In the spirit of my previous post, and because I’ve already released a couple of these photos under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence, I’ve decided to post a few of photos I took at the West End Live event last weekend.  I’ll try to do this more often when I take my camera out just for fun.

All photos are Copyright 2010 Carreg.  Indicated images are licenced under a CC-BY-3.0 licence (attribution to Carregs-Blog.co.uk, please), for licencing of other images (as well as details of further images) please contact fluttphotographic.com.

I expect (kind of hope) a few days will be occupied by the Grim North stuff. It’s my one (perhaps two) chances each year to stretch my lighting design legs.  Lighting was something I did quite a bit of when I was younger in one way or another, and I really love.  At one stage I considered training to work as a theatre lighting designer, but it never happened.  I also do their photos for them.  I’ve read the script a couple of times now, but to be honest still no idea what’s going on.  (This is the same as last year.  Then only having seen it a few times did I begin to get the hang of it. I don’t know how anyone watching it once could possibly have understood it).  I’m hoping that I’ll get chance to talk to the director about his artistic direction at some point early in the week, then on Wednesday night I’m going to attend one of their rehearsals to see how they play it out.  By this time I’m going to have to have some idea of how I’m going to light the thing and will, hopefully just be finalising ideas by then.  I’m told we’ll have time in the theatre on Thursday for rigging and focussing, but it’s not confirmed yet.  If we don’t then we’re going to have real problems.  The company is in the theatre 6-10pm on the Friday when the plan is to have a block run and, hopefully, a quick tech run.  This doesn’t leave much time for anything else.  They are looking to hire a small space in Hebden Bridge on Saturday to do some final polishing, which hopefully I’ll be able to shoot, as I’ll have finished everything else by then (to be honest even if not there’s not much I can do by that stage), before being in the theatre 6-10 on Saturday and Sunday.  I think the show goes up at 7.30 so I’ll have an hour and a half to, hopefully, relax before each night.

One problem with this company is they don’t have anyone there all the time who is technical.  When they book the venue they don’t give any thought to when any kind of technical get-in might happen, so when I turn up and ask about it, it always seems to take them by surprise.  Along the same lines they don’t have many people with professional theatre experience, although there are some who have trained professionally, and certainly no one who has experience back stage, so no one thinks about the general house work needed around the theatre, so I end up doing all that too.  It gets a bit hectic.  I’m hoping this year will be a bit different – the production team have more experience and I gather there will even be a stage manager.  It could be all different.

Either way, I think I’m looking forward to it.  Despite the hard work last year, I really enjoyed it.  I’ll let you know how we get on.

I’m at Wakefield Westgate now.

One of the things I’ve been doing which has been getting in the way of writing this is re-vamping a website for my brother.  He’s part of a group which run a large Blood Bowl league and last year I made a site which they used to manage the league tables and match reports.  They’ve grown a lot in the last season and now need the site to manage a lot more complicated things than it did previously.  This involves doing quite a bit of rebuilding of the output and processing side of things although at least I can reuse a lot of the back-end code.  I got the brief and some design documents a good few weeks ago and the deadline is the end of September.  In my mind that’s quite a while away, so I haven’t been too bothered about rushing with it (in fact it’s probably fair to say I did nothing for a long time, to be honest).  Occasionally my brother would give me a nudge about it, and I’d say something like “yeah, it should be ok” or “I did some last night, I’ll have something to show you soon”.  After a while I started to run out of excuses and had to do some work.  I worked late on the Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday night and then emailed him with a basic version of the site.  This seems to have worked — he did say something about being worried about the deadline in his reply — but at least it’s put his mind at rest that I actually am doing something.  I suppose I should do some more soon.  Maybe tomorrow and Thursday.

I can’t do any on Friday because I’m off to build a set with Miss T.  She rang me while I was out with Mr P and Miss C last night and we had a long chat.  I’m glad she rang — I’d been worried following a short conversation on Friday night.  I’ll write about that more soon, but Sunday’s conversation ended up with me offering to help her build the set for the upcoming Sedos production of One Flew Over The Cookoo’s Nest.  I think it’ll be quite fun — certainly better being with her than being stuck at home all bank weekend by my self (Miss D will be off at Mr T’s parent’s house) — if a little tiring.  I’m meeting her on Friday night in London and staying at her house so we can get a whole day’s work in on Saturday and Sunday.  I’m not quite sure what I’ve let myself in for, but I’ll let you know how things go.

Talking about art, I’ve been following the events up on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in the last few months.  The One & Other project is a living art installation consisting of a different person occupying the plinth for an hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week through until October.  There’s a live web stream so you can watch and listen to the person up there from the comfort of your own home.  It’s been quite interesting.  Some of the people are certainly art while some I’d wonder.  I think, in general, it’s got better as time has gone on with more people being creative than just sitting reading a book.  Having said that it is supposed to be a reflection of the UK at the moment, so I do believe that sitting quietly is a perfectly acceptable thing to do… it’s just not very exciting to watch!  There’s a very interesting collection of photos building up on Flickr of the project.  I’ve also been following the project on Twitter.

Talking of Twitter, I’ve jumped on that band wagon.  All being well you’ll see the latest tweet at the top of the front page of this blog.  I find it’s quite good just to drop random thoughts on to — small thoughts I just want to put out there but don’t necessarily have anyone around to say them to.  I know a lot of people who have Twitter accounts — most of my friends are on there — but having connected it to this anonymous blog I can’t really follow them.  That’s a bit of a shame, I’d certainly be able to have more friends, but it’s a choice I made to carry on being able to write this blog without feeling restricted.  If you’d like to add me then please do — @CarregsBlog.  I might, at some stage, add another account as the real me (although all my normal usernames seem to have been taken, so I’ll have to come up with something else), but I’m not really sure what I’d write on that one!

I think that’ll do for now.  I’ve lots more to write about, but at least that gets some of it out of the way.  Sorry I’ve been so useless.  I’ll try harder from now on, at least for a little while, I promise.

We arrived at the venue at 6pm and found it already open.  Inside there were two people and a very friendly dog.  One of the people, their lighting man, was up a ladder trying his best to cover up the set which had been built on stage with their black drapes – we had been promised a black box, so he was aiming for that with mixed success.

Ben and I had travelled to Hebden Bridge together on the train from his house where we’d had a chat about the play and my ideas for lighting it.  We were shortly joined by Nick, a friend who Ben had met at university, and who in the past had done the lighting for the company.  I wasn’t sure exactly how things were going to work with the two of us – I knew he would be around Thursday and for the show on Friday but not for the show on Sunday, and I wasn’t sure exactly how far his experience and knowledge stretched – so I thought best to play it by ear.  I’d already come up with some ideas from seeing the previous day’s rehearsal and had a list of what I wanted in order of preference depending on what was available at the venue.

After a quick chat with the people there we were shown around the box and told how to switch the kit on.  I asked a few questions about what we could do and the capabilities of the venue, and then we set to rigging and focussing.  At first we planned only to use the bars at the side of the auditorium to light down stage and the bars on stage to light up stage simply because of the time and effort of getting to the two front of house bars, but this plan changed after we noticed one of the luminaries FOH did not have a safety chain and we had no choice but to get a ladder up to it anyway!

We spent about three and a half hours rigging, with me taking charge, until we thought we had something reasonable to work with (at which point I also felt a bit aware of the fact the theatre tech was also still there, and we were eating up his evening!).  I took a few notes of the sockets we had plugged in to, the type of control board we were going to be working with, and took a quick look at the patch in the gallery and we left.  The plan was to work out a reasonable patch and get hold of an offline editor for the desk so I could programme it the next day during rehearsals.  Unfortunately things weren’t quite as straight forward as I had hoped…

I joined the company today in their rehearsal space and watched a run through of the piece, taking notes as to what I’d like to do.

I have some ideas but there’s one problem – I haven’t been to the theatre it’s playing (the Hebden Bridge Little Theatre) in since I was about 11, Ben’s not been able to get any kind of technical contact there, and we have an hour and a half in the space tonight to get ourselves sorted – rigging, focussing, plotting, etc.  All I know of the technical specification is that last time Ben went he thinks he saw a computer screen in the box.  If this wasn’t bad enough when I spoke to Ben quickly today about it he said he wasn’t even sure if we were going to be able to move anything and that we might just have to ‘make do with what was there’.

That’s not really good enough for me.  I need to do the best I can.  I need to make sure it’s right and I’m willing to put the hours in – I’ve said that if the problem with access to the venue is because people don’t want to hang around with keys then I’ll take responsibility and get the keys back to them once we’re done or the next day when the show goes up.  I’m willing to stay all night if we can make it right.  Unfortunately I suspect it’s more complicated than that.

So, later today, armed with notes, I’m going to meet Ben and we’re going to talk through what we both want out of it.  Then we’re going to go to the theatre and see how much of those plans we can actually do.  And I’ll let you know.

I guess it means something that when it’s a choice between theatre and anything else theatre always wins.  This has always been the case, and when I dropped out of university I think I must have realised it (at least subconsciously, although at the time I thought I was just looking for something totally different from what I had been doing) – I applied to take a course at RADA.  I didn’t get in, they said I lacked industry experience (which seems odd given they’re job is to teach people things they’ll need to get into the industry!).  I think this knocked me back into thinking it was a silly idea (I’ll admit it was a bit of a long shot anyway) and I got on and made the life I live now.

In the last year these thoughts have crept up on me a bit.  I blame Miss T – through her I’m experiencing working in theatre.  She tells me about her days and what she’s had to deal with, we go to shows together and sit there commenting on things we’ve spotted, and we’ve even sat there reading the same script talking about how we see the scene being set.

And you know what?  I love it.

Part of me wishes I didn’t.  I want to go and be involved, I want to spend my day’s like Miss T does surrounded by it, working on it, making it all come together.  But I can’t just do that.  I can’t just drop what I have and do that, it doesn’t work like that.

I spoke to Miss T today on the phone and she said that, one day, we’ll both be working in the West End, and we’ll finish our shows and head to the clubs where only those working in London theatre can go, together.  It’s fantasy, it’ll never happen… and yet she tells me it can, that I just have to get myself together and make it happen.  Perhaps she’s right, but I don’t think I know how to go about it.  Or maybe I don’t think I can go about it.

Either way, for the next 4 days, I’m in that world.  It may only on the very outer fringe, but I’m involved, and I’m going to put everything I can into it.  Because this is what I really, really want to do.

The weekend drinks were supposed to be for Miss D’s birthday.  We’d already kind of had birthday on her actual day, but given it was in the middle of the week and Mr T was working they decided to go for a few drinks with people on the Saturday afterwards.  It took place at our usual pub in Guildford.  I went on the train while everyone else except Mr P came in Mr T’s car.  I met Mr P at the station and we walked to the pub together.  It was the first time Mr P and I had seen each other since the new year, so we talked about what we had done over Christmas and I told him about my new year’s resolution and the Press Club.  Once we arrived at the pub we got a table, and then people changed their mind about the table so we moved.  And then they changed their mind again and we changed back.  Shortly afterwards they changed their minds again and we moved for one final time.  The rest of the evening went pretty much without hitch.  I sat between Mr P and his brother and oposite Miss D.  I talked mainly to them because they were the people I knew most.  It did strike me as the evening went on, however, that other than me it was really just a group of Mr T’s friends.  Granted Miss D’s friends are either busy with babies or further away than was practical, but it was still all Mr T’s friends.  In fact Miss D said something in the following days about feeling she wished there were more girls there to talk to.  I suppose there wasn’t much anyone could do.  On the way back home as I was walking with Mr P back to the station after the rest of them had gone off to the car park he said he sensed some tension between Mr T and I.  I’m not really sure why, I thought it had gone OK and I’d pretty much managed to avoid saying too much to him.  I guess either it’s more obvious than I realised, or he just read that into it because he knows what I’ve told him before.

So that was that weekend.  The next weekend (last weekend) I got a text from Mr P saying that Miss C was over from France and asking if I would like to meet up with them on Saturday and maybe go to the theatre.  Always being up for the theatre, and very happy to see Miss C again, I said I would.  Unfortunately Miss D was off seeing Mr T that weekend (she sees him every weekend and Miss C not very often, but still.  Miss C’s going to be back in about 3 weeks when I’m told it’s Mr T’s birthday so there’ll no doubt be a collection of his friends going out for that which we’ll all go to) so it was just me.  I met them at Embankment tube just after 4, just in time to see a protest march going past along the Embankment.  I’m not sure what they were protesting about, and I didn’t have my camera so I didn’t bother investigating too much.  We walked to the discount Tkts booth in Leicester Square to see what shows were still available and decided to go with Buddy, the Buddy Holly musical.  Both Mr P and I had seen the touring version a number of years ago and were happy to go again while Miss C hadn’t seen it at all.  The show went up at 7.30 so we headed to find a bar.  We went to a nice place near Covent Garden and chatted until it was time to head to the theatre.

The show wasn’t quite what I remember (or the touring version has more story telling).  I still enjoyed it, and I think I’d go again if someone else wanted to.  It’s supposed to tell the story of Buddy Holly’s life, but the story telling is a little thin on the ground.  The first half takes you from an appearance on the radio of The Crickets as a country band through them recording their hit singles, Buddy’s marriage, the band’s break up and on to the final tour.  The second half turns the audience in the theatre into the audience at Holly’s last concert in Clear Lake with The Big Bopper and Richie Valens in 1959.  It’s more like seeing a tribute band than a musical.  Buddy’s death is treated handled very poignantly if briefly and it seemed to genuinely take some people by surprise (“shit” said one lady behind us with honest surprise when the VO said what had happened).  The thing closes with a big reprise of Oh Boy.  It does make you leave with a smile on your face.

Sitting next to me were a couple of foreign girls and sitting next to Mr P were another couple of girls one of which caught my eye a few times during the show.  I’m sure she was looking at me, and she wasn’t unattractive either.  I thought maybe I might be able to find out if she really was interested during the interval, but she seemed to be buried in her programme with her friend so I summised she wasn’t.  On the way out she was standing in front of the theatre waiting for her friend when we came out, and again she caught my eye.  So I don’t know what she thought — perhaps she was as shy as me and that’s why she hid during the interval — but I am liking the attention my new look seems to be attracting.  Just got to keep it up and I think I’ll be well on track to managing my new year’s resolution!

I don’t feel well.  Headache, sore throat, stiff joints and it hurts to move my eyes very far.  And yet I still go and do things.  And yet I still do silly things which, it would be obvious to anyone remotely sensible, would only make things worse.  I went to see KJ.  I don’t mean that itself is a bad thing, simply that when I see KJ I stay up far too late and when I do go to bed sleep on the floor of the lounge (this time I had the added bonus of a mattress, not just on the sofa).  Last night we stayed up until 4am.  Not because we were hard at work doing productive things, not because we were out living it up in the capital, but because we have this urge to do statistical analysis on all night television stations.  There are lots on Sky.  Last night was the turn of Kerrang TV, an automated music television station where you can call and text and request things for them to play – you know the kind I mean.

The problem: “Between the hours of 3am and 5am, with no other people requesting music, how long does it take before a request is played?”  The methodology is simple: request a track and see when they play it.  The answer is also pretty simple, and before the true results were revealed we had already proposed it: 1 hour.  Almost exactly.  The snag with the investigation was the time we begun it – in true researcher style (OK, university paper maybe) we submitted our requested track, Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend, at 3.25am.  KJ stuck with it until about 4.10am and then folded, I however stayed watching to the bitter end – 4.26( + the length of the track)am.  No wonder I’m ill.

Earlier in the evening we had been to the theatre – the West End transfer of the Menier Chocolate Factory’s Little Shop Of Horrors.  It was very good.  The last time (and only other time) I saw it was way back when my brother was in the chorus (and either 1st or 2nd year) at school, I was still at primary school.  It’s a fun musical and made all the better for having Sheridan Smith (Janet, 2 Pints of Larger and a Packet of Crips) as Audry and Alestair McGowen (various impressionist type programmes) as Orven and assorted other roles once he’s fed to the plant.  To be fair the whole cast was very good – Mushnik, the Ronettes, even the plant – all gave first class performances.  Was it worth £90?  Well, that’s a good question.  I’d recommend seeing it, and cheaper tickets are available (though we wandered into the upper circle during the interval and the view does leave a lot to be desired) but you’ll have to book in advance.  Unlike us.

During the interval, while we were discussing the use of intelligent fixtures in a theatrical setting, a young man came up to us and asked to see our programme.  I was reluctant (it wasn’t mine and he might have run off with it!), but it turned out he only wanted to know if the girl playing Audry was really Ms Smith – his girlfriend had said it was, he thought it wasn’t.  We were able to confirm this and he went happily on his way.  It was at this point it crossed my mind how much like old theatre hacks we must have looked.  It’s the interval, we are standing in the corner with our drinks, wearing our long back coats, discussing the finer points of the sound and lighting design.  If only I’d taken my copy of the stage…

Of course I did go to see it to evaluate it’s artistic merit.  KJ didn’t.  He proved it at the box office: while I was paying I made a few light hearted remarks to the ticket lady – “oh I see, I’m paying now he isn’t able to get his student discount”, “I only sat over there so as not to have to pay” – and she chuckled.  Then KJ turns to her and says “it is Sheridan Smith in tonight’s performance, isn’t it?”.  “Yes”, says she, “the only understudy tonight is [one of the Ronettes]“, “now it all comes out, you’re only here to see “the only cast member being played by an understudy is [one of the Ronettes]“.  “I see, so you only want to see it to see her!” I exclaim.  To this the ticket lady remains stoney faced: a that’s not funny; that’s perverse kind of look.  We took our tickets and left.