We came second. So we're through. Yay! As DG would say.
It's been a very exciting festival. Friday saw Holy Cow with a man who lost his reflection, one of the Leitheatre groups with something about a journey to Innesfree and us. Holy Cow were colourful and featured an adorable girl who is apparently a civil engineer in real life. Leitheatre did a dreary tale about a woman who couldn’t decide whether she should go into sheltered accommodation and debated the question with her younger and her middle aged selves. It looked very lovely and was nicely acted. I did not like the play but then it didn’t feature nearly enough misery for my liking.
Ours went off pretty hitch free. Inevitably there were a handful of “wouldn’t have done it quite like that” moments but that seems to be the way with this competition. The cruelty of only getting to do it once. And the lighting at the end was a shabby mess but this was entirely my fault as I was too busy staring at the stage and fiddling with my sound cue to give poor JGH The Look to cue the thing. Lesson learnt there. We were much more skimpily setted, much more bleak and much more sweary (as Susan would say) than both of the other entries. And than the three plays on the following night for that matter.
Adjudication on Friday night was fairly kind. He was complimentary about the actors, didn't seem at all perturbed by the content and gave us a long chat about how you should never put a table centre stage and square-on but somehow we had got away with it. But then he was fairly kind to all of Friday's entrants so this didn't mean anything much.
Saturday saw the Mercators with a tragic little piece about a pair of old (physically and long-standingly) friends who were about to get stuffed into inappropriate care homes. Susan was as charming as she always is. I love seeing her on stage.
Then we had another Leitheatre offering. This one, an extraordinary piece called After the Dream which told the tale of what happened to Bottom ten years after the midsummer's night. It was a terrible play that I could hardly understand but pleasantly enough presented from some lively and vivacious young people. And of course the play itself doesn't really matter.
And then we had the offering of my arch rival: Act 3 of The Killing of Sister George which I do not know at all but sounded like promising fare. This told the tale of an ageing soapstar who was being killed off – and this killing off was mirrored in her personal life as her long-standing relationship with a girl half her age crumbled around her ears. A cracking story and I’d like to read the whole and I awaited this final show with eager anticipation as I fully expected it to be astonishing. Disappointingly, it wasn’t quite. The actors were all pretty to very good but lacked chemistry in their relationships with each other. It was a great pity.
The adjudicator was much nippier about Saturday night’s shows than he’d been on the Friday. Perhaps because he was missing his daughter’s 18th. He grumbled his way through the feedback, the curtains swept shut and then the moment of shame where the hopefuls trudged back stage to stand awaiting our moment in the limelight at the prize giving. I plastered on my fake grin and hoped.
And it turned out alright. I don’t know if I quite agreed with the quantity of cups that Leitheatre got for Innesfree but that’s probably just being mean spirited. The "yes I thought so too" director - who I'd been very carefully pleasant to in the wings beforehand - somehow melted away the moment the curtains swept shut on the afterglow. And we’re going to Killin. I’ve always wanted to go to Killin. Apparently their catering is marvellous.
It's been a very exciting festival. Friday saw Holy Cow with a man who lost his reflection, one of the Leitheatre groups with something about a journey to Innesfree and us. Holy Cow were colourful and featured an adorable girl who is apparently a civil engineer in real life. Leitheatre did a dreary tale about a woman who couldn’t decide whether she should go into sheltered accommodation and debated the question with her younger and her middle aged selves. It looked very lovely and was nicely acted. I did not like the play but then it didn’t feature nearly enough misery for my liking.
Ours went off pretty hitch free. Inevitably there were a handful of “wouldn’t have done it quite like that” moments but that seems to be the way with this competition. The cruelty of only getting to do it once. And the lighting at the end was a shabby mess but this was entirely my fault as I was too busy staring at the stage and fiddling with my sound cue to give poor JGH The Look to cue the thing. Lesson learnt there. We were much more skimpily setted, much more bleak and much more sweary (as Susan would say) than both of the other entries. And than the three plays on the following night for that matter.
Adjudication on Friday night was fairly kind. He was complimentary about the actors, didn't seem at all perturbed by the content and gave us a long chat about how you should never put a table centre stage and square-on but somehow we had got away with it. But then he was fairly kind to all of Friday's entrants so this didn't mean anything much.
Saturday saw the Mercators with a tragic little piece about a pair of old (physically and long-standingly) friends who were about to get stuffed into inappropriate care homes. Susan was as charming as she always is. I love seeing her on stage.
Then we had another Leitheatre offering. This one, an extraordinary piece called After the Dream which told the tale of what happened to Bottom ten years after the midsummer's night. It was a terrible play that I could hardly understand but pleasantly enough presented from some lively and vivacious young people. And of course the play itself doesn't really matter.
And then we had the offering of my arch rival: Act 3 of The Killing of Sister George which I do not know at all but sounded like promising fare. This told the tale of an ageing soapstar who was being killed off – and this killing off was mirrored in her personal life as her long-standing relationship with a girl half her age crumbled around her ears. A cracking story and I’d like to read the whole and I awaited this final show with eager anticipation as I fully expected it to be astonishing. Disappointingly, it wasn’t quite. The actors were all pretty to very good but lacked chemistry in their relationships with each other. It was a great pity.
The adjudicator was much nippier about Saturday night’s shows than he’d been on the Friday. Perhaps because he was missing his daughter’s 18th. He grumbled his way through the feedback, the curtains swept shut and then the moment of shame where the hopefuls trudged back stage to stand awaiting our moment in the limelight at the prize giving. I plastered on my fake grin and hoped.
And it turned out alright. I don’t know if I quite agreed with the quantity of cups that Leitheatre got for Innesfree but that’s probably just being mean spirited. The "yes I thought so too" director - who I'd been very carefully pleasant to in the wings beforehand - somehow melted away the moment the curtains swept shut on the afterglow. And we’re going to Killin. I’ve always wanted to go to Killin. Apparently their catering is marvellous.
posted by Claire at 6:04 pm
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