Music

We all had a great day in rehearsal. Lots done and some good creative breakthroughs. But of all the great things there was one stand-out totally incredible and beautiful great thing, thanks to Mr Eddie McGuire.

I wrote the other day that Eddie was off writing a culminating piece. He arrived with it at lunchtime yesterday (Tuesday) after having had his brief on Friday. While we took Eddie for a bowl of soup in the CCA cafe Katie read through the score. So, Eddie wrote this piece in just a few days and Katie had about 30 minutes to read the score. Eddie gave Katie some thoughts on tempo and then she began.

The piece lasts about 4 minutes and at the end of it I was welling up, Katherine was too. It is the most beautiful and powerful piece of music. Eddie has taken all the emotion of the play and concentrated it into those few minutes. It is wonderfully powerful on the alto-flute. As it builds in waves the characters and elements of Sanna portrayed in ‘Only the Men’ are revealed and flung at the ear. Eddie is a genius! I wish I could write more but my vocabulary is limited by not giving away the purpose of the music in the play.

Katie played it twice, did an astonishing and powerful job with the tiny amount of time she had to familiarise herself with the piece, and managed to get heartburn.

When Katherine and I set up Reeling & Writhing one of our biggest goals was to create theatre that used music to propel the performances with and as much as the text. We want to capitalise upon the inherent physical performance in the creation of music as well as the music itself. We are not seeking a soundtrack to the words but for a musical experience as well as a textual one. We want our musicians to be seen and to be appreciated for their contribution in the same way as the actors. And most of all we want to use the capacity of music to reach new emotional intensities and expressions. ‘Only the Men’ will be a very big step forward to achieving that goal.

Thank you Eddie, and Katie.

Rehearsal

Two things are happening: in a bright, timbered floor office at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow the show is coming to life, and in a dark and cold old shop on the Saltmarket, also of Glasgow, everything else is happening. In their own ways both of these hold great excitement. The glamour of the rehearsal room is obvious but the tour itself is fascinating as it takes on colour beyond the overall shape we have known about for a while.

The composer Eddie McGuire was in rehearsal on Friday to see some samples of how his work is being used and to discuss the brief for his last piece of work. It was impossible for us to have an accurate idea of what the music needed to do at the climax, denouement, of the show so Eddie agreed to write this piece during rehearsal. Prior to rehearsal Eddie wrote eight pieces that each represented a character or an element of the geography of Sanna. While writing I took inspiration from this music, and there is a very important scene that would not have existed if it had not been for that inspiration. Katherine has then been working with the eight pieces of music and the text to find the overall progression of the play. Ironically the scene that was inspired by Eddie’s music has now outgrown the original piece and we’ve asked Eddie to write a much bigger piece of music for it. Eddie remains a marvel. His music and attitude to his art are fantastic.

We’ve had a couple of crises, all resolved happily. Not least is the change of venue when we discovered we were double booked with a country dancing class at a particular venue. The class is a long term booking that took precedence and we got the shove. Thankfully the promoter that booked us found an alternative. We’re now in what may prove to a better venue than the former, a converted church, that’s beautiful but would have always been a headache to have squeezed the show into. These are the things that happen. Ah well.

It is very difficult to describe the buzz you get from watching everything fall into place for a show. Amazing.

Fenella’s back!

Fenella’s back, and she’s stronger, fitter and lost the wobble. She’s now in the office and waiting for the off. Of course, she doesn’t actually do much more than wait. It’s what she does. Fenella is our sheep, and she’s stuffed.

The real problem with writing this blog is how much can I write without giving away the content of the show. Hmmm…

Well, here’s a couple of reasons for how the show came to exist in the first place:

1. When I was about 9 I wrote a short story at primary school. At this age I was addicted to horror stories and had a growing collection, many of which came from a mail order ‘club’ that was promoted from the school. The collections of horror stories were the only books that varied – the remainder of the monthly catalogue was a rotating list that included ‘Stig of the Dump’, ‘Down With Skool’ and some girlie books. My reading was taken with blood, gore and ghosties. However, in amongst the things-that-went-bump was the occasional Edgar Allan Poe or Saki. This smattering of existentialism influenced my own writing and the short story was a thriller narrated by the victim of a murder. My teacher had the audacity to return the story, explaining to me that this was impossible as the narrator was dead. I tried to explain to him that this was not a problem as the short story was FICTION. The teacher didn’t relent and I had my first experience of looking someone of authority in the eye and thinking ‘DONKEY’. This play is, to a certain extent, my thumbing of my nose to Mr XXXXX of Barnham Primary School.

2. At a time of exhaustion a while back, Katherine and I went to Ardnamurchan to recuperate. We found all of the relaxation we could possibly have wanted, and natural beauty, and the poetic landscape and exoticism that only the Scottish landscape can offer. We were inspired. Then we got to Sanna Bay and the stream of emotional reaction became intense. It is an incredible place. I have travelled all over the world and only in a handful of places have I felt such an immediate and wonderful connection. I started making jottings in a notebook while I was there and continued to do so after I left.
Back at home I read some books bought in Kilchoan – ‘Nightfalls on Ardnamurchan’ by Alasdair Maclean and ‘Ardnamurchan – Annals of the Parish’. While the latter is a fantastic history of the region it was the former that inspired me to write more fully. ‘Only the Men’ is a fiction but I have Mr Maclean to thank for the setting for the play, and the timing. And I hope he will forgive me for replacing him and his father with a new son and father, who go through their own stories rather his factual ones.
Some of the incidents in ‘Only the Men’ were derived from anecdotes in the book, and others from people who live in the area that I subsequently interviewed, from other sources and from my own upbringing on a small-holding.
One of the characters was derived from an anecdote in ‘Nightfalls on Ardnamurchan’. And that’s Fenella, the house sheep. More of her and other things later.

Trying to write, first festival show of 2007 and the CCA

Fenella’s away. She arrived and then she went back. A chiropody problem unfortunately. Hopefully she’ll be back next week, so watch this space.

In the meantime, I’m trying to make some time to write. The office has many demands at the moment and I’m not getting creative time. I’m not getting stressed about it yet but something has to give by next week. This, unfortunately, is the world of the under-funded theatre company – keeping way too many balls in the air at any one time and taking on everything that needs doing when you want to just be doing the thing you should be doing. Still, beats working in MacDonalds.

Went to to private showing of ‘England’ by Tim Crouch last night. Clearly going to be a hot ticket for the festival and justifiably. I’m not a critic so I won’t do a quasi review here but I’m very happy to say it is fantastic and go if you can.

Tonight’s the launch of this year’s Creative Lab at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow. I helped to select the participants in the round so I’ll definitely be there, and we have a slot to develop and start ‘Only the Men’. The CCA really is in recovery now after the mess last year (went bust!). It’s fantastic to see the building being used and it’s getting busy with some great art. The cafe is a thousand times more accessible than it was before the crisis and everything seems much more comfortable and relaxed. I don’t know how they’re doing with getting people in there to see the work, but hopefully there’ll be more and more getting in there soon. The David Rokeby exhibition should be a cracker. The Creative Lab should be feeding in new work. Most of the artists for this year are local and their work will start appearing at the CCA or other venues in Scotland soon.

Back with news of Fenella soon.

Tim Nunn