Henley Festival - by David Cooke
10/05/10 13:59
It was with some collective trepidation that we finally got to perform our little play in front of a paying audience. Were we brilliant? Yes – in a word. Did the adjudicator agree? No – in another word.
Alright so we left the odd prop offstage but Fraser and Keith brilliantly covered up the lines which referred to the errant hat and we didn’t get picked up on it. So we were ½ a minute longer than the allowed time, again not something we got picked up on. Strangely enough, we’d always been at least 5 minutes longer than that and for the life of us, we can’t work out where we managed to save those extra minutes. No what the adjudicator didn’t like was the way we did the play. In a nutshell – it didn’t meet with her expectations of the way the play should be performed and this coloured the rest of the adjudication. More slapstick, more pace, more energy is what she was looking for, less realism. So away we shall go and no doubt our beloved director (who truth be told, was expecting a bit of a hammering) will do some tweaks but in my own humble and entirely biased opinion, we really weren’t bad, and a fair number of the audience came up to us afterwards and agreed.
As for the rest of the evening, there were two other plays, one junior and one serious play which both received (again in my entirely biased opinion) far too reasonable and uncritical judgements. OK so you don’t want to dampen kids spirits when they’ve put a lot of effort into producing a play, but honestly I had very little idea what the hell it was supposed to be about. There were some very nice artistic touches and some good performances but I was left feeling ‘Err..’ and the singing whilst very melodious was mostly lost beneath the sound of the live musicians. The other piece, whilst extremely well set and beautifully acted, was wrist-slittingly depressing. I suspect this is why Phoenix tend to do comedies and farces but we could have all done with play being shorter, about 5 minutes in total would have done me.
I realise the above will sound like sour grapes, but truthfully, there was much good stuff in the comments we received and it was really good for the cast to try the play out on a real audience. We will take what we have learnt and build on it for our next tour-de-force at Cornerstone in Didcot on 29th May, but I hope we don’t lose the fun we’ve all been experiencing to-date in putting this play together.
Alright so we left the odd prop offstage but Fraser and Keith brilliantly covered up the lines which referred to the errant hat and we didn’t get picked up on it. So we were ½ a minute longer than the allowed time, again not something we got picked up on. Strangely enough, we’d always been at least 5 minutes longer than that and for the life of us, we can’t work out where we managed to save those extra minutes. No what the adjudicator didn’t like was the way we did the play. In a nutshell – it didn’t meet with her expectations of the way the play should be performed and this coloured the rest of the adjudication. More slapstick, more pace, more energy is what she was looking for, less realism. So away we shall go and no doubt our beloved director (who truth be told, was expecting a bit of a hammering) will do some tweaks but in my own humble and entirely biased opinion, we really weren’t bad, and a fair number of the audience came up to us afterwards and agreed.
As for the rest of the evening, there were two other plays, one junior and one serious play which both received (again in my entirely biased opinion) far too reasonable and uncritical judgements. OK so you don’t want to dampen kids spirits when they’ve put a lot of effort into producing a play, but honestly I had very little idea what the hell it was supposed to be about. There were some very nice artistic touches and some good performances but I was left feeling ‘Err..’ and the singing whilst very melodious was mostly lost beneath the sound of the live musicians. The other piece, whilst extremely well set and beautifully acted, was wrist-slittingly depressing. I suspect this is why Phoenix tend to do comedies and farces but we could have all done with play being shorter, about 5 minutes in total would have done me.
I realise the above will sound like sour grapes, but truthfully, there was much good stuff in the comments we received and it was really good for the cast to try the play out on a real audience. We will take what we have learnt and build on it for our next tour-de-force at Cornerstone in Didcot on 29th May, but I hope we don’t lose the fun we’ve all been experiencing to-date in putting this play together.
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