So here’s a little teaser for our upcoming show ‘The Secret Agent’. The footage is taken from our work-in-progress showing, mixed with the brilliant work of Paddy Molloy who also put the teaser together. The music is from William Basinski’s album, ‘Melancholia’.
We’re making the show in June so this isn’t intended to show the finished product – just to give you a sense of where we might be going…
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We are absolutely and unconditionally thrilled to be able to announce that the people at the Arts Council, they said YES!
This means that we have the go ahead to make ‘The Secret Agent’ this year. We’ll post details later, but for now we’d just like to share how excited we are that this has happened. Although we’ve been developing work here and there over the last 3 years, this will be our first full production since Delirium.
We’d like to thank all those who’ve been helping us prepare for this and have shown faith and belief that we’d get to this point. We’d particularly like to thank the wonderful Lucy Moore and the amazing work she put into the application. We’re very excited to be working with her on this project and it feels like the start of something very special.
Here’s to an amazing 2013.
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I think that the last time we posted anything was last September – well I know it was, I can see from the date on the next post down!
We’ve been incredibly busy since then with various projects. We’ve both been doing a lot of freelance work as well as, of course, working hard with the amazing Lucy Moore to get our Arts Council application in for ‘The Secret Agent’… We’ll find out about that by the end of this month. Lucy worked incredibly hard on it and did a great job. As well as the Young Vic co-producing the piece, she also pulled in the Warwick Arts Centre as a partner. We have a nearly complete creative team and can’t wait to get on with the show. Fingers crossed!
In my movement director guise, I worked with David Lan on ‘Blackta’ at the Young Vic. It was the first play by Nathaniel Martello White. The whole thing was a lot of fun – a great team and a great atmosphere in the room – I can honestly say that I enjoyed every day that I was there. It was also great to be working on a show in the theatre where we’ll perform ‘The Secret Agent’ in September – it was incredibly useful to get a sense of the space and more importantly to get to know the team at the Young Vic who were amazing!
After that I started working on Hansel & Gretel with Katie Mitchell at the National Theatre – the production is still running (until the 26th Jan I think) and is aimed at 6-10 year olds. It’s the the 3rd show for children that I’ve made with Katie – it wasn’t without it’s challenges but I think that the end result is a lot of fun. It’s been a really great thing to work on these shows, I think particularly since we’ve had children of our own – making productions that Laszlo at least has been able to come and see. I suppose that Wilhelmina will get to see the next one, whatever that is! Get along and see Hansel & Gretel if you get the chance – as well as the more known aspects of the story you get to see Stuart the Bat and Rostislav the talking oven!
Next up Carolina was cast in Phyllida Lloyd’s all female production of Julius Caesar at the Donmar Warehouse. Caro is fantastic in it – she brings a focus and commitment that is remarkable – definitely worth catching if you can. The piece itself is good – fascinating – the all female part of it becomes unnoticeable after a few minutes, but continues to bring useful and exciting perspectives on a play that is predominantly about male behaviour. I’m not convinced that the concept of the prison is thoroughly followed through, but it’s a great production and a welcome change from what has been the regular Donmar fare for so many years.
(there she is, watching the TV in the front row)!
Finally we’re both working as movement directors on the RSC’s Hamlet, directed by David Farr. It’s great to see yet another director at work – great because it throws my/our process into relief – between David Farr, David Lan and Katie Mitchell I’ve been able to observe incredibly different approaches whilst having a strong creative input myself. I haven’t worked on any Shakespeare in a long time, so that’s also a very useful thing to expose myself to. In this case I have a directing job to do towards the end of February (more on that later), so Carolina is going to take over from me once she has finished at the Donmar.
But of course, most of all, we are excited to be getting on with our own work, whether ‘The Secret Agent’, the Sinfonietta Project (Gallup Memo) or developing ‘Sheriff’. There’s so much that we want to get on with and bring all these different experiences of the last couple of years to. Here’s hoping they all work out!
We look forward to seeing you over the course of the year.
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It had been my intention to write something each day of our development week at the National Theatre Studio – it turns out that wasn’t the only change of plan during the week!
Interestingly (and perhaps inevitably), our plans had changed by the end of day 2 – but then that’s one of the joys of creating/devising theatre – it’s very likely to take exciting and unexpected turns!
It had been our plan to make the first 20 minutes or so of the piece. On day 2, however, we ran into one of those small, niggly glitches which is absolutely fine in a longer creation process, but with just 4 days to make a coherent and exciting presentation for potential future partners, we decided that there was probably a better way to go about things.
On tuesday evening we decided that we had to embrace the form of the ‘trailer’ – a (relatively) short burst of theatre that would give a strong sense of the world of the piece, it’s shape, the characters involved and enough clues to the plot for people to want to know more.
This turned out to be incredibly useful. Because the trailer had such clear requirements (to intrigue, excite, entice), we were able to make a lot of strong decisions very quickly. This was very clarifying from a devising/writing point of view, and an important reminder to always go to the essence of things.
All the reasons that devising is an incredibly exciting way to make theatre are also the reasons that it can fail. One of these pitfalls can be an over-saturation of ideas, whether they be visual or textual. By choosing to make the trailer we knew that we had to cull anything that wasn’t strong enough or clear enough. It helped us to decide what we needed, prioritising that above what we fancied. Given more time we would inevitably have worked hard to make those other ideas work – we would have succeeded in some cases and not in others, but maybe (and of course it’s just a maybe) at the expense of the clarity of the whole.
By making the trailer we have set really clear guidelines for the making of the show – we have the visual, rhythmical and textual framework on which to build the eventual production of ‘The Secret Agent’. This still allows for invention and creativity, but with a clear knowledge of the constraints within which that invention and creativity can flourish. When I talk about ‘constraints’, I am talking about them as an exciting and positive thing.
Of course, the main reasons that the week was such a positive experience were the people and the place; our whole team was really fantastic – we had almost everyone we needed in the room (only lacking sound designer Gareth Fry) – Carolina Valdés, Dominic Burdess, Emma McKie, George Ramsay, Helena Lymbery, Leander Deeny, Matthew Hurt, Marc Teitler, Natasha Nixon, Paddy Molloy and Simon Daw. It was immensely useful to have the whole design team there for the week so that everyone could move forward together, so that each element could grow from the same seed. To be in the National Theatre Studio was a privilege and a pleasure. There’s a great team there and it meant that we could focus on the work knowing that we had the practical support we needed to make the most of it. So a huge thank you to all of them.
And now the next phase begins; funding applications, private donations, tour booking, and finding co-producers. Our aim is to make the show at the beginning of next year, tour it and bring it to London. We’ll need a lot of support of various different kinds to make this wonderful project happen – so if there are ways in which you can help, then we’ll let you know! In the meantime, here are some pictures from the work we presented last Friday. We wanted to create a world that is strongly reminiscent of the Music Hall tradition of the end of the 19th Century, as well as with early cinema. This is the era that Conrad wrote in and it gives us a chance to explore a theatrical equivalent of Conrad’s detached and ironic writing style in The Secret Agent:
We’ve just come to the end of a very exciting first day working on The Secret Agent. We’re at the National Theatre Studio for a week, putting some of our Act 1 ideas to the test. Following a very productive development of the piece last year, we’re now checking to see if what emerged from it is worth pursuing… so far it’s been great. There’s a fantastic, talented and dedicated team in the room – I feel very lucky to be working with them all. It’s also wonderful to be back at NTS; the place is going from strenght to strength, and under the new leadership of Laura Collier it continues to grow in exciting ways.
Part of the aim of the week is to put together a presentation for potential co-producers and touring venues. It seems that in the current climate there is (naturally) less of a desire to take risks. That, combined with decisions we’ve made recently to change the way we work, means that it makes a lot of sense for us to develop our work little bits at a time – from the point of view of time and money this is, of course, much more manageable for us to do. We feel now, however, that the show is ripe for the making, so hopefully this week will yield the interest and support that we need to create the show in its entirety – something that we want to start in Janurary next year.
More later.
The ‘O’
On Wednesday this week (18th) we will start to preview the show that I’ve been working on with Katie Mitchell at the Hampstead Theatre. It’s the UK premier of a play that Simon Stephens has written as a companion piece to Alfred Jarry’s ‘Ubu Roi‘.
January 2010. The International Criminal Tribunal sitting in The Hague. Day 436. The dictator Ubu, the grotesque andamoral megalomaniac from Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi, is before a UN constituted International Tribunal charged with Crimes against Humanity and other serious violations of international humanitarian law.
Is this the justice of the victors? Is this the best way to deal with the perpetrators of unspeakable crime? Wherein lies the legitimacy of an internationally convened Tribunal?
The Trial of Ubu is a savage comedy that interrogates the assumptions of a Court as it struggles to deal with defendants who are not only opposed to the morality of law, but exist in a different moral dimension altogether.
As always, it has been a fascinating process and doubtless the production will provoke mixed reactions and a lot of discussion!
I hope you can make it!
First of all we’d like to wish you a rather bleated and very happy New Year. There have been so many world changing events over the last year, so many things that have made us examine who we are and why we do what we do – it’s a time of great change and great opportunity and we hope that it’s a chance for us all to make exciting and daring choices.
At the end of 2011 we finished our attachment at the National Theatre Studio. We’d spent 2 weeks working with our full creative team and then another 4 weeks working with writer Matthew Hurt, building up the foundations of our new piece of work based on Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’. It was incredibly productive and marks the start of a very exciting project. There are clear ideas for the show, we have a narrative structure in place and the beginnings of muscle on the bones of act I (!).
We’ve never had the opportunity to work in this way before; to be able to thoroughly explore ideas for a project with the full creative team, and then to have the time, space and financial support to develop those ideas with a writer. It has been a pleasurable and constructive experience and we’re excited about what the next stages will bring. It has always been our ambition to effectively bring a writer into the devising process and it strikes us as essential to the evolution of our work. It’s a territory that we started to explore with our last show, ‘Delirium’, and is the key to all our future projects.
‘The Secret Agent’ is a show that we want to make in the Autumn of this year. Between now and then we’re keen to put some of our choices to the test to be sure that they hold up. As well as formal choices, this is also a chance to develop a full rehearsal draft of the script. This is something of a challenge, as whilst it’s great to have the template of a script from which to work, we also need to leave space for the devising process to continue when we eventually finish making the work. In this sense the type of relationship with the writer is paramount and needs to be one that continues to allow for the unforeseen suprises of devising. We also need to make some decisions on where we’d like the project to go, the sort of life we’d like it to have and of course we also need to raise the money to make the show!
One of the things that has really struck me about the process so far are the resonances it has with our previous work. More than any of our other projects, it feels like this one is being fed by what has come before. Of course all our work is informed by what we’ve already done, but it feels that the lessons we’ve learned are really starting to come to fruition. In this sense it feels like 2012 represents a new phase of theatre O’s existence and we hope very much that it’s the year in which we get to share new work with you all.
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With best wishes from the ‘O’
So we’ve just finished a fantastic couple of weeks work at the National Theatre Studio. We spent the first few days generating a whole lot of material that would inform how we wanted to tackle our adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel ‘The Secret Agent’. It was all incredibly productive, and it feels like we’ve created a very distinctive theatrical world in which to tell the story.
Of course it’s just the very beginning of things, but the flavours were strong and we think we’re going to be able to make a tasty meal!
Today (111111) we did a showing to an invited audience and got some very positive and useful feedback. It felt like an auspicious date to be introducing a new piece of work to a wider public. We will now spend the next 4 weeks working with writer Matthew Hurt, building on what we’ve discovered in these last 2 weeks.
It’s been an immensely useful way of working as now we have a shared theatrical vocabulary and a clear understanding of how we want the piece to develop. By the end of the next 4 weeks we’ll have a clear structure and the basis of a script to start rehearsing with. We’d like to make the show next year. At this point I’d like to say a huge thank you to all those who’ve been involved in the process (listed below) as well as to the National Theatre Studio for all their help and support and to the Arts Council for making it possible for us to pay everyone for 2 weeks of their time and immense skill.
We’re very excited about the project and will of course keep you posted on how it’s all going. In the meantime, here are some hastily snapped images from today’s showing.
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the ‘O‘
Performer/Devisers
Dominic Burdess
Leander Deeny
Helena Lymbery
Oliver Senton
Carolina Valdés
Joseph Alford – director
Simon Daw – designer
Matthew Hurt – writer
Rosie Kelly – associate producer
Ellen McDougall – assistant director
Emma Mckie – stage manager
Paddy Molloy – animator
Marc Teitler – composer
Tomorrow. Monday 31st.
And we start 2 weeks of development on a new show idea. We’ve been completely blown away by Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’ – it’s inherent theatricality, it’s relevance to today, it’s political and social themes. It’s an immensely complex book (despite the fact that it’s full title is ‘The Secret Agent – a simple tale’)! It speaks in so many ways to what is happening in our society today, both here and abroad, about the people who want to dictate and control the flow of things, the people that talk about change but do nothing, the people who want to put a halt to any possibility of change, the people who find it easier to think of it all as somebody else’s problem. It’s an attack on lethargy, on mediocrity and on those who blind themselves and others to the realities of the times in which we live.
Not exactly easy to put on stage.
But we have some ideas. We are starting to make some choices.
Most importantly we’re working with an amazing team of people, all of whom are passionate about the subject matter and who are committed to finding a way through it.
When Conrad wrote the novel he was aware of the necessity to reduce his story ‘to manageable proportions’ – and of course putting it on stage requires us to do the same. To pick out the things that speak most clearly to us. So these 2 weeks will be the very first steps of doing that. After, we’ll spend a month working with writer Matthew Hurt, to continue picking out our route through the material, and then… well, first things first.
For these first two weeks the team is:
Simon Daw – Designer
Paddy Molloy – Animator
Marc Teitler – Composer
Ellen McDougall – Assistant Director
Carolina Valdés – Performer
Dominic Burdess – Performer
Leander Deeny – Performer
Oliver Senton – Performer
Helena Lymbery – Performer
Emma McKie – Stage Manager
Rosie Kelly – Associate Producer
We’ll let you know how it goes!