Scratching the Surface
As part of the journey to reimagine and refine this piece, Hugh had factored in a 2-day rendezvous with the Ideas Lab at Theatre Royal Plymouth. This is a supportive platform for in-development work; the chance to show some of You, Me and My Voice to a live audience, alongside works-in-progress from other companies and artists. TRP’s subterranean Ideas Lab is where we, as a company, spent much of the weekend.
I was maybe too nervous about this process-within-a-process, which wewere to undertake with just 2 rehearsals of the current show incarnation under our collective belt. I am a nervous maker and performer whose creativity is underpinned by neuroses, as is the same for most people surely, but said neurosescan sometimes get a little upper-handy. As it turns out, scratching thepiece didn’t cure me of this, but it was entirely the right call. Youonly know what you are making when you leavethe rehearsal cocoon, to sense others sat in the dark around you, tunedin.
Not only was it valuable and sweet to spend more time as a fledgling gang, to go through something together and develop company in-jokes about being stalked by Calendar Girls (tax-dodging songster Gary Barlow’s new WI musical was playing upstairs in the theatre), but the driving journeys between home and Plymouth allowed for quiet thinking stretches. I usually listen to musicin the car, at the moment I’m exclusively playing just one gorgeous song on repeat, but the quiet of the road at night allowed me time to reflect on what we were doing down in Plymouth. I’d planned to turn in my first blog entry in the form of a song, but I had alot of thoughts over the weekend, so hopefully this collection of them is helpful. There will be music at the end– just not mine.
1 Tone
I appreciate performances, films, writings and songs which play with tonal or genre shifts. In its current form, YMMV seems to slip assertively between pathos (earned and vital) and comedy (subtle and slapstick). I think, if refined well, most of these left-turns will take listeners and watchers with them. It could be useful to talk at our next R and D session about tone, in terms of evenness and consistency. For instance, what sort of comedy is right for this piece? Comedy has its own subgenres too, and is notoriously difficult to get right in terms of timing and execution, so this might be a worthy question to ask. A joke that falls flat can hurt the contract between a performed piece and its audience, which would be a shame in this case. Ratherlike video projection elements, just because we can insert something (like a theatrical device or a joke or a gimmick) into a scene, does this mean that we automatically should? Sometimes less is so much more, and quietness can have as much an impact as music or cathartic laughter. The wonderfully stark third piece at Saturday’s Ideas Lab ‘Forget Me Not’ demonstrated this for me – its big theatrical “tilt moment” was all the more devastating for being withheld and deployed at the exactly the right time, and certainly because the rest of the piece was balanced so carefully around it. For me, some of the gentler, more naturalistic humour we’ve been discovering already shines and, on Saturday night, seemed to land well. How does this subtler, more nuanced stuff (sometimes contained within a glance or a barely-perceptible movement) sit alongside the more overtly slapstick material, or some of the more conventionally-jokier jokes in the script?
2 Tech
I love that we turned up with our tech sorted, only requiring one mic and lighting cue, and were a self-contained unit. This will make touring the piece so much easier, for both the venues and ourselves!
3 Content
At the start of our R and D process, I made an argument for this as more of a one man show, thinking that the focused and more granular listening required of an audience would work thematically well. In this redevelopment, it is still sort of a one-man show, with supporting characters brought in from the periphery at certain times to help (or hinder) the telling of the story. I think this feels right, now that each of the three supporting characters is symbolic of a different approach. This also harkens back to tutor feedback from South Devon College; the peripheral players help tell the meta-story of the characters in Hugh’s life, facilitating and supporting as best they can – even though we can’t get it right all the time.
This weekend reaffirmed for me how fantastic and unique it is that Jen is in this piece, exploring creatively what it means to work so closely with Hugh in her day-to-day life. I’m a fan of these narratives that blend the edges between real and devised worlds. Maybe it’s utterly important that audiences know who Jen is and what her twin roles are on the project. I almost wonder if the pre-show loop could start with the three supporting characters announcing who they are into the microphone and why they are onstage, so that the voices become layered together like a crowd, over which the music grows:-
(examples)
“Hi,I’m Jen and I have worked alongside Hugh, supporting him throughout his theatre degree and I am now in this theatre piece...”
“Hi, I’m Sophie and I studied at Uni alongside Hugh and I am a technician for his first post-graduate theatre piece...”
“Hi, I’m Steve and this is the third time I have worked with Hugh. I am scoring Hugh’s theatre piece...”
There is a moment in the narrative where Jen’s character acts incontravention to how real-world Jen would respond. This is the fitting of the device to Hugh’s chair, which is handled in a big, noisy, comedic (and potentially off-key) way. Can we have a closer look at this scene, in terms of tone and Jen’s role?
I’ve been thinking a lot about the story and I believe we’re getting to the core of it. This feels already like a mirror narrative. A game of two halves. I went to see Stewart Lee on his Content Provider tour last year and he started the show with an acerbic monologue about Brexit. After the intermission, he came back on and said exactly the same text but with different nouns, to talk about the rise of Trump. What we have in mind is a similar bait-and-switch, wherein Hugh attempts to restart the one-man show content as written, but in this instance his voice has been switched out with the synthetic one. The audience can perhaps hear the content more clearly, but the humanity has been lost. I have a feeling this will land well and I’m wondering about other ways the second half could interact with (or oppose) thefirst half.
4 Political
The piece takes risks in its opening gambit, with the deployment of pre-recorded sniggers and cruel jibes from a Bluetooth speaker concealed in the audience. Perhaps the company, like me, feel a responsibility to make this segment work somehow, without pushing it too far (leaving us open to the charge of punishing or making assumptions about our audiences) or not far enough (omitting to confront the ableist attitudes and policies that are clearly out there in the wild).
Two years ago a UN enquiry found that austerity measures in the UK amount to “systemic violations” of the rights of people with disabilities. Between 2016/17 and 2017/18 reported instances of online disability hate crime surged by a third. As the parent of a disabled child with invisible yet life-altering needs, my involvement with a project that runs in gleeful contravention to these menacing national trends feels therapeutic and comforting.
When we share our concerns with neighbours and friends over the threat a no-deal Brexit poses to the European-made medicines and devices that our daughter relies on to live, we become doubly anxious – as no one (not least the so-called government) can offer the succour or certainty we seek. The collective national shrug is as terrifying as the policy. In R and D we’d discussed these contemporary political relevancies – as it seems that one half of Britain has plainly stopped listening to the other. If that wasn’t disconcerting enough, these non-listeners seem happy to make a national spectacle of their shared regression. YMMV, with its questions about who we listen to and why, is inherently current, regardless of how explicitly or knowingly so.
5 Personal
Since last year and working on YMMV for the first time, I’ve been referred for potential diagnosis of a neuro developmental disorder that may have been there all along. I’m on a two-year waiting list to find out for sure. If this thing does exist in my brain (and some doubt whether ADHD even exists at all) then it could explain why I am able to hyper-focus on creative tasks (like this overlong and indulgent blogpost which I began writing seven hours ago) but find it so difficult to stay tuned in when listening is required in anything but a musical context, or when I have to wait my turn in a conversation or when a pedestrian is giving me directions through the car window. I also developed sensitive ears during our YMMV hiatus and, at the outset of this year, both of them stopped working correctly for way too long. We should never take for granted the ability (if we have it) to listen to what’s around us.
So the ears seem fixed, hopefully the mind will follow and it’s a just a privilege to be involved in this project, which is a real confluence of things for all of us. I can hear properly now (not just the low frequencies) and am presentand engaged in a way I haven’t been for a while. Above all, and without sounding too obvious or trite, Hugh is an inspiring project lead who goes to some nakedly raw, honest places in this performance. In doing so, he shows us how to do that too; so we can allow more of our true selves into the work.
6 Farewell Transmission
So that one song I’ve had on repeat, which just this week became my favourite song, I decided to play at the end of my car journey the othernight as I rolled back into the bay. It’s by the late Jason Molina (Songs: Ohia) and it’s called Farewell Transmission. It’s relevance to this project could be questionable or invented, save obviously for its very final moments, but please don’t skip to the end and allow yourselves seven or so beautiful minutes to LISTEN.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1WDnl6Nszg