Andy McGregor

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...

I spent the last week working on a play that I first wrote, with Samuel Keefe and Molly Vevers, almost 2 years ago.  'Love 2.0' is a really fun little show that I think is going to really make people chuckle. You can read all about the show on my theatre company's blog here  and you can see a little trailer I made up above. We had photographer Emily Rowan in rehearsal ( her website is here ) and she caught various great shots of the actors but also, unusually, of my good self at work.  I'm not sure what the picture below says about my directing 'technique'... Hopefully this is a show that we will be able to tour later in the year, but we shall see how our little showing at the Tron comes along first, it's certainly been a really fun show to make.

Weeeell the end of 2013 was extremely busy for me (hence lack of being on here) with various projects happening. First off I composed the music for 'Bauble Trouble' at the Citizens theatre (directed by Guy Hollands). This was a great wee show for nursery children and we received fantastic reviews  for it.  It was a real challenge writing so much music - the entire show was pretty much underscored - in such a short time, but I loved it.  I had my own little station in the corner (see below) and, using Logic Pro X and Native Instruments Komplete Ultimate amongst others, I created a soundtrack that I was pretty pleased with. My portable studio set-up Here is the track that opened the show:   After Bauble Trouble was up and running I moved back to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland where I was assistant-director on their production of Merchant of Venice that has just opened this week.  It is a production which shall be going to Taiwan, here's a short t...

It's been a busy few weeks. I've mainly been working at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, taking the 2nd year BA Acting students through a course that culminates with them leading workshops and performing scenes from Macbeth with schools. This is a great job for me as it allows me to combine two things that I really love, working with actors on Shakespeare and working with young people. We will be heading out to schools at the end of this coming week and I'm really looking forward to it. The other main focus of the week is my musical 'Towards the Moon' that will be premiered in it's entirety in an off-Broadway production at the end of the month.  This is really exciting, I've been exchanging emails with the director, Paul Andrew Perez, and it sounds like it's shaping up to be a great show, I can't wait to see/hear some of their work.  I'm still working on getting it performed in Scotland and have been having some really interesting cha...

I'm starting to get some ideas together for a new album, music production is my first love and I remain extremely interested in all the latest technology and am always listening to new music to try and excite my ever-ageing earbuds with some new ideas. To me there's nothing quite like a well-made record, I don't particularly like live music, the joy of listening on good headphones to a record with great songs and amazing production is second to none... I used to teach sound recording at a school (it's now part of the Higher music syllabus) and I loved taking new students through a very quick history of sound recording and opening their ears to what was really happening in songs.  Those little details that the musician and producer will have slaved over, but the casual listener may not hear.  I kind of miss those classes, it was a great job to have!  It should be noted that 'produced' records are not always the best way forward.  Take 'Hurt' by Nine...

I'm just back from holiday in Poland (which was great) and things are getting really busy.  I started work as assistant director on the National Theatre of Scotland's ' In Time O' Strife ' by Joe Corrie, directed by Graham McLaren.  Here's a wee video about the exciting concepts behind the show: It has been a great experience so far and what has been really nice to see is the way in which Graham incorporates actioning into his rehearsal process.  I talk a little bit about this approach in my previous post about the classes I've been teaching at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, so it has been very interesting to see the process taken out of the classroom and into the professional rehearsal room. We have been working through the script scene by scene and attributing an 'action' (ie a transitive verb) to each line/thought.  This can be a slow process to begin with but, as the actors get used to the idea, it starts to speed up.  We then have ...