2022 - A Year of Making and Learning

 2022 is coming to a close and it has been an extremely busy one for me. I worked on a number of shows all with their unique challenges and artistic rewards.

The year started with The Dream at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. This was an ambitious project where we mashed together A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet into what was a cohesive whole. This was still when the grip of covid hadn't quite left us so it was performed to an audience of about 20 and we also made a fairly cinematic film of it as well, which was an interesting process that I learned a lot from. It was a technically challenging show and it was a pleasure to work with all the students as we pushed ourselves to make the best show possible. 

The Dream - Royal Conservatoire of Scotland

I then headed into two back-to-back development sessions, with thanks to Creative Scotland, The Beacon, NTS and The Tron in supporting this. First up was To Save the Seas, a musical I'm writing with the brill writer Isla Cowan (we wrote the whole thing online during lockdown, without ever having met in person!). It's based on an astonishing true story of a group of Greenpeace protestors who took over a oil rig in the middle of the North Sea, to stop Shell dumping it. We had a brilliant two weeks working on the music and came away with the feeling that there is something special in this story and we look forward to the next stage, whatever that may be!

I also worked on my play Battery Park. We had made a short film Everyoung over lockdown that was a companion piece to this story. It's about Greenock and Britpop in the 90's, so is a story very close to me. It's a play with songs, in that the music in the show are songs that the band are writing. I'm very excited by the show, I think it's themes of the positivity of Britain in the 90's (compared to the Brexit Britain of now) and also looking at middle-age and feeling like your life is over before you really got started. My theatre company is looking to stage this play, so hopefully the funding will come through. Regardless, we had fun recording some songs that Isla and I wrote, with a very different feel to To Save the Seas. 

After such a busy start to the year I was looking forward to a little time off, when I got a message from my good pal Debbie Hannan. Debbie was interim Artistic Director for the theatre company Stockroom (formerly Out of Joint) and had started working on a new play Dead Air, but got ill. So I suddenly found myself standing in a rehearsal room with actors I never met, directing a play I had only read once on the train down! It was a huge challenge. The play was a slapstick comedy that had been written by a number of playwrights in a writers room. Deadlines were extremely tight and the show was technically challenging as it involved a great deal of foley sound. It didn't help that the actors were getting Covid as the rehearsal went on, I think I only had three days with all the actors in the room... quite the challenge! I had a holiday booked so left for tech as Debbie came back and took over, so I never saw the show... which is very odd now that I think about it! I feel like I saw it because the photos were so brill, but no, alas... I hear it went down well with audiences, so that was nice!

Dead Air, photo by Hana Kovacs

My theatre company also brought our hit musical Spuds to the Tron and Perth in early 2022. It went down spectacularly well with standing ovations and the audience loving it. We had a tiny rehearsal period, we were relying on the actors remembering everything from the previous tour in 2021, and they did! Which was a relief. We even had time to add a couple more jokes, including a Will Smith at the Oscars nod that got a round of applause every night!

Spuds started as a Play a Pie and a Pint (PPP) show, and another of these that I had written, Crocodile Rock, was due to be produced in a larger scale version at Cumbernauld Theatre. We had a really exciting new design for the show by Kenny Miller and fantastic lighting, using all the facilities at the new theatre, by Grant Anderson. Darren Brownlie returned to play the part of Stephen with Andy Manning joining us as MD. It is always a real pleasure to return to a show and try to fix the problems that you felt were in the previous production. PPP has a fairly strict time limitation of less than an hour, so we had found we couldn't explore everything we wanted to, but with no limitations of time at Cumbernauld I could write songs and go down paths that were fresh and new. I was really happy with the show, unfortunately we struggled to get people into the theatre - and received no reviews at all - which was disappointing. But I learned a lot about how to place the show in the public sphere, the way to market it to the audience and how to make it appeal to as many people as possible. The feedback we received from audience members was superb and Darren's performance was absolutely sublime. 

Then I was onto making the summer panto for PPP. This job was a pleasure from start to end! We had an amazing cast, many of whom were new to the PPP audience, they got on like a house on fire and I think we created a really fun, uplifting show. Unfortunately our Dame got ill for a few days and I had to step into the heels and wig. I can't say I enjoyed it, although I haven't quite as much as I did backstage after absolutely ruining a number of scenes (which thankfully the audience seemed to thoroughly enjoy!). 

It was then time to return to Crocodile Rock for a tour - but this would be a very different experience! I had decided to pair the show with another of my PPP shows, A New Life - a musical about parenthood. On paper this looked like a tricky, but doable task. In reality it was extremely challenging!

We had a new actor to play the part of Stephen in Crocodile Rock, the fantastic Stephen Arden who did an absolutely amazing job. It was really interesting for me, to see an actor do this one man show, singing the same songs and saying the same lines yet it being something absolutely unique to them. We also had Kim Shepherd and Simon Donaldson with us, they played in the band for Croc Rock and were the lead parts in A New Life. The rehearsals for both shows went extremely well, what I didn't quite bank on was the amount of differences there would be in doing two shows instead of one. 

It all started with the poster. I mean it's pretty simple, you have a show, you get an image, you make a poster and a flyer. But what if you have two shows? Is it two images? One image incorporating both shows (they are very different pieces)? What about the flyer, is it double-sided, is it one flyer for each show etc etc. That was just the start of what became a real headache for our very small team to deal with. Illness in our production department also led to us being behind schedule and I found myself writing apology emails daily - which is not something I'm accustomed to doing! But we finally caught up with ourselves, thankfully I always had faith in the actual shows, it was the getting them out and about and selling them that was the challenge. 

Crocodile Rock ended up with multiple 5 star reviews and standing ovations every night. A New Life was a very different sort of play and some people absolutely loved it whereas others were left cold (but universal praise, and rightly so, for the performers). I can see where I could have improved things - had I time - in developing some of the characters more and moving the action along in a more cohesive way, but there we go, I can't get it right all the time and in the end I was extremely proud of the team and what we managed to achieve. Putting on two musicals in 4 weeks is no easy challenge!

We also recorded a Podcast of Crocodile Rock, which I mixed, that I think works really well. You can get it here. 

And then we come to Christmas. I've written a couple of shows (that at the time of writing I've yet to see) a panto for PACE in Paisley, directed by Daniel Cameron and a wee ones show for the Macrobert directed by Niloo-Far Khan. 

I've also been directing a panto,  Jack and the Beanstalk written by Isla Cowan (ending the year as I started!) for Hopscotch theatre. It's been a very interesting process. The show is for school tours and the actors tour it without any stage management support. So they are putting up the sets and lighting and operating their own sound. There are not one, not two, but three casts all performing the same show! Hopscotch reckon around 30,000 people will see the show once it has completed it's extensive tour. I've really enjoyed working with so many actors, most of whom were new to me, and to be working in such a tight-knit company that is all about people lending a hand wherever they can and making the show work one way or another. It's a very original panto script, with a light focus on women in STEM, that is fun, engaging and has a brilliant baddie in the petulant school-boy Quentin.

Gregor Mackay as Quentin

I'm sitting in a cafe right now writing this, before I head out to the rehearsal room in Govan and see the final runs of the show. Then in a couple of days time I start back at RCS on shortened versions of Coriolanus and Macbeth - quite the change. 2022 has been extremely busy, it has left little time for me to prepare for 2023 (which puts the fear of God into me, any freelancer will understand) but I am grateful for all the people I've worked with, for the audiences my work has got in front of and for the many many lessons that I've learned over the year. I'm definitely wiser than I was!