7/15/2011

Every playwright's dream

It's excruciating, really: you've slaved over this script, spent endless hours pacing and pondering and trying this or that with varying degrees of desperation, and now that it's done, you place all its fragile and complicated beauty into the hands of people you really know very little about. Will they get it? Will they understand what you meant? Will they see your characters' nobility, or only their flaws, and make caricatures of them? Will they turn your play into something horrid?

Or will they dig, and explore, and do their courageous best to understand? Will they trust you, as you have trusted them, and find wonder and joy in your script?

There was another rehearsal for The Death of Albatross last night. The director and actors added more depth and nobility and complexity to the characters than I could have ever hoped for. They took what I'd put on the page and, through their own skill and open-heartedness, made real people out of what had been just characters. They came up with insights about them, created memories for them, found their quirks and mannerisms — in fact, they came up with a lot of stuff I wish I'd been good enough to put in the script in the first place. But then that would have left no room for their own genius, and part of the fun of theatre is leaving room for everyone else's genius, and seeing what happens.

I hope you can come to the show and see what these amazing people are doing. (Click on the link above to go to the show's Facebook page; if you "like" the page, you'll get updates, trailers, the lot.)

Starting August 1, tickets will be on sale at The Sydney Fringe website.

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2 Comments:

At 12:39 PM, Anonymous north face outlets said...

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At 6:26 PM, Blogger Flinthart said...

I've had the good fortune to have a short story adapted to film by a small company willing to let me play along in developing the script. It was a delightful exercise, and I'd dearly love to do that kind of thing again.

To be honest, my favourite projects so far have been those where my stuff is only a base for the other players. I loved Canterbury for that, and the work they've done on the opera so far just takes my breath away. Collaborative work is brilliant.

 

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