Faversham Forever round-up

September 12th, 2008 • comedy, festival, penny dreadfuls

Fringe 2008 and Aeneas Faversham Forever marked my third year of work with The Penny Dreadfuls - following Aeneas Faversham (2006) and Aeneas Faversham Returns (2007) - and I think we’re getting better at it.

Some production detail:

- we jumped ship from the Underbelly to the Pleasance 2, a 156-seat venue in the Pleasance Courtyard.

- our early previews played to over 100 each night; the rest of the four week run was sold out.

- our reviews were extremely positive, with a majority giving us five stars.

- thought the production budget for the entire year (running from development previews in the winter through to fringe) was far larger than either previous show, the company will turn a profit for a third year in a row. Yes, you can make money at the Fringe.

- our publicity was once more designed by the ultra-producer, Idil Sukan. It’s the third year we’ve produced a pack of bespoke playing cards which doubled as fliers: no-one seems willing or able to match the effort or cost of copying us.

- for the third year, we’ve given our audience beautiful badges as they leave the show, this year reading “Henchman of the Month.” It’s a nice call-back to a key scene in the middle of the show (it’s a title awarded for good attendance); audiences seem genuinely delighted to have something to take away with them.

- we spent far too much money on children’s tricycles for a climactic mine-cart chase, which never made it into the show.

- the show now has three further performances in London and Brighton during October, including the Apollo Theatre on Shaftsbury Avenue on October 5th.

On a more reflective note, there was a moment mid-fringe where I realised that word-of-mouth is partner to hype, leading to a small percentage of our audience buying tickets for a show that they knew nothing about (other than that a friend thought it was quite good).

On those nights - most often weekends - the cast had to work incredibly hard in the opening scenes to let the audience know what kind of performance they were watching: not only the genres of comedy and melodrama that were being blended, but the way in which the play was staged, characters were created and narrative constructed. That said, audience response was generally very positive, and very generous.

Finally, we’re almost certainly taking a break from the Victoriana for a while: the guys are working on other writing projects (including a pilot for Radio 4), though we may return for a short burst of shows next fringe.

Near miss

August 24th, 2008 • comedy, festival, penny dreadfuls

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.

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.

The Bird and The Bee

August 11th, 2008 • festival, theatre

Al Smith’s pair of plays - writing one, exec producing the pair - have picked up a pair of strong reviews in The Scotsman.

IT’S inevitable that people will want to compare Matt Hartley and Al Smith’s two new interconnecting plays. Smith, the writer of The Bird, has had an illustrious career at the Fringe with company Kandinsky, while Hartley won the prestigious Royal Exchange Bruntwood Competition for new writing last year. Both met and decided to create separate pieces, drawing inspiration from the Bridgend teenage suicides and a bizarre condition called “colony collapse disorder” – where honey bees willingly leave a colony to die, seemingly without reason.

It’s really pleasing to see both works reviewed as part of a whole, proving that kind of experiment in writing can find a critical home. Pragmatically, a pair of four star reviews should sell also tickets through to the end of the festival, and puts both in the running for a Fringe first. Fingers crossed.