Just had a really great experience with the Project XXX play at Bolton Octagon.
We had two and a half days of intensive work with our great actors – Gary, Caroline, Holly and Nadia – and brilliant input from both Elizabeth Newman and Lisa O’Neill, then we had a performed reading to an invited audience on Friday 20th January at 2pm.
This process has been incredibly useful, finding ways through knotty little problems of storyline or logic, exchanging really interesting creative and issue based ideas and watching the piece come to life, which is so important. It felt great to work with Paul and really get some good writing going, it was such an ejoyable experience.
After the reading, the audience gave us some really useful feedback – the sort of stuff we need to get this piece exactly right. Because of the subject matter and because of the storyline it would be so easy to get this play disasterously wrong, too funny, too moralistic, too anti porn, too pro porn etc etc, but the feedback assured us that we are heading in the right direction.
Next steps include a reading with Activ8′s Indra group and a scratch performance in June at the Octagon, which will be opened up to a wider audience. We then have to start getting ready for phase 2 of the project, getting funding together to get the piece on a full national tour – is that too ambitious?!
