— read write play

When it was announced last night that the if.comedy spirit of the Fringe award would be shared amongst all performers at the festival, it was a running joke that everyone could put it on their posters next year: “if.comedy award winner.”

14 hours later and I’ve just been given a flier for a stand-up proclaiming her the recipient of the 2008 spirit of the Fringe award. It’s quite literally true, but probably not what the judging panel had quite intended.

Heh.

Did I mention how the fringe show I work on almost got nominated for an if.comedy award?

After three weeks of visits to the show from judges, the panel met last Wednesday morning and decided that The Penny Dreadfuls‘ Aeneas Faversham Forever was so funny that it should be short-listed for the main if.comedy prize.

Then, five minutes later, one of the judges remarked that the show wasn’t actually eligible because it was a play. Hmm.

Lively opinions were exchanged (ahem) with the director of the award and another panellist fighting our corner. Sadly, they didn’t convince enough of the other judges. So that’s possibly why the nomination list was a little short this year.

When the news reached us, we had a few hours of mild hysteria and bewilderment as we tried to get our heads around what had (nearly) happened – then drowned those heads at the Avalon birthday party free bar. Meh. I don’t think we’d have won this year, but it would have been nice to be nominated.

Fortunately, the spirit of the Fringe panel prize was awarded last night to every performer at the Fringe in the shape of a free drink on Monday evening (news which was slightly muted by delivering it to a room full of people already on their third free drink of the evening). So there’s that for the poster.

Also see: Why the if.comedy shortlist is intriguingly short.

I’ve caught up with Al Smith – who I’ve known since studying in Edinburgh – a few times since the start of the fringe, during the week when he opened The Bird and The Bee. During the week when he opened his half of the pair of plays twice.

After uncomfortable previews in London and a single performance in Edinburgh, Al took the step of pulling two performances of his play, The Bird, to rapidly rework the script and production. The play just wasn’t working.

It was a step that he couldn’t have taken if he hadn’t had direct control over the whole process as executive producer – and if Matt Hartley (authoring the partner play, The Bee) and James Yeatman (directing The Bird) hadn’t supported the move, or if several years of work with Tom Ferguson and other cast members hadn’t built up a reserve of trust.

Pragmatically (in other words, financially) it’s perhaps hard to think of a better place in a Fringe run to deliberately cancel performances – falling over cheap preview ticket dates and before any major reviews had appeared. Even so, it’s a pretty bold, even crazy move: to not only re-write substantial portions of a play that has already been rehearsed and previewed, but to significantly alter the staging.

The transformation of the sound and lighting design was so radical that Neil Hobbs (also working as the technical director for the Penny Dreadfuls, which I co-produce) was able to tell the Underbelly team that they wouldn’t be using any of the lights on the rig which the production had previously spent time plotting and focussing. Not a single one. Consequently, it’s a design that’s adventurous not merely by contrast, but in its own right.

And the new staging – which exposes the processes of sound, light and characterisation to the audience far more explicitly than before – works well enough that it appears a natural solution to the problem of staging the text, as if it would have been near unthinkable to stage it in any other way.

Of course, you don’t need to know any of this to watch the play; this off-stage narrative of production process has an explicit but still weirdly tangential relationship to the experience of the play as it appears before an audience.

Enough now: go and buy some tickets for the pair.