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The Beige Adventuresome Blog
6th August 2009: Train to Edinburgh
I am currently speeding through the countryside listening to Philip Glass' 'Akhenaten' ('The Window of Appearances' to be precise). Golden fields are flying past, with the occasional patch of purple on the banks near the train. It's pretty amazing.
I am training it to Edinburgh. I am, frankly, knackered. We have spent the week packing up our flat in Camden and delivering boxes here and there to get rid of everything we're not taking to Edinburgh, but have still wound up with two 30kg suitcases and multitudes of bags to carry on our early-morning train up north. This is as much fun as it sounds.
As much as just about no-one who reads this will know what 'Akhenaten' is (a very weird, but wonderful opera) it is helping to relieve the stress that has built up over the last couple of weeks. I have been slowly but surely driving myself mad with the arrangements for Edinburgh, but strange male soprano harmonies streaming through my ears and beautiful golden fields with streaks of green flying past my gaze are soothing me. The track I'm listening to is the prince Akhenaten singing a duet (not a duet, through – a triplette?) with his mother and his wife, the three voices blending and running through each other in a beautiful minor-key melody. Well, that's what it is to my ignorant ears, and in case I have the nomenclature all wrong I will simply say it's pretty.
Oh, wait a second – Akhenaten has given way to Gorillaz. Now I have my energy back again.
28th July 2009: Technical difficulties
Well, we have gone through three offers to tech operators/stage managers now but fourth time's the charm and we now have the wonderful Sam Charleston on board.
Hiring a tech for this simple show has turned into a fiasco wrapped in a debacle wrapped in a conundrum. After interviewing many eminently suitable applicants, everyone we asked had just been hired by someone else. Such is the life of the Fringe, it seems – act fast or miss out.
Now we've got the show, got the stage manager, and got the place to do it in. Everything is well in train for the festival, and the start date is approaching fast. Gulp.
21st July 2009: The Beige Adventures – guest starring No One In Particular
We had a very exciting moment recently when it turned out that someone we knew was friends with the Waiting for Godot cast. You know the cast I mean, THE Waiting for Godot cast, all of whom have amazingly recognisable voices. What a coincidence, we need a voice for the Author in one section of the show.
The proposal was made that we ask Them if They would be interested in recording the seven lines we need so we could use each of the cast on rotation, even the youngest (XXX). I have to admit, I completely geeked out. (For anyone who is unfamiliar with the term 'geek out', it describes when someone, usually a geek, meets or comes in contact with someone who inspires their awe, causing a mental meltdown that usually ends up with them making 'gur' noises. It's a special moment.) I have been an admirer of Patrick Stuart since I was nowt but a little tyke, and Simon Callow holds obvious interests for me. And I'm pretty sure the Queen gets nervous about meeting Sir Ian McKellan.
Unfortunately, we dreamed the dream but didn't get to live it. The idea didn't work out and so we are left distressed, distracted and discontented. While it was an amazing idea, it was not meant to be and the amazingness of the show will have to stand for itself. We did, however, land a marvellous actor for our voice of the Author, and his recording is so good I'm considering using it as my ringtone.
On a similarly geeking-out note, our script was shown via a friend to Rhys Shearsmith, of League of Gentlemen fame, of whom I am also a huge fan. I affirmed my status as a sad, geeky girl by doing a little dance of joy when I found this out.
30 June 2009: The Chickens Have Landed
After hard months of canvassing, and hauling in the cold, hard pounds to buy ourselves some rubber chickens, they have Arrived.
I believe the event deserves a capital Arrive because it's not often you get 25 squeaky chickens land on your doorstep. Very shortly after receiving our store-bought birds, we got the delivery of our Chickens On Loan, thanks to Barnard Castle Meet. We now have 33 rubber chickens roaming about the house.
While many of our chickens have been named, there are still quite a few that are currently nameless, including George (his temporary name), the star of the chickens. In light of this, I have started a Beige Competition, in which the person to present the best name will win the honour of formally naming George and also a free double pass. I am looking forward to the names that come in – some of the names our sponsors have come up with are hilarious.
There's nothing quite as beautiful as the sight of a basketful of rubber chickens being thrown at someone.
25 May, 2009: The Hunt for Rubber Chickens
So, when I wrote 30 rubber chickens into this show I thought, 'Rubber chickens — easy thing to get hold of.'
Wrong. Rubber chickens, it turns out, are incredibly expensive. (Okay, not like gold or anything like that, but in the UK they start from £10 apiece, and in Oz I spent $30 on one.) Not only are they expensive, but nae bastard'll sell them to me in bulk.
As £300 on a ten-minute joke seemed a bit much, we have spent significant amounts of time searching for affordable rubber chickens. One particularly absurd session involved myself, my sister-in-law and her husband all spending a Saturday night frantically trawling for rubber chicken sites, shouting to each other, 'I've got one for £6.99!' or 'I've tried "rubber chickens job lot" and it doesn't work.'
The number of conversations I've had recently involving rubber chickens you wouldn't believe. Somehow, I never pictured my career in the arts as involving chasing rubber chickens.
Don't count your chickens before they're hatched, and all that kind of thing. Wish us luck.
5 April, 2009
Well, the time has come to write an opening for this blog, and the words won't come. The Ay and Bee site is almost ready to go, everything else is in place, but I am seriously sleep deprived and my thoughts are sluggish. As Winnie-the-Pooh would say, My brain is all fluffy.
Ay and Bee began with their first line. I was sitting writing one day and all of a sudden had this vision of two funny little characters, dressed in strange costumes (for example, a carrot and a parrot) walking onto a blank stage and one of them saying, 'I knew we never should've annoyed that wizard.' Why I thought this concept hilarious, I'll never know, but I jotted it down and then I had to come up with a reason for them being there and it all sort of flowed from that point.
Ay and Bee are curious characters, in every sense, funny little beings that step onto stage just as they stepped out of my mind*, with no reason or rational explanation for how they got there. This happens to them every act, and they stumble through the situation as best they can, playing along until they have a grasp of it, then - the next act. I think what attracted me to this idea is that that's life really, except in the real world we rarely get to do our stumbling in silly costumes or with rubber chickens, which is unfair considering that life is certainly absurd enough to warrant it. Sometimes I worry about using terms like 'absurd' or 'surreal' (and I stay well clear of 'avant garde') because they sound so academic. This play is academic in the same way as using Muppets to teach nuclear physics (not a bad idea). The whole point of it is to get a laugh, as I hope you've found when cruising the website, or will find if you check back.
What on earth gave me the idea of raising money through the global community? I'll be honest, the inspiration came from a guy called Chris Jones, who did it himself, raising the finds to make an Oscar-winning short film, or at least that's what he aimed for - and he got pretty close (in the end, the film made the shortlist, the final 10 of 10,000). Jones asked everyone he knew to donate £50 to the project. If they didn't have £50, he asked them to ask their friends, and for their friends to ask their friends. It sounds like a crazy idea, but he ended up raising the £28,000 needed to make the film, which went on to win lots of awards, came close to an Oscar, and created an incredible community of contributors ('producers').
Jones is an incredibly inspiring guy, as I found when I attended a screening of the short ('Gone Fishing'), and he encourages anyone he meets to give their impossible ideas a go. I thought, well, the budget for an independent theatre piece is nowhere near that of a film (£3700 for us) and the effect of theatre is much, much more immediate - we'll be making 4,000 people laugh in Edinburgh and the interactions we have on our website are aimed to do the same.
We can't promise the awards. However, we're giving the Fringe First a rock hard go. Better still, we give a solid return to anyone who does contribute, or even anyone who pays attention to us, really: a smile, a chuckle, a chortle, or a guffaw (we've even had a laugh-laugh-snort). How freaking cool is that? And we'll continue to provide giggles and associated forms of laughter, but we do need your help to get the show happening. If you can, give a thought to donating and becoming a producer - read the associated web page and give it a go.
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*sometimes I'd like to do the same, but that's another story...
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Ay and Bee can be contacted at ayandbee@hclarecallow.com
This site went ran around yelling 'Grapes!' last on
31/05/09
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