Friday, December 22, 2017

So that's a first draft printed off and about to be despatched to my AD for its first ever reading.

If you're speaking to me in seven to eight months' time, remind me not to think that trying to do a full time job and write a script for a full length Fringe show to a deadline is a good idea.

Friday, December 01, 2017

Occasionally, work and my eventime pursuit cross paths with wonderful serendipity. A few months back, I found myself sat in the boardroom at work opposite the table from the combined marketing wisdom and the new artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland. If I were a dog, I'd have leapt and spun and frothed at the mouth. As I'm not, I settled for trying to hurl as many show titles at the poor unsuspecting things ("yes, this is our job. Who TF is this wannabe??" they must have burst to say).

This turned into us at the agency trying to come up with some stuff that might be useful to them in their new artistic director Jackie Wylie's inaugural season with the company. Which has been like living my fantasy life as Ms Wylie's sense of what theatre should be seems eerily in line with my sense of what theatre should be. (I'm ashamed to even write this as she is she and I am just living in hope of being better.) She's taking their premise, Theatre Without Walls, and giving it a good shake down. She's wanting to make it political with a little p and topical and promenadey and site-specificy and it all just sounds marvellous. Audacious theatre, she spoke of, and I wanted to stand up and clap. 

The season launched last night at their shiny new premises, Rockvilla, with our blue and our pink and our very bright yellow. And they were all out. All the glitterati of Scottish theatre. Luckily I was there with a colleague so I had to contain my impulse to gibber like a fool. But there's Fergus from EIF. And all the marketing team from EIF. (Oh the shame when their marketing man remembered me and I remembered tens of minutes too late that he had been wonderful as we navigated through a laborious development process for some other campaign some at least ten years ago.) There's my hero and I want to be her Cora Bissett. There's that man who is obviously someone I should know as I see him everywhere and he looks really cool and kind. There's the cast of Rocket Post on stage.There's Adura Onashile. And oh, over by the sausage rolls, there's David Greig. Just standing about like a normal person, chatting away, just like a normal person and not an amazing god of the pen (or keyboard).

I quietly gathered up my obscurely large bag of stationery. (For who wouldn't want to take a large bag of stationery to a launch party?) And slipped away into the night.