Met Sam Berger, who’s directing Salt’n’Sauce, in the Alma Tavern to talk over the script and the production. We smiled at the Alma’s eccentric pricing policy — there seems to be an aversion to round figures with the price of a pint usually coming in at a few coppers above or below the nearest five […]
Arrived a little late for the auditions at St Werburghs Community Centre having caught a taxi from town. Although auditioning had begun promptly at 10am, I’d missed nothing because Sam was giving the first batch of actors a chance to familiarise themselves with the scenes he’d picked for the sessions (two, five and six). He […]
A healthy contingent of Southwest Scriptwriters at the Alma Tavern to see Steve Hennessy’s The Inhabitants of the Moon are Noses at the start of the second week of Theatre West‘s autumn season. Steve’s play, which tells the life story of the Russian novelist, dramatist and short-story writer Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809-52), is directed by […]
So, I’m reminded why I don’t keep a diary or journal — even though I think it’s a great idea for a writer to do so both as a writing exercise and as a way to generate source material for projects. Every time I attempt a chronicle, I get so bogged down in detail that […]
By the time I’d hauled myself up to the Coopers’ Loft this morning, Sam and the cast were a couple of scenes into a read-through of the script, marking the dialogue for subject changes as they went. This was an interesting process because it revealed how successfully I’d managed the changes without a crunching and […]
I joined Sam and the cast for the afternoon’s rehearsal in the Alma Tavern, which began with a run of the play. It was interesting to see progress since Tuesday when rehearsals were around a table, and I was impressed with some of the week’s innovations: Simon and Paul huddle close together during the ceilidh […]
Following Saturday’s rehearsals I feel that the cast has nowhere to go except to perform the play to an audience. Sam ran the show three times at the weekend and picked the actors up on a few points, but I didn’t have anything to add. The only thing left to practise is cueing and timing […]
There was a good preview for the show in today’s edition of Metro, a free daily newspaper given away on the local buses that many passengers pick up as they board. It’s well-researched and written and sums up what the show’s about nicely, and it’s illustrated with a shot taken at yesterday’s tech and dress […]
Wednesday, 1 November 2006 Not such a great house tonight (17), although the audience responded more expectedly to the play. Bristol Evening Post‘s reviewer, Harry Mottram, was in and congratulated me after the show — he seemed to like it, although, as the play points out, this doesn’t necessarily mean a thing. Thursday, 2 November […]
Simon warned earlier this week that all the shows he’d worked on had got cool receptions from audiences at least once during their runs. I was starting to feel a bit complacent that it wasn’t going to happen with Salt’n’Sauce, but it happened tonight. Things were looking good at the start of the evening. The […]
I wrote the following notes on ‘ownership’ of a play script in response to a request from Jo for a ‘few lines’ on the subject for her creative writing essay titled ‘Whose play is it, anyway?’ I think it’s important to distinguish between the script and the production when asking to whom a play ‘belongs’. […]
This article, first published in December 2006’s edition of the Writernet Bulletin, explores the writing and production of Salt’n’Sauce for Theatre West’s autumn 2006 season at the Alma Tavern Theatre, Bristol.
