6 THINGS I LEARNT
FROM VANDAL RAPTOR
So this week I presented my solo show, Whatever Happened
To Vandal Raptor, at York Theatre Royal.
The show’s been in the works for a year, and I’m incredibly proud of the
final product. My first ever solo show
which doesn’t just exist as a set of poems, but a full narrative story. First show with entirely new material. Far from extinct, VR will have a life beyond
the walls of YTR’s Studio.
But, because this is the Internet, I have borrowed from Buzzfeed
to neatly summarise some of the lessons learnt from this process, production
and pretending to be a dinosaur.
You Can’t Prepare Enough
Like a clock
ticking down until a detonation, I was very much aware once we hit the rehearsal
process there would be little time for my other projects. This meant my podcast didn’t have a new update
for a while, but it also meant I got all my sessions for the Youth Theatre
groups I run written up in good time. We
did a Big Shop of food. As a freelancer,
you often have the luxury of dictating your own timetable, but in this instance
your timetable dictates you.
DIY lesson: When you have no manager, you have to make
sure your time is manageable.
The Writer Is Not The Editor
It’s hard for me
to think of a poem as finished. Partly because
I enjoy tweaking for specific audiences, updating references or changing due to
changing attitudes. I also enjoy adding spicy
spontaneity. But many times during the
process, I wanted to change lines, sometimes for the best to make something
clearer, often because I worried about the meaning of the scene. But there’s got to a be a point where the
show is the show because the script is the script.
DIY lesson: Just because you have the ownership over the script
doesn’t mean you can control the script.
I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends
A solo show doesn’t
necessarily mean you work alone. A
running gag has been the fact I’m an Only Child, and I don’t like sharing. But I can’t express how much I love the bunch
of people that offered their support.
Simon Bolly and Emily Rowan of Flora Greysteel for their
advice on loop pedals, Jonny Gill for lending me equipment, John Holt Roberts for
giving me some much-needed guitar lessons, for Hannah Davies, Dave
Jarman and Jack Dean for coming
into the rehearsals and watching a run.
To all the folks at York Theatre Royal, especially Juliet Forster, for
their support. For everyone that shared
on social media, that came and everyone that couldn’t make it but wished me all
their best. Although, as an only child,
I’m totally not prepared to share my toys, I would like to share my undying,
eternal, unyielding and unending gratitude and hope I can return the favour
somehow.
DIY lesson: Punk is not, as Mr Lydon seems to think,
about pissing people off. It’s about
building community.
Advertising your Marketing and Market your
Adverts
I never studied
publicity, I have just learnt it from doing gigs and events over the years, and
I’ve far from perfected it. My Facebook page
has over 900 Likes, and the event I co-run, Say Owt, often sells between 60-90
tickets. We plugged the show through
these networks. We had a feature in York
Press, were in the York Lit Fest programme as well as the York Theatre Royal
brochure. We exit flyered punk shows, Josie
Long and other York Lit events. We didn’t
get terrible audiences, but we could have done with more. Was it the price (standard for theatre, not
so much for poetry/music). Was it the
blurb? Was it just too niche? Things to think about.
DIY lesson: It’s easy to be stuck inside your own world
of punk, protest and dinosaurs, but you still need to make that madcap world
accessible.
No Gods, No Masters, Yes To Quatermasters
On this project I
worked with director Natalie
Quatermass. There’s no way in the 7
Hells that this show would even exist without Natalie’s ability to keep the cast
on track (me) but also make sure the subject matter (kinda me) was heartfelt,
well-paced, dynamic and had the true spirit of vital story-telling. Natalie’s passion for making a strong,
exiting piece of theatre is at the heart of this production.
DIY lesson: Make work with your mates.
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