Feedback Time

9th March, 2009

This is how it goes…. So last week my one act play Watershed was given a Rehearsed reading at Live Theatre. 

A Rehearsed Reading is exactly what it sounds like…basically the actors get to read the script a couple of times and make some kind of sense of it all…before they read it to an audience.  So, It’s subtly different from a Script in Hand Performance…where the actors rehearse much more and there is usually some staging and some direction and…is anyone still reading??? 

Right so…I was very lucky to have a fabulously intelligent and instinctively intuitive cast in the form of Vicky Elliot, Laura Norton, Micky Cochrane and Rob Atkinson.  And of course the calm management of the stage directions and the performance in the form of Gez Casey.   

I’d worked hard on the script.  The actors were great.  So I should feel quietly confident shouldn’t I?  But I was terrified.  Absolutely terrified.   And it’s a sort of stupid phobia. Because the worst that can a happen is that an audience doesn’t like my play.  And that’s hardly the end of the world is it. I could deal with that.   

And I make it worse for myself by insisting on writing drama rather than comedy.  My writing heroes are Neil laBute, Martin McDonagh, Patrick Marber, Antony Neilson etc… I love theatre that takes you right into the centre of people’s strange twisted lives and has shed loads of light and dark.  I’d choose deep and dark over shallow and funny anyday.  Of course there is space for both.  And lots of writers do it brilliantly. 

I’m still learning – so I need to not be too hard on myself. 

But with Watershed is a dark and torrid sort of world...and I worried terribly that everyone from the actors to the audience would be saying ‘well it isn’t very funny is it?’  And the thing is…it’s not really meant to be. Not all the time!  It’s a drama not a comedy. 

But to go around explaining to each member of the audience what my intentions were with the play is not theatre etiquette so…. And anyway…there are plenty of other writers who write comedy much better than me as Alison Carr, Laura Degnan and Paddy Campbell proved on the 2-4-1 night.  

I’m trying to plough my own little furrow though.  Make a little Rosalind Wyllie shape in Theatreland…so I know that I have to stay true to myself…but sometimes I do wish I had written a more feel-good script.I worried so much that I would depress the audience!! 

But here’s the thing.  Now that the performances are over.  Now that the feedback is in and I have a moment to pause before the next draft…I’ve noticed that not one person complained about the subject matter, or that it was too dark, or that my characters swore too much, or that they felt tricked that they got a drama not a comedy. 

So, maybe I’m underestimating the audience.   Maybe they’re more up for a bit of dark than I thought!  

 Let’s hope so kids…because I can’t see myself writing romantic comedies anytime soon…but never say never right!