Tuesday, 15 August 2006
Initial meeting with Sam Berger
by Tim Massey
Met Sam Berger, who's directing Salt'n'Sauce, in the Alma Tavern to talk over the script and the production. We smiled at the Alma's eccentric pricing policy – there seems to be an aversion to round figures with the price of a pint usually coming in at a few coppers above or below the nearest five or ten pence.
When we set up the meeting on Sunday, Sam said he had some ideas for the play, and I was a bit apprehensive about whether we'd have similar thoughts about its staging. I've got no directorial ambitions and feel that playwrights who direct their own work jettison an invaluable fresh perspective. In the same way that being open to feedback on your playwriting helps improve your scripts, having someone else direct is likely to bring about a better production simply on the two-heads-are-better-than-one principle. I suppose it's natural to have a few qualms about working with somebody new, but, checking through Sam's CV, I was encouraged by the fact that he'd chosen to direct a couple of my favourite plays in the past – Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane
It turned out that our thoughts for the production are very similar. Interestingly, Sam said that when he'd read my treatment for Salt'n'Sauce, he thought that its scope was too wide, but that the script had convinced him otherwise. He wondered what I thought the play was about: the rivalry between John and the unseen Crispin; the relationship between John and Paul; or the process of putting on a play on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. I said that the theme was the rivalry, as in Gore Vidal's quote: 'Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies,' or, as Morrissey
We also agreed on the portrayal of the characters. Sam said he thought that the clichéd approach would be to render John as an aggressive, embittered writer with Paul a screaming queen of a director, and he hoped to avoid these stereotypes. Having Paul played as a mincing monstrosity is something I'm keen to avoid and I told Sam that my feeling is that Paul is so much of a closet homosexual that he doesn't know himself that he's gay.
Another thing that needs to be underplayed is the fact that the play is a commentary on itself. Although I've written it so that the script draws attention to its existence as a play – to fit with the 'Inside Out' theme for Theatre West's autumn season this year – I'm keen that it's acted entirely naturalistically with the nods and winks to the audience remaining oblique. Sam agreed that the 'fourth wall' should stay firmly in place, saying that he favoured the Meisner school of acting, which is very naturalistic.
We went through the script and Sam gave me his notes on it. He came up with a great suggestion to give extra impact to a scene with a deliberately missed lighting cue and suggested some cuts here and there. I suggested that some of the weaker lines might be improved through improvisation in rehearsal – the actors might well be able to come up with something spontaneously that I couldn't better by wracking my brain.