The Trouble With Being Gordon











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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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Love 2.0

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So I have spent the last 3 weeks working on a new wee comedy called 'Love 2.0' with Sam and Molly at the RCS.  This was a great wee chance to start from nothing and work with some actors in creating a brand new play. Molly Veevers as Suzie and Sam Keefe as Gary The idea behind the play was that social networking, Facebook in particular, has very little to do with being social.  In fact it could possibly have the opposite effect. One of the characters, Gary, creates a completely false impression of himself online that then attracts the attention of Suzie.  Everything looks like it's going to be a perfect match until they finally meet, and then have no idea how to actually talk to one another.  We had a great wee audience who laughed throughout and I'm now looking at ways of bringing this and my other comedy, Lucas Petite, to the stage.  There seems to be a huge gap in theatre for 20 somethings/late teens.  Maybe the audience isn't there...
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Music As A Time Machine

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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...
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