We took a group decision last night to do the show Unplugged - sorry, we'll not be needing that ample Special Effects budget.
The right decision : the human voice, performing live, has a resonance that no recording can capture, and theatre ( and football ) is all about living in the moment.
jueves, 31 de enero de 2013
Football and Theatre.
During the 1990s, Michael Robinson ( himself a former Ireland international ) forged a career on Spanish TV with a programme en abierto on Canal Plus called "El Día Después." The format, Robinson's own creation, was genius : every Monday evening at 8.30, his team would report affectionately about the week's football games, focussing on everything except what happened on the pitch.
So instead of the usual round of interviews with dreary superstars, they'd tell the story of a couple who spent the afternoon of their wedding, still in wedding dress and morning suit, watching Real Madrid in the Bernabeu; or the Rayo employee who explained his job, with the intense happiness probably only attainable by the harmlessly mad : on match days, he broadcast through the stadium loudspeaker system, every time Rayo scored a goal, the first five bars of the greatest song ever recorded : "The Final Countdown."
My favourite story from the Día Después was this : a Betis fan who every year bought two season tickets to watch his team. One for himself, and one for the ashes of his dead father. Which he took to the ground, Sunday after Sunday, in a milk carton.
Once you accept that normality is a mosaic of this sort of thing, nothing you put up on a stage can be too far-fetched.
I guess because they're two of my main interests, I've always enjoyed the similarities between football and theatre. They both have their little pre-match rituals, both in terms of psyching up the performers to give their best, and the kind of conventions of behaviour the spectators follow. They both depend on teamwork ( for 3 demented weeks in January 2011, I rehearsed the Crucible with the Players in the morning and trained with the Harps, Madrid's GAA team, in the afternoon : the groups share a number of warm-up exercises, all designed to promote teamwork ). And they're both spectator sports.
The Parting Glass lasts for 90 minutes, and it's a game of two halves : and I believe in theatre which grabs the audience emotionally and doesn't let go from start to finish - like an Atlético-Barça from the old days, or a Wales - Ireland rugby match...
So instead of the usual round of interviews with dreary superstars, they'd tell the story of a couple who spent the afternoon of their wedding, still in wedding dress and morning suit, watching Real Madrid in the Bernabeu; or the Rayo employee who explained his job, with the intense happiness probably only attainable by the harmlessly mad : on match days, he broadcast through the stadium loudspeaker system, every time Rayo scored a goal, the first five bars of the greatest song ever recorded : "The Final Countdown."
My favourite story from the Día Después was this : a Betis fan who every year bought two season tickets to watch his team. One for himself, and one for the ashes of his dead father. Which he took to the ground, Sunday after Sunday, in a milk carton.
Once you accept that normality is a mosaic of this sort of thing, nothing you put up on a stage can be too far-fetched.
I guess because they're two of my main interests, I've always enjoyed the similarities between football and theatre. They both have their little pre-match rituals, both in terms of psyching up the performers to give their best, and the kind of conventions of behaviour the spectators follow. They both depend on teamwork ( for 3 demented weeks in January 2011, I rehearsed the Crucible with the Players in the morning and trained with the Harps, Madrid's GAA team, in the afternoon : the groups share a number of warm-up exercises, all designed to promote teamwork ). And they're both spectator sports.
The Parting Glass lasts for 90 minutes, and it's a game of two halves : and I believe in theatre which grabs the audience emotionally and doesn't let go from start to finish - like an Atlético-Barça from the old days, or a Wales - Ireland rugby match...
martes, 29 de enero de 2013
"He was always going to be an architect. If he's going to be an architect, he will have to live elsewhere."
The Parting Glass in the title refers to the last drink you have with your mates before leaving - I guess like "la penúltima" in Spanish. It's also a traditional Irish song, here in a particularly upbeat version by The High Kings.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvoBrhbhgk0
This play is it's a 90-minute fragment of reality - and I mean reality so real that I see more about it every day in the newspaper, in conversations with friends - visualised and re-written by a poet who could also write stand-up comedy.
It's kind of interesting to be doing a play about the lives of people who could just as easily be in the audience, not just in terms of their general characteristics, but also the very specific details of their lives. Because we're a cast made up of emigrants ( apart from Javier ), performing a play about emigration, for an audience largely of emigrants, in a city where everyone's pretty much from somewhere else anyway. The other night I struggled through a group of protesters venting their righteous anger outside the Bankia hq in Calle Alcala, to rehearse in the James Joyce pub : yes, we've been rehearsing a show about guys who sit around in Irish pubs... in an Irish pub.
The parallels between Ireland and Spain at the moment make so many lines in the play resonate. When Eoin says of his son, Dieter, and his plans for the future "He was always going to be an architect. If he's going to be an architect, he will have to live elsewhere." , elsewhere means "not Ireland" - but in our performance, it means "not Spain" as well. Both countries have a generation of young people whose lives have been conditioned, and will be conditioned for a long time to come, by the greed and stupidity of the housing bubble years, which in Spain at least are talked about by those in power as if they were some inexplicable act of God.
This has set us two challenges as we've worked on the play : I'm lucky to be working with such a gifted group of actors, and my job of course has been to stop them acting, or at least to make it so unobvious that the audience don't notice it. The other challenge I think I'll mention another time...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvoBrhbhgk0
This play is it's a 90-minute fragment of reality - and I mean reality so real that I see more about it every day in the newspaper, in conversations with friends - visualised and re-written by a poet who could also write stand-up comedy.
It's kind of interesting to be doing a play about the lives of people who could just as easily be in the audience, not just in terms of their general characteristics, but also the very specific details of their lives. Because we're a cast made up of emigrants ( apart from Javier ), performing a play about emigration, for an audience largely of emigrants, in a city where everyone's pretty much from somewhere else anyway. The other night I struggled through a group of protesters venting their righteous anger outside the Bankia hq in Calle Alcala, to rehearse in the James Joyce pub : yes, we've been rehearsing a show about guys who sit around in Irish pubs... in an Irish pub.
The parallels between Ireland and Spain at the moment make so many lines in the play resonate. When Eoin says of his son, Dieter, and his plans for the future "He was always going to be an architect. If he's going to be an architect, he will have to live elsewhere." , elsewhere means "not Ireland" - but in our performance, it means "not Spain" as well. Both countries have a generation of young people whose lives have been conditioned, and will be conditioned for a long time to come, by the greed and stupidity of the housing bubble years, which in Spain at least are talked about by those in power as if they were some inexplicable act of God.
This has set us two challenges as we've worked on the play : I'm lucky to be working with such a gifted group of actors, and my job of course has been to stop them acting, or at least to make it so unobvious that the audience don't notice it. The other challenge I think I'll mention another time...
domingo, 27 de enero de 2013
Este en el poster es Thierry Henry, ¿ no ?
On Friday, when I ran off a few copies of the poster, the folks who work in the photocopy shop were immediately interested : they've done posters for Madrid Players for about a year now, but this time they really wanted to know what Thierry Henry was doing in our play.
And in case anyone wants to know what Thierry is doing in the play.., this is what happened in the Stade de France on 18th. November 2009.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QNHlFDbxvY
And in case anyone wants to know what Thierry is doing in the play.., this is what happened in the Stade de France on 18th. November 2009.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QNHlFDbxvY
The Parting Glass
For the last couple of weeks I've been working on this :
( Poster by Aki Ginory )
The story of The Parting Glass starts around 18 years ago; the only time I've been to Ireland, I spent a week walking through Wicklow, with a weekend in Dublin at either end : the first Saturday night I went to the Abbey Theatre to see Sharon's Grave by John B. Keane; and the following weekend, before getting the boat back to Holyhead, I saw April Bright, by Dermot Bolger, at the Gate. And was completely blown away.
Ireland seems to turn out writer after writer with a lyrical, poetic turn of phrase, an ear for dialogue which sounds real, and above all the ability to make audiences laugh and then move them to tears within a few pages of script : but even in this context, I knew Dermot Bolger was a bit special. So it's quite something to have the chance to present one of his plays to a Madrid audience for the first time, in the company of John McClafferty, James Duggan, Javier Gómez-Acebo, Eimear Fee, and Jackie Cresswell.
I think the one thing I love most about theatre is it's a collaborative art form : it's a privilege to be working on this with these mighty talents.
For the next couple of weeks, I'll be babbling on here about all sorts of stuff to do with the business of directing this play : starting with, of course, football !
( Poster by Aki Ginory )
The story of The Parting Glass starts around 18 years ago; the only time I've been to Ireland, I spent a week walking through Wicklow, with a weekend in Dublin at either end : the first Saturday night I went to the Abbey Theatre to see Sharon's Grave by John B. Keane; and the following weekend, before getting the boat back to Holyhead, I saw April Bright, by Dermot Bolger, at the Gate. And was completely blown away.
Ireland seems to turn out writer after writer with a lyrical, poetic turn of phrase, an ear for dialogue which sounds real, and above all the ability to make audiences laugh and then move them to tears within a few pages of script : but even in this context, I knew Dermot Bolger was a bit special. So it's quite something to have the chance to present one of his plays to a Madrid audience for the first time, in the company of John McClafferty, James Duggan, Javier Gómez-Acebo, Eimear Fee, and Jackie Cresswell.
I think the one thing I love most about theatre is it's a collaborative art form : it's a privilege to be working on this with these mighty talents.
For the next couple of weeks, I'll be babbling on here about all sorts of stuff to do with the business of directing this play : starting with, of course, football !
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