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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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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Start of week 2

This week started with Glynn's movement classes. She dissected peoples walks in seconds and, in the majority of cases, had people walking far more 'cleanly' than before. It was great to see how tiny tweaks can make such a difference. We then had text analysis. An interesting look at prose in Shakespeare. This is when, it was suggested, the characters have something to hide. They are playing with words and attempting to confuse, misguide one another. This makes sense and will be very useful to take into Much Ado rehearsals. Went to see 12th Night (Dame Judie Dench in the audience!) and it was a fantastic performance by Simon Callow, unfortunately he was dragging the rest of the cast kicking and screaming behind him! They were awful. It was all in the head and nothing in the body. Part of me wonders how someone like Peter Hall could direct it and make such fundamental mistakes. Today was again about exploring the directions and gesture. This time applying them to elemen...
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