent a few hours sitting in her kitchen (which has a remarkably low ceiling!), and chatting about a whole load of different things.  One thing which did come out of it was the possibility of shooting the ISTA festival they are hosting in October.  I probably aught to chase that up.  So the afternoon came and went, and was very pleasent.  Then was time to get over to the theatre.

I set off leaving myself plenty of time.  I wanted to make sure I got there early just in case the place was open before we had been told.  On my way to the theatre I passed the same pub I’d been to with the rest of the company the night before.  Outside were a couple of members of the cast eating chips.  I didn’t see them and would have walked straight past if they hadn’t shouted out.  The rest of the company were inside — apparently they’d arranged to meet for a pub lunch — and were just finishing off.  We all headed to the theatre together.

The show went ok but for one missed entrance.  I’m not sure exactly what happened, but someone who should have been there, wasn’t there.  As lighting op these things cause a problem: you bring the scene up, one person is on stage, the other doesn’t turn up.  What do you do?  Everyone knows something’s wrong, but if you leave the scene up then you’re just re-inforcing the point, and if you take it down again all hell breaks loose because the cast don’t know what to do, and there’s potential for everyone to get out of step.  This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if we had an SM on cans of course, it would be her call, but we didn’t.  I have no idea where she was.  The girl with me in the control box on sound was a co-director of the piece, and apparently didn’t have much experience working FoH.  She went ballistic shouting down the comms which seemed a little pointless to me as there was clearly no one on the other end.  Everyone in the audience could hear.  Now normally I’d be upset by this, but in this instance it didn’t do me much harm — as long as she was shouting, and everyone could hear it, it got me off the hook: it clearly wasn’t my fault.  In the end the missing actor appeared and the show went on.

After the success of Saturday night I was confident for Sunday’s performance.  I knew I didn’t need to change anything for my side of things to work all right, and anything I did change would be an improvement.  I didn’t set out on Sunday with any specific plans, but managed to slip in one or two improvements.  The biggest of which was the use of the house tab, which I found almost totally accidentally.  There are a set of unlabeled buttons in the control box which I’d never pressed before and I decided now would be a good time to see what happened if I did press them.  It turned out they opened, closed and stopped the house curtain.  After quick consultation with the director, we decided we’d use them.  I set up a quick preset including the house lights and a couple of soft red profiles on the curtain which looked great (it’s not the nicest blue tab, but with a touch of red it looked much better), I also threw in a light on stage so the cast could see what they were doing (in fact adding this to the preset was a mistake — when I brought the house lights back up at the interval this light came back up too, and caused a little confusion — I removed it from the preset during the break).  I kind of wish we hadn’t used the tab at the end, there wasn’t much need for it and it seemed a little amateur, but all in all it was a good addition to the piece.

I expect (kind of hope) a few days will be occupied by the Grim North stuff. It’s my one (perhaps two) chances each year to stretch my lighting design legs.  Lighting was something I did quite a bit of when I was younger in one way or another, and I really love.  At one stage I considered training to work as a theatre lighting designer, but it never happened.  I also do their photos for them.  I’ve read the script a couple of times now, but to be honest still no idea what’s going on.  (This is the same as last year.  Then only having seen it a few times did I begin to get the hang of it. I don’t know how anyone watching it once could possibly have understood it).  I’m hoping that I’ll get chance to talk to the director about his artistic direction at some point early in the week, then on Wednesday night I’m going to attend one of their rehearsals to see how they play it out.  By this time I’m going to have to have some idea of how I’m going to light the thing and will, hopefully just be finalising ideas by then.  I’m told we’ll have time in the theatre on Thursday for rigging and focussing, but it’s not confirmed yet.  If we don’t then we’re going to have real problems.  The company is in the theatre 6-10pm on the Friday when the plan is to have a block run and, hopefully, a quick tech run.  This doesn’t leave much time for anything else.  They are looking to hire a small space in Hebden Bridge on Saturday to do some final polishing, which hopefully I’ll be able to shoot, as I’ll have finished everything else by then (to be honest even if not there’s not much I can do by that stage), before being in the theatre 6-10 on Saturday and Sunday.  I think the show goes up at 7.30 so I’ll have an hour and a half to, hopefully, relax before each night.

One problem with this company is they don’t have anyone there all the time who is technical.  When they book the venue they don’t give any thought to when any kind of technical get-in might happen, so when I turn up and ask about it, it always seems to take them by surprise.  Along the same lines they don’t have many people with professional theatre experience, although there are some who have trained professionally, and certainly no one who has experience back stage, so no one thinks about the general house work needed around the theatre, so I end up doing all that too.  It gets a bit hectic.  I’m hoping this year will be a bit different – the production team have more experience and I gather there will even be a stage manager.  It could be all different.

Either way, I think I’m looking forward to it.  Despite the hard work last year, I really enjoyed it.  I’ll let you know how we get on.

I’m at Wakefield Westgate now.

One of the things I’ve been doing which has been getting in the way of writing this is re-vamping a website for my brother.  He’s part of a group which run a large Blood Bowl league and last year I made a site which they used to manage the league tables and match reports.  They’ve grown a lot in the last season and now need the site to manage a lot more complicated things than it did previously.  This involves doing quite a bit of rebuilding of the output and processing side of things although at least I can reuse a lot of the back-end code.  I got the brief and some design documents a good few weeks ago and the deadline is the end of September.  In my mind that’s quite a while away, so I haven’t been too bothered about rushing with it (in fact it’s probably fair to say I did nothing for a long time, to be honest).  Occasionally my brother would give me a nudge about it, and I’d say something like “yeah, it should be ok” or “I did some last night, I’ll have something to show you soon”.  After a while I started to run out of excuses and had to do some work.  I worked late on the Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday night and then emailed him with a basic version of the site.  This seems to have worked — he did say something about being worried about the deadline in his reply — but at least it’s put his mind at rest that I actually am doing something.  I suppose I should do some more soon.  Maybe tomorrow and Thursday.

I can’t do any on Friday because I’m off to build a set with Tiffany.  She rang me while I was out with Phil and Cecile last night and we had a long chat.  I’m glad she rang — I’d been worried following a short conversation on Friday night.  I’ll write about that more soon, but Sunday’s conversation ended up with me offering to help her build the set for the upcoming Sedos production of One Flew Over The Cookoo’s Nest.  I think it’ll be quite fun — certainly better being with her than being stuck at home all bank weekend by my self (Dana will be off at Tim’s parent’s house) — if a little tiring.  I’m meeting her on Friday night in London and staying at her house so we can get a whole day’s work in on Saturday and Sunday.  I’m not quite sure what I’ve let myself in for, but I’ll let you know how things go.

Talking about art, I’ve been following the events up on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in the last few months.  The One & Other project is a living art installation consisting of a different person occupying the plinth for an hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week through until October.  There’s a live web stream so you can watch and listen to the person up there from the comfort of your own home.  It’s been quite interesting.  Some of the people are certainly art while some I’d wonder.  I think, in general, it’s got better as time has gone on with more people being creative than just sitting reading a book.  Having said that it is supposed to be a reflection of the UK at the moment, so I do believe that sitting quietly is a perfectly acceptable thing to do… it’s just not very exciting to watch!  There’s a very interesting collection of photos building up on Flickr of the project.  I’ve also been following the project on Twitter.

Talking of Twitter, I’ve jumped on that band wagon.  All being well you’ll see the latest tweet at the top of the front page of this blog.  I find it’s quite good just to drop random thoughts on to — small thoughts I just want to put out there but don’t necessarily have anyone around to say them to.  I know a lot of people who have Twitter accounts — most of my friends are on there — but having connected it to this anonymous blog I can’t really follow them.  That’s a bit of a shame, I’d certainly be able to have more friends, but it’s a choice I made to carry on being able to write this blog without feeling restricted.  If you’d like to add me then please do — @CarregsBlog.  I might, at some stage, add another account as the real me (although all my normal usernames seem to have been taken, so I’ll have to come up with something else), but I’m not really sure what I’d write on that one!

I think that’ll do for now.  I’ve lots more to write about, but at least that gets some of it out of the way.  Sorry I’ve been so useless.  I’ll try harder from now on, at least for a little while, I promise.

We arrived at the venue at 6pm and found it already open.  Inside there were two people and a very friendly dog.  One of the people, their lighting man, was up a ladder trying his best to cover up the set which had been built on stage with their black drapes – we had been promised a black box, so he was aiming for that with mixed success.

Ben and I had travelled to Hebden Bridge together on the train from his house where we’d had a chat about the play and my ideas for lighting it.  We were shortly joined by Nick, a friend who Ben had met at university, and who in the past had done the lighting for the company.  I wasn’t sure exactly how things were going to work with the two of us – I knew he would be around Thursday and for the show on Friday but not for the show on Sunday, and I wasn’t sure exactly how far his experience and knowledge stretched – so I thought best to play it by ear.  I’d already come up with some ideas from seeing the previous day’s rehearsal and had a list of what I wanted in order of preference depending on what was available at the venue.

After a quick chat with the people there we were shown around the box and told how to switch the kit on.  I asked a few questions about what we could do and the capabilities of the venue, and then we set to rigging and focussing.  At first we planned only to use the bars at the side of the auditorium to light down stage and the bars on stage to light up stage simply because of the time and effort of getting to the two front of house bars, but this plan changed after we noticed one of the luminaries FOH did not have a safety chain and we had no choice but to get a ladder up to it anyway!

We spent about three and a half hours rigging, with me taking charge, until we thought we had something reasonable to work with (at which point I also felt a bit aware of the fact the theatre tech was also still there, and we were eating up his evening!).  I took a few notes of the sockets we had plugged in to, the type of control board we were going to be working with, and took a quick look at the patch in the gallery and we left.  The plan was to work out a reasonable patch and get hold of an offline editor for the desk so I could programme it the next day during rehearsals.  Unfortunately things weren’t quite as straight forward as I had hoped…

I joined the company today in their rehearsal space and watched a run through of the piece, taking notes as to what I’d like to do.

I have some ideas but there’s one problem – I haven’t been to the theatre it’s playing (the Hebden Bridge Little Theatre) in since I was about 11, Ben’s not been able to get any kind of technical contact there, and we have an hour and a half in the space tonight to get ourselves sorted – rigging, focussing, plotting, etc.  All I know of the technical specification is that last time Ben went he thinks he saw a computer screen in the box.  If this wasn’t bad enough when I spoke to Ben quickly today about it he said he wasn’t even sure if we were going to be able to move anything and that we might just have to ‘make do with what was there’.

That’s not really good enough for me.  I need to do the best I can.  I need to make sure it’s right and I’m willing to put the hours in – I’ve said that if the problem with access to the venue is because people don’t want to hang around with keys then I’ll take responsibility and get the keys back to them once we’re done or the next day when the show goes up.  I’m willing to stay all night if we can make it right.  Unfortunately I suspect it’s more complicated than that.

So, later today, armed with notes, I’m going to meet Ben and we’re going to talk through what we both want out of it.  Then we’re going to go to the theatre and see how much of those plans we can actually do.  And I’ll let you know.

I guess it means something that when it’s a choice between theatre and anything else theatre always wins.  This has always been the case, and when I dropped out of university I think I must have realised it (at least subconsciously, although at the time I thought I was just looking for something totally different from what I had been doing) – I applied to take a course at RADA.  I didn’t get in, they said I lacked industry experience (which seems odd given they’re job is to teach people things they’ll need to get into the industry!).  I think this knocked me back into thinking it was a silly idea (I’ll admit it was a bit of a long shot anyway) and I got on and made the life I live now.

In the last year these thoughts have crept up on me a bit.  I blame Tiffany – through her I’m experiencing working in theatre.  She tells me about her days and what she’s had to deal with, we go to shows together and sit there commenting on things we’ve spotted, and we’ve even sat there reading the same script talking about how we see the scene being set.

And you know what?  I love it.

Part of me wishes I didn’t.  I want to go and be involved, I want to spend my day’s like Tiffany does surrounded by it, working on it, making it all come together.  But I can’t just do that.  I can’t just drop what I have and do that, it doesn’t work like that.

I spoke to Tiffany today on the phone and she said that, one day, we’ll both be working in the West End, and we’ll finish our shows and head to the clubs where only those working in London theatre can go, together.  It’s fantasy, it’ll never happen… and yet she tells me it can, that I just have to get myself together and make it happen.  Perhaps she’s right, but I don’t think I know how to go about it.  Or maybe I don’t think I can go about it.

Either way, for the next 4 days, I’m in that world.  It may only on the very outer fringe, but I’m involved, and I’m going to put everything I can into it.  Because this is what I really, really want to do.

The weekend drinks were supposed to be for Dana’s birthday.  We’d already kind of had birthday on her actual day, but given it was in the middle of the week and Tim was working they decided to go for a few drinks with people on the Saturday afterwards.  It took place at our usual pub in Guildford.  I went on the train while everyone else except Phil came in Tim’s car.  I met Phil at the station and we walked to the pub together.  It was the first time Phil and I had seen each other since the new year, so we talked about what we had done over Christmas and I told him about my new year’s resolution and the Press Club.  Once we arrived at the pub we got a table, and then people changed their mind about the table so we moved.  And then they changed their mind again and we changed back.  Shortly afterwards they changed their minds again and we moved for one final time.  The rest of the evening went pretty much without hitch.  I sat between Phil and his brother and oposite Dana.  I talked mainly to them because they were the people I knew most.  It did strike me as the evening went on, however, that other than me it was really just a group of Tim’s friends.  Granted Dana’s friends are either busy with babies or further away than was practical, but it was still all Tim’s friends.  In fact Dana said something in the following days about feeling she wished there were more girls there to talk to.  I suppose there wasn’t much anyone could do.  On the way back home as I was walking with Phil back to the station after the rest of them had gone off to the car park he said he sensed some tension between Tim and I.  I’m not really sure why, I thought it had gone OK and I’d pretty much managed to avoid saying too much to him.  I guess either it’s more obvious than I realised, or he just read that into it because he knows what I’ve told him before.

So that was that weekend.  The next weekend (last weekend) I got a text from Phil saying that Cecile was over from France and asking if I would like to meet up with them on Saturday and maybe go to the theatre.  Always being up for the theatre, and very happy to see Cecile again, I said I would.  Unfortunately Dana was off seeing Tim that weekend (she sees him every weekend and Cecile not very often, but still.  Cecile’s going to be back in about 3 weeks when I’m told it’s Tim’s birthday so there’ll no doubt be a collection of his friends going out for that which we’ll all go to) so it was just me.  I met them at Embankment tube just after 4, just in time to see a protest march going past along the Embankment.  I’m not sure what they were protesting about, and I didn’t have my camera so I didn’t bother investigating too much.  We walked to the discount Tkts booth in Leicester Square to see what shows were still available and decided to go with Buddy, the Buddy Holly musical.  Both Phil and I had seen the touring version a number of years ago and were happy to go again while Cecile hadn’t seen it at all.  The show went up at 7.30 so we headed to find a bar.  We went to a nice place near Covent Garden and chatted until it was time to head to the theatre.

The show wasn’t quite what I remember (or the touring version has more story telling).  I still enjoyed it, and I think I’d go again if someone else wanted to.  It’s supposed to tell the story of Buddy Holly’s life, but the story telling is a little thin on the ground.  The first half takes you from an appearance on the radio of The Crickets as a country band through them recording their hit singles, Buddy’s marriage, the band’s break up and on to the final tour.  The second half turns the audience in the theatre into the audience at Holly’s last concert in Clear Lake with The Big Bopper and Richie Valens in 1959.  It’s more like seeing a tribute band than a musical.  Buddy’s death is treated handled very poignantly if briefly and it seemed to genuinely take some people by surprise (“shit” said one lady behind us with honest surprise when the VO said what had happened).  The thing closes with a big reprise of Oh Boy.  It does make you leave with a smile on your face.

Sitting next to me were a couple of foreign girls and sitting next to Phil were another couple of girls one of which caught my eye a few times during the show.  I’m sure she was looking at me, and she wasn’t unattractive either.  I thought maybe I might be able to find out if she really was interested during the interval, but she seemed to be buried in her programme with her friend so I summised she wasn’t.  On the way out she was standing in front of the theatre waiting for her friend when we came out, and again she caught my eye.  So I don’t know what she thought — perhaps she was as shy as me and that’s why she hid during the interval — but I am liking the attention my new look seems to be attracting.  Just got to keep it up and I think I’ll be well on track to managing my new year’s resolution!