The Trouble With Being Gordon











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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 ...
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Making Battery Park

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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...
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Keep moving, just keep moving.

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In what must surely be the longest move ever recorded by man I think KD and I are finally ready to leave the lovely Largs behind (perhaps for good).  Our new flat in Glasgow is looking lovely and just about everything, apart from the GIANT framed photo of David Bowie, is out of our old house. My bare house... I've almost finished the new One Man Town album, all the songs bar one are in some sort of completion, now it's just extended listening and tweaking until everyone's happy with the final mix.  It's a concept record so all the tracks are inter-linked which is quite fun to try and do.  I've got a good idea for the first video, involves computer games. Also happening just now is the biggest fund-raising event of the year for the Largs Youth Theatre - we run Largs Has Got Talent, which sounds terrible but is actually a lot of fun.  I'm doing the sound for the show and am basically in charge of the running of the actual night (Ryan and Emma do a great j...
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