Andy McGregor

The Making of 'Love 2.0' - a 3 year journey of silliness  This is a blog I wrote for Sleeping Warrior's Blog Page, but I thought that it should be here as well, there is a link at the bottom that takes you to the online programme that I created for the piece. The show is currently touring Scotland, we've just got our first review through which you can read here . ***SPOILERS ALERT*** Before I go any further I should say that this blog contains a number of spoilers, so if you are currently sitting in a theatre waiting for the show to start, or checking it out before you've seen it in the flesh, then you may want to save this link and have a wee look post show! In the Beginning The genesis of the show is one based on pure circumstance. In 2012 I was asked by my friend, who was an acting student at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, if I would be interested in working on devising a piece of theatre for a couple of weeks with some fellow students. They had el...

It has been some journey, taking over three years in total ( see here  and here ) but we started rehearsals for my comedy 'Love 2.0' last week. It is going on tour all over Scotland and I'm really excited to share it with a wider audience. You can get the tour details here . We spent a chunk of our first day rehearsing by making this wee trailer: It is a co-production between my company - Sleeping Warrior - and the Beacon Arts Centre in Greenock. The set arrives in a couple of days (designed by Kirsty McCabe). It's going to be a really exciting time and we can't wait to get the show up and running and in front of audiences.

I have spent the last wee while making my show 'Eric the Elf's Chaotic Christmas' for the Citizens Theatre and it finished it run at the end of December. I'm finally getting round to writing a wee bit about the creation of this Christmas show for 3-6 year olds. I was responsible for writing and directing the play as well as composing the music. Eric the Elf (Harry Ward) receives a phone call, photo by Richard Campbell I have made scores of plays with young people and I was composer and assistant director for Bauble Trouble in the same space last year, but this was my first time making a show from scratch for this age group. I thought it may be of interest to write about it's creation, both to visitors to this blog (I checked and it's had 23 odd thousand views... which is a surprising and also slightly terrifying statistic) and to the future me. ---- The Treatment The first thing was to create a treatment (you can have a look at that here ). This was a ...

Took a wee break from Elf-based business today to record my song 'Side by Side' live. Actual song with band is here:    

It's all been so busy recently that I haven't had a proper chance to post anything on here. I've just finished working on a couple of great projects. I was back as assistant director with the National Theatre of Scotland's 'In Time O' Strife'. That took me all sorts of interesting places around the country (including a short performance in the parliament at Holyrood, which was just brilliant) and it was fantastic to see the show grow and for it to engage a really wide-spread audience. The cast of 'In Time O' Strife'. Photo by Andy Ross I have just finished this year's Shakespeare in Schools project with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. This is now the fifth year that I've taken second year BA actors out to schools for workshops and a reduced version of a play, this year it was the turn of 'Midsummer Night's Dream'. I love this project as it takes me and the RCS students to places we would rarely visit, this time a...

Working on a Scottish classic Image by David McGarvey My most recent project is a very interesting one, I am co-directing (alongside Prof Maggie Kinloch) the John McGrath classic 'The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil' for the Largs Players community drama group, also featuring the mod-winning Largs Gaelic choir (you can see photos from our production here ). The play was first performed by 7:84 (pictured below) who toured it all around Scotland and, in doing so, created a classic piece of Scottish theatre. It is an interesting experience to work on this play for a number of reasons. The most obvious being the text itself, it's unlike any play that I've ever come across and I doubt will come across again. Here's a little snippet of the opening number. The Play The play was first performed 40 years ago, in 1974. It tells the story of the Scottish Highlands from 1746 up until - the then - modern day. It looks at how the people and their la...

I have spent the last few weeks working on a show called 'Notes to Self' with the 2nd year Musical Theatre students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. The brief is simple in principle, create a show where the students generate all the material themselves. In practice this kind of work has a number of significant challenges but l have a lot of experience working on projects with multiple writers and, sometimes, hundreds of participants. I thought it may be helpful for anyone else who is looking to devise with large groups if I documented how we did it, the techniques used to create ideas and how modern technology can really make life easier. We are transported back into the 1950's. Photo by Kevin Robertson Generating Ideas We started in traditional devised theatre territory. I asked everyone to bring in a photo and a object, these were then left together in a little pile. Another actor would look at these objects, some which made sense (e.g. a picture of a sn...