uhm..yeah - wikked?!

Here is my most embarrassing Edinburgh-Festival story (- the ferocity of my blushing prevented me from posting it any sooner -). Uh, bear with me while my face cools down.

Our theatre required every company to have a steward for every performance - someone who remained outside the door to help latecomers and get people out in (the unlikely event of) an emergency. They suggested that to keep costs down and avoid having to hire a steward, companies team up and help each other out. I posted a notice on the internet forum, mentioning that we were looking to share stewarding duties and in due time, a student company replied. All of our correspondence was limited to emails and text messsages, so to this day I haven’t met the girl in question. Let us call her ‘C’.
Eventually, on the first day of previews, I texted C, to confirm that we would we be sending someone to their show. She replied, saying that they didn’t need anyone that day, did we? I responded that we did need a steward (the deal was from the start to the end of the festival, with no days off so I was surprised at her reply and question). C’s sms reply was the following: Wicked will be there!

Seeing as I was going to be backstage and then on-stage, I knew I wouldn’t meet our steward before the performance, so drummed it into the technician and stage manager that “someone called Wicked (what do I know - it’s the theatre, right? Actors are weird!) will be manning the door for us. Please look out for him.” They couldn’t seem to remember “Wicked” and I kept having to spell it for them in French. They asked what it meant and I told them. I thought it was silly to use that as a pseudonym, but if that’s what makes the guy happy - whatever.

Of course, you can see where this is going, can’t you? I quizzed our boys afterwards, and they insisted no-one called Wicked introduced himself and there was not guy at the door either. I was slightly miffed, so the next morning, before C’s show, I sent another text message to confirm Nico’s presence as steward and mentioned that: BTW, Wicked didn’t steward for us last night - what happened? She shot a reply straight back saying: I was there! And how many shades of red do you think I went? Beet - no wait, blood, crimson, fire-engine, SCARLETT FERRARI-RED. Clearly, the missing comma and subsequent elision in her sms caused the confusion for me. (Wicked, I will be there. or Wicked! I will be there. and none of this would have happened!)

What made the whole thing infinitely worse, is that I used to live in London, where people use “wicked!” (as in “cool!”) aaaaaaaall the time! It’s not like I can claim ignorance. On top of that, I was the English translator of our play and thus responsible for cultural references AND I had been insisting to the French boys that this was a boy’s nickname or pseudonym in English (apparently).

Did my gang ever laugh at me when they found me glowing Scarlett Ferrari-Red after the text message and I had to ‘fess up. From then onward, whenever I did or said something daft - and sometimes just sticking my head around the door qualified - I was greeting with a tilt of the head, a raised eyebrow and a big:
“ WICKED, Heiks!”

from township to tent

Well, it’s been quite a day....I saw Township Stories this afternoon.
Go to http://arts.guardian.co.uk/edinburgh2006/story/0,,1854717,00.html if you want to read an article about it.
Let’s just say it’s .... harrowing. Took me a good while to come out of shellshock. Before I had read that they call the director “ the Township Tarantino”, I sat in the theatre feeling like I was in Resevoir Dogs. Lots of violence and brutality close up and lots of beautiful music, juxtaposing the action on stage. Music from Enya, Tracey Chapman, Sting, Paul Simon and Louis Armstrong to Zola and other Kwaito artists. Yet again, there is no point in trying to describe this type of theatre in words. It has to be experienced - that is the essence of theatre, is it not?!

And then tonight at midnight, I found myself in The Famous Spiegeltent in the Spiegelgarden, watching La Clique. A burlesque cabaret with circus performers, the amazing rubberman, the skating Willards (who rollerblade and fling each other around on a tiny round patch of stage about 2 metres in diametre!) and other freaks, including the Caesar Twins. Some stuff is outrageous (mostly the things from Berlin!) some is really awesome and some is.... quite gross. Good fun!

smells like...

...dressing room drama!
I have to say, our dressing room at C venues is dismal. I mean, it just can’t get any worse. We share the shack that has been erected in the cellar of the building with around 10 other companies. The cellar of the venue is a very hot place. All the beer barrels are stored there, the ice-machine and a whole lot of other paraphanalia that exudes heat and wierd smells. In the midst of all this, the venue management have erected two adjoining shacks for us to get changed and made up in. The next door dressing room has persian rugs on the floor.... and what do we get? The Big Stink. I kid you not - our place is BO Central - so much so, that Steve even brought in one of those dangly air-fresheners that people hang on their rear-view mirrors. Pine tree-shaped - you know the one. Anyway, he hung this thing over by where the clowns keep their unbearably smelly costumes and the next day someone had thrown it out! THEY LIKE IT TO STINK, obviously.
We also did a dramatic Febreze-ing session, but - can you believe it - the smells in the curtains there are so ingrained, that they overpowered the Febreze!

Actually, I just wrote all that as an excuse to put up this picture of Steve. I mean, it’s all true, but it’s not neccessarily interesting enough to warrant a post, right? The picture, however, is priceless.
Steve getting ready to perform. He says he’s really enjoying the painting of his nails before a show and he will miss it.

Fred at the Fest

I’ve been very lucky to have friends pop by this festival to see the show and hang out... one such person was Fred Baker, who made a special effort to spend one night in Edinburgh on his way up from Vienna to Cambridge to Inverness for a wedding. Whilst the rest of the wedding party were already having a pre-WEDDING dinner, Fred was watching The Clan of DIVORCEES, bless his heart.

He also brought the DVD of Mind The Gap, the fim we made at the Berlinale this year. Good news. The photo above is of him and his wife Sandra, who directed Mind The Gap.

Fred wasn’t staying very long, so we talked until deep into the morning to make the most of it and here is what I learnt. Fred hates when women say they aren’t good at networking. It pisses him off. Apparently, networking is the wrong word. It’s “having conversations with people about your work and what you’re doing! And you are very good at that.”

So, because I respect Fred and listened closely to his 4am pearls of wisdom, I went off the next night to our publicists ‘having conversations with people about your work and what you’re doing’party and decided to try it out under that new title. I had several conversations and for a first effort on my part, it went swimmingly I thought!

Right said Fred. (couldn’t resist that, SORRY!)
Thanks Fred.

(photo: Fred and his wife Sandra at the Grand Palais in Paris)

Paul Le Guen, or how to perfect your scottish

You may not know this, and I don’t blame you one little bit, but Paul Le Guen is a Frenchman from Rennes. And this is his current job, according to Wikipedia:
On March 11, 2006, it was confirmed that Paul Le Guen had agreed to replace Alex McLeish as manager of Rangers starting in season 2006/2007. Le Guen signed a 3 year contract with Rangers, with the option to extend his stay at Ibrox Stadium. So, he’s coaching Scotlands Premier League football team, based in Glasgow. Why am I bringing this up, you ask? Well, Paul Le Guen is our stage manager's answer to his language problems!
The stage manager for The Clan of Divorcees is French/Moroccan and doesn’t speak English. However, in a moment of panic when we were all dashing up the road towards the monster rental truck, thinking the traffic wardens cicling it were on the brink of ticketing, he started shouting: “PAUL LE GUEN! PAUL LE GUEN!” By using that name, he was simultaneously explaining that ‘we are from France, but we come in peace, so please don’t give us a parking ticket’! Of course, you would have to be a football fan to get it. I am not and I didn’t...

Similarly, when taking the monster rental truck through a traffic circle in the wrong direction (pesky English, imposing left-side driving wherever they went!) and having a lady gesticulate wildly at him from her little car, our stage manager rolled down his window and tossed the following phrase at her: “I want you BEGINNING!” Put that in your pipe and smoke it, lady. As a put-down, I have seldom heard anything better.

(photo: stage manager in promotional action on the Royal Mile)

festival living

Due to unforseen circumstances, we have more people staying in our festival apartment than bedrooms. This means that the youngest team member gets to sleep in the living room. This also means that there is no common room for us to have breakfast in, as our youngest team member tends not to get up before lunch time.

Anyway, you remember our empty truck dilemma from the previous post? Well, there was one other thing in the truck that I didn’t mention. When the stage manager noticed that there was no set, he raided the mother-theatre in Paris. In an attempt to bring something we might be able to use as a set to Scotland, they took a sexy little café table and 3 café chairs from the theatre bar. Seeing as they are totally the wrong style for our play, we have set them up in the apartment instead... there is an oversized hallway that we are now using as a breakfast nook for coffee and croissants in the morning!

our smashing entrance

Edinburgh Fringe Festival news: we certainly made a smashing entrance when we arrived at our theatre venue for our technical rehearsal of The Clan of Divorcees... our truck arrived mere minutes before our slot-time, driven by a stage manager who was under-slept (to put it mildly) and not used to driving on the left, and as he slid into the loading zone outside the venue the top of the oversized rental truck crashed into the scaffolding around Adam House. No lasting damage was done, but it ensured that everyone present knew we had arrived!

In a slick move, after having frightened the smokers outside the venue, our stage manager opened the back of the truck and out came a measly 6 panels, white chest containing utter crap, costume chest and a strobe light from its cavernous interior. Yes, that's right, the massive truck transported virtually nothing useful, save for the lighting 7 sound teccie's guitar and the stage manager's bedding. In terms of our set, we had nothing, except some panels to make up the walls, a broken teapot and broken champagne glasses from the white chest.
Where were our table and chairs, bar counter, bar stools, kitchen sink, step ladder and host of other accessories too numerous to list here? Why did we need a fuel-guzzling, ferry-travelling, border-crossing truck from France to deliver a few random, broken items, minutes before our 4-hour technical rehearsal? Nobody knew, but it was clearly a typical case of broken telephone. The people who had driven the truck from Avignion via Paris to Edinburgh blamed the people who had packed (or not) the truck in Avignon, who blamed the people who had driven the truck for not having packed the truck, and management back in Paris didn't understand how this could have happend! So we spent 4 happy hours at our technical rehearsal discussing whether to construct a bar counter in the morning, using the inside of the monster truck as a workshop, so as to "avoid the shame of others seeing what's going on as we cobble a set together", or whether to capitulate and pay IKEA a visit. After some initial arguing - tempers have a tendancy to flare in sleep-deprived individuals - plans were hatched and charity shops were googled at 2am.

The upshot of which is that we spent our first day in Edinburgh split up into teams of set-scavangers. Some of us did a reccie at the Salvaton Army furniture shop. We struck gold there with a man named Brian who was ever so helpful, patient and accommodating. We then called the giant truck in, to collect our treasures. Meanwhile two actors were cruising the inner city streets for accessories and an ugly tablecloth (which, to our disgust, they found!) and the 3rd team set off for IKEA, searching for last minute items that hadn’t been uncovered elsewhere.

And guess what? Our new Salvation Army set is much nicer than the original! All’s well that ends well, I guess.