Staging “The Bird”
August 12th, 2008 • festival, production process, theatre
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.
