This weblog is going to chart the journey of a new play for Eastern Angles from its first rough draft to its opening night. It should provide a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes in the weeks and months before the lights go up. We don’t yet have a final script. But we do have some exciting material. Now all we have to do is turn it into a play that will keep people interested, challenged and entertained for two hours, and send them out into the Suffolk night with a new perspective on our relationship with the past. The blog will be updated as the process unfolds and you can follow it by subscribing to the feed (click the little button if it’s showing in your browser heading) or by bookmarking the page and dropping back from time to time to see how we’re progressing. First a little background (Pt 1).
The play which became Bentwater Roads was conceived during a visit to the cavernous spaces of The Hush House – the vast engine testing shed on the former Bentwaters Airbase.
Does this look like a theatre to you? A jet engine on test in The Hush House. Photo Mark Payton
Eastern Angles had already performed several plays there (including one of mine, The Anatomist) setting up their raked seating, bringing in lighting and generally working the kind of magic the company is famous for. Artistic Director, Ivan Cutting, had suggested that instead of using The Hush House as an atmospheric receiving house for different plays we should think about writing something specifically for the space. This seemed like a fine idea. We talked about various possibilities, which Ivan liked, and in a fairly short space of time the play was commissioned.
Sometimes the process of writing a play can be refreshingly straightforward. There are twists and turns, good days and bad, but if the idea is sound and you can hold on to it then the journey to the stage can happen without too many unwelcome suprises. It soon became clear that the Bentwaters play wasn’t going to be like this. Our difficulties began with a slight feeling of unease which deepened through a series of meetings over pub tables (the preferred method of collaboration which has served Ivan and me well for 3 previous productions). The story began to change, and then slowly but surely to unravel. We stopped thinking of it as site-specific piece and started wondering if we could tour it. Time was pressing and there was still nothing to show beyond a complicated story that was becoming more complicated by the day. The Bentwaters idea had begun to feel like a wrong turning and my heart was no longer in it. Which is the point where Ivan showed just how good an Artistic Director he can be. At the end of one of our meetings he sat back and said, maybe we shouldn’t do this play. His solution was to set it aside, write off the commission as an adventure in development that was productive but didn’t actually produce a final piece of work, and to find something else that I really wanted to write.
For a writer this could have been a devastating conclusion to the enterprise. But in fact it was immensely liberating. I agreed gratefully with the proviso that I wouldn’t entirely abandon the play, but would keep the file open, and see if in time I could approach things from another angle. We had another glass of wine and that was that. It could have been the end of our Bentwaters play. But in fact, the journey was just beginning.
