In terms of work I am more a performer than anything else but lately I have mostly been writing and in the near future I will mostly be directing. Which makes me a right jammy mare I know, because I love doing both.
Rising Up – the show I am writing (with songs by the brilliant Sean Cooney – is eating most of my attention-tokens at the moment. I am about to finish the rehearsal draft of the script after a brilliant R&D day with Sean, the actors, musicians and creative team. I’ll be honest; so much of a freelancer’s working life is spent creating and realising projects either on your own or with an overburdened team of two or something. So to have 10 other people in the room with your script & your ideas – the ones you spent weeks trying to crawl out of the dank, dark well of on your Jack Jones in your study (I know, get me! I’ve got a study!) – talking about them, playing with them and taking them seriously is bloody amazing!
Rising Up will go in to rehearsal, with me directing, on 30th September and will open at HOME in Manchester on 16th October.
After that, it’s a quick performance at Tobacco Factory Theatre in Bristol before going in to pre-production with Bleak House, which I’m directing for Creation Theatre. That will open on 1st February 2020.
Then it’s back to Hamlet, Gertrude and Outrageous Fortune. By then it’ll probably, at 6 months, be the longest I will have been without performing for 4 years. I’ll be chomping at the bit by then. For now, though, I am in my oil tot as we say in my bit of Brum.