What's New In The New Year

Weeeell the end of 2013 was extremely busy for me (hence lack of being on here) with various projects happening.

First off I composed the music for 'Bauble Trouble' at the Citizens theatre (directed by Guy Hollands). This was a great wee show for nursery children and we received fantastic reviews for it.  It was a real challenge writing so much music - the entire show was pretty much underscored - in such a short time, but I loved it.  I had my own little station in the corner (see below) and, using Logic Pro X and Native Instruments Komplete Ultimate amongst others, I created a soundtrack that I was pretty pleased with.

My portable studio set-up
Here is the track that opened the show:
 

After Bauble Trouble was up and running I moved back to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland where I was assistant-director on their production of Merchant of Venice that has just opened this week.  It is a production which shall be going to Taiwan, here's a short trailer that one of the students made for it:



Moving on I now have a couple of exciting projects to look forward to.  I received a little bit of development money from the Tom McGrath trust that I will be using to work on my comedy 'Love 2.0' and we shall show the fruits of that labour in the Tron theatre's Victorian bar space in January and then I will start work on 'Notes To Self' a devised musical with the 2nd year MT students at RCS, both of these should be extremely enjoyable ventures and I cannae wait to get stuck in.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Oblique Strategies for Drama

I am a big fan of the musician Brian Eno. From his work with Roxy Music through to his records with U2 and Coldplay via Bowie, Byrne and inventing ambient music I think he has an interesting outlook on the creative process and has made a career out of reinventing his own sound, and the sound of others. As a theatre director who has a massive interest in record production I was drawn to Eno's Oblique Strategies . A series of prompts written on cards that he would pull out at random to instigate a creative impulse in the musicians he was working with. You can check out some of the strategies on this website .  Sometimes when you are rehearsing a play you can feel that, as a director, you are making the same safe choices again and again. Actors have this feeling too. They have made choices in rehearsal and are scared to deviate from 'what works'. This pushes a whole world of unexplored possibilities to the side.  I was working on some show or other a few years ago and when it
Read more

Music As A Time Machine

Image
I’m preparing for my next show, called Battery Park which is a fictional story of a Britpop band from Greenock that almost made it. It looks at the bruised and bitter mid-40’s main character and flashes back to his youth in the 90’s, when his band almost became the next Oasis… almost. In my latest draft I wrote the line, ‘music is the closest thing we have to a time machine’ that then got me thinking. I thought back to my own days in a band, Blind Pew (why we were called that, I can't recall, I know it's a character from Treasure Island but... well... that's all I know!) some of which makes it into the play. I thought about doing something exciting and fun with your pals but also the boredom, the arguments and the crushing disappointment that comes with the territory.   This was before smartphones so we don’t have many photos outwith the official ones from gigs, but when I put on our old albums, it was incredible how quickly images and people came rushing back into my h
Read more

Making Battery Park

Image
Opening night for my latest play, Battery Park, has come and gone. I'm sitting here, exhausted but exhilarated after a fantastic rehearsal process that led to us making what I think is a great show.  I started this blog as a student at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where I studied directing, as a place to reflect on my practice, and over a decade later I haven't kicked the habit. So here's a reflection on my process as a director - but also as the artistic director of Sleeping Warrior Theatre Company.  It will be of niche interest to some I hope, and will be a resource for myself looking back. Battery Park is about a group of young people from Greenock who form a band and attempt to become bigger than Oasis in 1990's Britain. We know right from the off that they didn't succeed and we watch the main protagonist now - a 47 year old man - as he grapples with the choices made by younger him and how they still affect his life.  Around a year and a half ago I appli
Read more