writernet bulletin feature, December 2006
inside out at the alma
Theatre West is a Bristol-based new writing theatre company who annually present new work in a ten week season at the Alma Tavern. This autumn season took a different tack to those in previous years, with playwrights being commissioned to write on a particular theme. Tim Massey, one of the participating writers, shares the experience of Inside Out at the Alma.
Bristol's Theatre West has produced more new writing in recent years than any other company in the South West, building on its established reputation for working with writers by staging a ten-week season of five all-new plays at the Alma Tavern in Clifton every autumn since 2003. The company's joint artistic directors, Alison Comley and Ann Stiddard, are also responsible for creating the 50-seat pub theatre in the former function room upstairs at the Alma, which has provided an affordable home for Theatre West and other on-a-shoestring companies since 1997.
Theatre West received more than 120 submissions from across the country in its annual 'Search for a Script' in 2005, a phenomenal response leading to the gargantuan task of reading and sifting the entries to find five plays for production that autumn. To limit the workload this year, Alison and Ann decided to take the fresh approach of inviting 60 writers from the Bristol area to submit play treatments on the theme of 'Inside Out'. 40 of us put in 1500-word proposals for the four, hour-long slots on offer - the fifth play this year was The Voice That Keeps Silent, an experimental piece commissioned from David Carter - and the company chose nine of the treatments to be developed as full scripts.
I usually dislike writing to a set theme - it feels uncomfortably close to being given topics like 'What I did on my holidays' or 'Autumn Leaves' for composition exercises at junior school - but I had an idea for a play that fitted with 'Inside Out' without any spurious shoehorning. Salt'n'Sauce is a script I'd been turning over in my mind since taking a play to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe six years ago. Named after the condiments on offer in the Scottish capital's takeaways, it centres on a playwright who runs up a stellar credit card bill to mount a production of his play at the world's biggest arts festival, only to find that he's outclassed and overshadowed by his archrival. I thought that a play about a play, a drama about a drama, might be the sort of thing Alison and Ann were looking for, and they agreed, picking my treatment as one of the nine to take to the script stage.
I warmed to the theme in the seven weeks in June and July allotted for writing, realising that my script need not only be 'inside out' in the sense that it was about putting on a play, but I could exploit the fact that it was a play to reflect its theme as well. I'm keen to make my writing as accessible and with as broad an appeal as possible, and didn't want to be self-consciously self-referential or (God forbid!) post-modern, but I felt that there was definitely room to have some fun with the theatricals. With this in mind, I wrote a scene in which Salt'n'Sauce's fictional writer and director discuss a bungled lighting cue following a performance of the play within the play, concluding the scene with... a 'bungled' lighting cue. I also had the playwright commenting on some of the play's dialogue, and enjoyed implying that the script is closer to the truth than it really is by ending it with a reading of part of its first scene. Even if Salt'n'Sauce wasn't one of the four scripts picked for production, at least writing to the collective brief hadn't proved too painful.
While I did my best to be philosophical about my play's chances of making it into this autumn's Theatre West season, I was on tenterhooks about the final decision when the day of reckoning came at the end of July. The Alma is my favourite place to have a play produced - I like its bijou, boozy bonhomie, which makes it perfect for comedy. I helped produce two of my previous plays in the space, but was keen to work with the resident company, having already had a couple of scripts turned down by them in previous years. Alison and Ann deliberated down to the wire, and I was busy practising my magnanimous response to another script rejection when Ann called to say that Salt'n'Sauce was one of the four finalists and would have a ten-night outing between Halloween and Armistice Day.
Theatre West's full line-up this autumn featured two fellow Southwest Scriptwriters, Steve Hennessy and Mark Breckon, whose plays, The Inhabitants of the Moon are Noses and The Keith Ashton Experience, ran for a fortnight each from the end of September. Sarah Curwen's Eggshell Blues was next, followed by Salt'n'Sauce, with The Voice that Keeps Silent as the season's finale. The five plays that 'got away' (including Cowboys and Campers by Shiona Morton and Steve Lambert's Touch - two more Southwest Scriptwriters) received rehearsed readings in the Alma in mid-November.
Having only had just under two months to write Salt'n'Sauce with little time to get feedback or for rewriting, I was anxious to work on the script with its director to produce a polished version ready for rehearsals. Theatre West had several potential directors vying for the four plays and picked Sam Berger to take on mine. Sam's a local director with theatrical experience in Canada as well as a previous show at the Alma with his own company, Plain Clothes Theatre Productions. I Googled him and was pleased to find that his CV includes productions of a couple of my favourite plays - Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane
I met Sam in the Alma in mid-August to go through the script and get his feedback. Fortunately, we had similar ideas about its staging and spent much of the meeting agreeing with each other. Sam had several ideas for improving the script including a suggestion about the 'bungled' lighting cue scene - why not have the untimely black-out coinciding with some stage business instead of just cutting in on dialogue about bungled lighting cues? Of course! Why didn't I think of that?
Another fresh feature of the Inside Out season was that all five plays were to be performed by a 'rep' company of six actors. Auditions were held in St Werburgh's Community Centre at the end of August with would-be company members trailing from room to room to try out for the various plays. We auditioned using two scenes from Salt'n'Sauce - one in which Paul, the megalomaniac director, berates Emily, the recent-drama-school-graduate stage manager, for her part in a rogue curtain call, and another set outside a ceilidh where John, the playwright, warns Paul that his cast will mutiny if he isn't nicer to them. It was useful to hear some of the script performed for the first time and a relief that it came off the page pretty well - I felt that the scene outside the ceilidh was a bit flat, though, and needed some changes to lift it.
The season's five directors gathered at the end of the day's auditions, clutching shortlists, for the potentially invidious task of picking the pool of six actors. Negotiations were amicable, though, and there weren't many trade-offs between first and second choices to get to a mutually agreeable cast list. Sam and I were pleased that the line-up for Salt'n'Sauce was close to our ideal casting with Paul Mundell as John and Simon Winkler as Paul. Some last-minute personnel changes in the weeks following the auditions meant that we also landed Joanne Lancastle, who had been our first choice for Emily.
The 'rep company' approach meant that there was a chance to see Simon and Paul in action together before rehearsals for Salt'n'Sauce began. Both appeared in Mark Breckon's The Keith Ashton Experience, in which Simon, as the eponymous class-warrior-cum-lifestyle-guru, dismantled the bourgeois prejudices of Paul in the guise of self-satisfied yuppie, Jez, who was apparently plucked at random from the audience. Sam saw the show a couple of times and took notes on the actors' respective strengths.
Given the chance, I'd have rewritten the script right up to going into rehearsal, but the actors were anxious to have a final draft so that they could make some headway with learning their lines. Most of the revisions from the version accepted for production in July were nips, tucks and tweaks in the dialogue, but I'd changed the 'bungled lighting cue' scene so that the black-out fell just as the character Paul, undressing for a shower, dropped his underpants. The fictional director's striptease fed nicely into the storyline as he also intimidates John, the playwright, with his near-nudity.
Whether or not it's worth a playwright's while to attend every rehearsal of his or her play is a moot point. The director needs to establish a rapport with the actors, and having the author lurking in the background doesn't necessarily help with this. I showed up at the first couple of rehearsals for Salt'n'Sauce, but work commitments meant that I could only make those held at weekends afterwards. My sporadic view of the process gave me a sort of 'time-lapse' take on it, with developments in the performances showing up in sharper relief than if I'd been at all of the rehearsals. Sam and the cast made several judicious cuts in the script - some of which I didn't notice until I'd seen the show a few times - and the 'missed lighting cue' scene was shaping up nicely with Simon getting seriously aggressive in his underpants. The ceilidh scene that had seemed lacklustre at the auditions scrubbed up well too. I'd relocated it to the party itself and Paul and Simon did a good impression of being in a crowded bar by huddling close together in the middle of the otherwise empty stage. By the time the two-week rehearsal period was over, it felt that all the performance lacked was an audience.
In his version of the Four Tops
Turnouts dipped a little on the second and third nights, but the small space seems full even with fewer people in, and the audiences responded animatedly, buoying the show up. On the run's first Friday, it seemed that the performance had sold out. There was a stand-by list and several people were turned away at the box office, but some no-shows meant that there were a few empty seats. I was expecting the performance to go down a storm based on previous form, but the atmosphere evaporated. An elderly man in the audience spent the first fifteen minutes of the show sighing and yawning conspicuously and then fell asleep, filling the theatre with his heavy, regular breathing. This caused much unintended irony in the final scene in which, at a wake of a last-night party in an Indian restaurant, the play's beleaguered playwright complains about how most of the residents of a local retirement home attending his final performance needed the toilet several times during the show - apart from the one who was asleep. As if to heap irony on irony, a woman in the front row left the theatre across the stage to use the loo during this scene - life imitating art imitating life.
A play about a play that's a flop is an open goal for any reviewer wanting to be less than complimentary about it. The majority of Salt'n'Sauce's clutch of reviews were positive, though, with the Bristol Evening Post describing the play as, 'Well written, snappy and funny [...] required viewing for anyone involved in writing or performing for the theatre.' A glowing notice on the BBC Bristol website added that it was 'bursting with witty quips and brave self-mockery [...] a wee gem of a play,' but another Bristolian publication couldn't resist the urge to put a predictable boot into the exposed underbelly, concluding that the audience spent the play 'as underwhelmed as the protagonists.'
Audiences demonstrated their indifference by laughing and applauding loudly and leaving relentlessly positive comments on the feedback sheets. The show fulfilled its early promise and became the box office hit of the Inside Out season with turnouts averaging 38 (76%). The run concluded with two standing-room-only performances, meaning that I had to watch the show from the lighting gantry at the back of the theatre. The production had to contend with Bonfire Night - both as a rival attraction and with firework explosions pounding outside - which made me wonder ruefully if the audience figures might not have been even better if it weren't for that pesky Guy Fawkes.
Turning things Inside Out worked well for Theatre West and the season gave me my third memorable Alma experience.
tim massey
Tim Massey is a playwright and artistic director of Southwest Scriptwriters - Bristol's leading group for writers of drama for all media. You can find further information on Salt'n'Sauce, including Tim's blog of the Theatre West production at www.saltnsauce.com.
Theatre West's website is www.theatre-west.co.uk and Southwest Scriptwriters' online home is at www.southwest-scriptwriters.co.uk.