Saving Energy
Updates to the BTG this coming week (Monday 16th June) will be a little erratic and will only happen in the evenings , except of course for the normal Sunday update, which will go ahead as usual. The reason for this is that I am saving energy.
No, I have not suddenly gone all ecological! On Monday morning we begin rehearsals for a Theatre in Education piece for primary school kids about saving energy. The original brief was very odd: the client (not our direct client, actually, because we are working through Creative Partnerships) wanted us to promote a government initiative to install cavity wall and loft insulation. Now, apart from the fact that the newly-in-force EU directive on Unfair Commercial Practices make using kids to sell to their parent illegal, the thing wouldn’t work anyway. Insulation is not the sort of thing which preoccupies 9 and 10 year olds!
So now the piece is about what they can do to save energy and reduce their carbon footprint. And yes, we do explain what the “carbon footprint” is, although a primary head of my acquaintance tells me the Year 6 kids should know anyway.
The danger of this kind of work is that it turns into preaching and we’re working very hard to avoid that. Entertaining them comes first!
We do have a script. We met as a company a week ago and hammered out some ideas. I’d already thought of having the main character a very poor clown (poor in the sense of not being good at his job) and a couple of hours of brainstorming gave me the outlines of an idea. So last Monday I settled down to write.
I got the bulk of the piece written (it’s very pantomime!) and then dried up. How to end it? After racking my brains to no avail, I emailed the lot to my frequent collaborator, actress and writer Viktoria Kay who had been at the brainstorming session, with a heartfelt plea for ideas. 24 hours later I got the script back - finished! She added her usual caveat - “if you don’t like it, tear it up!” - but no need: it worked, so this week has been a mad scramble to find costumes and props. It’s amazing how oddly people look at you when you say you want an inflatable hammer, an inflatable guitar and a pop star wig! Not to mention huge red and yellow shoes and piles of newspapers, cardboard and egg boxes.
Well, how else would a clown set about insulating his house?
So at 10am tomorrow we start on our latest piece of what BTG reviewer Howard Loxton once described as “applied theatre”. A week of physical routines, slapstick and very bad jokes, so that the following week we can set off to visit 42 primary schools in the space of a fortnight. Or at least the company can: I’m too old to trash around the country doing two shows a day, each in a different venue!
I’ll keep you posted! And apologies again in advance for the erratic nature of the week’s BTG updates.