For the past couple of months I’ve been working with a director to construct a show which gets its first performances later this week.

Despite the “everyone’s a creative person” school of thought, I know that I am primarily an interpreter not a maker and I needed a director who can, in this case, also write scripts as well as direct for the stage. The narrative is a simple one but we have been piecing together a jigsaw of found text to make a version of it which slips between different periods of time and in which I move in and out of several different characters, without the convenient signifier of changing costume.

We think we finally got it right this weekend, when we knuckled down for two solid days with the final version of the script and nailed down the precise moments of transition between all these states. I love live theatre for what it permits – as long as we make the different states clear the audience should have no problem accepting the fluid way the narrative is presented, since this kind of sliding back and forth is an established theatrical device.

But there are still some basic questions to be answered:

Does our show actually work? will the audience understand the story and who I am at various points? how do we make sense of why some text is spoken and some sung? what are the ‘arias’ really about?

This project was conceived as an experiment: to see whether the original work could make the leap from concert platform to dramatic stage, and to allow the director and I to explore making a show in a way that we hadn’t worked before, with collaborators chosen by us. Tomorrow we get the technical boys in: sound and video effects, which I anticipate will totally change the way the wonderful Libby Burgess (piano) and I experience the piece as its performers. We will also start to see more clearly the results of our experiment.

More results will come at the shows themselves. Our host, Tête à Tête: the Opera Festival, implements a feedback questionnaire to elicit what people think of the piece and has now a well-trained audience that actually bothers to fill it in. It’s the sort of feedback that the Arts Council is very fond of, so let’s hope it’s positive as I would like this to be the first of many experiments.

Meanwhile, as the show’s producer, I am also running around with a clip-board, fund-raising, booking rehearsal space, paying bills, chivvying people to turn up to the shows, mopping creative brows, feeding the director (and myself) vitamin C when he is showing signs of a cold. Several veterans of self-produced shows have reminded me of the need to put down the list at some point and concentrate on the work.

Wise words – in the end, telling that story on-stage in an authentic way is the only thing that really matters.

 

A Voice of One Delight gets its first performances on Aug 16 &17 at Tête à Tête: the Opera Festival. See here for details.

Photo: L to R Clare McCaldin, Petra Söör (choreographer), Joe Austin (director)