During the making of ZERO, we were also able to offer a placement to a Year 10 pupil from Coventry, who although is interested in the performing arts, has a particular passion for all things technical! We were able to offer work experience whilst we were in production week at Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry with the creative team and cast - many thanks to all of the team who took time out of a hectic week to chat and offer support during the placement. Here are some words from the aspiring technician to be!
"I had a wonderful time on my placement with Theatre Absolute while they were preparing and running technical rehearsals for their new production Zero. I spent three days at Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry with the production team. I got a chance to meet and talk with the writer Chris O'Connell and I got to ask him what certain things meant if I didn't understand them and I feel I understand the play a lot more now after spending those three days at the Warwick Arts Centre. I also met the Director, Stage Manager, Lighting Designer, Soundscape Composer and the rest of production team. As well as getting to see what goes on back stage, I got to meet and talk with the cast of Zero. And I just have to say a big Thank You to Theatre Absolute for giving me the opportunity to learn about what goes on back stage of a professional play."
21/10/08
During ZERO we have been working with students from Cardinal Newman School, here in Coventry, as part of our in house apprenticeship scheme that specifically focusses on independent theatre making. The students have been present at various points of the creative process and were our guests at the premiere of ZERO on Tuesday 30th September at Warwick Arts Centre. Here are some of their comments about the play.
“The play was a brilliant experience and really intense. The audience, including me, were really drawn in. The play had a great structure as it moved through time.”
“The play was a really exciting experience. It showed me the different ways of portraying character as I had not imagined Tom and Syrah to be played the way they were at all. My GCSE performance will be really helped by watching the performance mainly due to the interesting structure and the power shifts between characters.”
“Even though over the past few weeks I went along to rehearsals for Zero the play still contained some surprises. I was particularly impressed with the structure and how all the scenes fitted together.”
“Reading the play told me that it would be good, however I was interested in seeing how they staged the play. I thought the small performance space worked really well and made the whole piece seem more claustrophobic.”
“I thought the play was well staged and really intense, making it really draw the audience in. Although there were some amusing moments – particularly with Tom – a very serious subject was handled with sensitivity”
"Originally I thought Zero was going to be controversial and fast paced. After watching it I thought it was powerful and the flashbacks and dream sequences with Alex and Demissie were really affecting”
“Zero was a really influential and powerful piece of drama that stayed with me long after the performance. The concept of censorship was so strong that it has heavily affected my GCSE drama performance.”
“I enjoyed the play Zero because of the way the actors portrayed the script, particularly the slow but increasing insanity of Alex. The actor playing Tom was also good because he was able to move from anger to being fine within moments as the time shifted around.”
It has been great to receive the above comments and as part of the apprenticeship scheme the students will now perform their own responses to their experience of ZERO at the end of October...we can't wait!!
06/10/08
Three weeks into rehearsals for ‘Zero’, and three weeks into my Arts Council funded writer-in-residence with Theatre Absolute. It’s a three month project providing me with writing time but also the opportunity to build on my relationship with the company. It’s been designed to take place during this very exciting production period, so that I can be part of Theatre Absolute’s work, yet free to develop my writing.
I suppose there’s a risk that I could feel outside of all the activity. So in my first week I stuck close to the action – observing rehearsals and getting to know everyone involved. I was made to feel extremely welcome – and important too - because I get the impression that having a writer-in-residence is an exciting new development for the company. And apart from rehearsals, and the time spent in pubs with actors, I explored Coventry – with an eye for little bolt-holes where I can park up with my lap-top.
Since then I’ve popped into rehearsals from time to time – giving me a kind of stop-motion insight into the play’s development during the rehearsal period. However, for most of my time I’ve been gradually working on some different approaches to my writing. It’s a rare luxury afforded me by this wonderful residency time – and Chris and Julia’s encouragement to try new things.
It’s mainly involved a different approach – so that in the beginnings of my play idea, in the rough early stages, I’m exploring the worlds of my fledgling characters. And as I do this I can feel my interest in them expanding. New depths and possibilities emerge. That’s very exciting. And it’s not the kind of development I would normally do. I’ve been creating items extraneous to the play world that could belong to, or even be made by, the characters themselves. I’ve actually been doing some painting. I’ve been writing in prose. I’m getting quite carried away – last week I went into Debenhams and tried to find the perfume that one of my characters might use.
I suppose I’m just having fun. My girlfriend said I should use the time to be playful – and I don’t want to stop. Because it’s reminded me that playing is what matters. It’s taken me back to why I started writing in the first place. Without this, I know I wouldn’t bother. I’d be selling shoes.
23/09/08
ZERO continues the dominant themes of Theatre Absolute’s previous work, placing ordinary people in extraordinary situations. It is a play made up of twin obsessions: the pulverisng grip of capitalism and its effect on the individual; and the onset of conscience, a time when a person is gripped and disturbed and unsettled by events around them, a time when one’s inner voice won’t be stilled, insisting that YOU as a citizen of the world should care, should act.
I am still chilled by memories of the TV footage from 1989 showing tanks moving across Tiananmen square, and the brave unknown rebel who stood in front of the tanks and refused to move. In Zero, the character of Alex is in some way constructed from visions of that lone soul in that empty space, doing his stuff against forces so much bigger, stronger, and deadly. To me that Chinese man is a defining vision of resistance - the insistence that the territory of one’s mind and soul will not be tampered with. Of course, resistance dies if the baton isn’t handed on, which is where Alex ends the play, babbling on his mobile to an unseen wife who has been given an incredible task.
There is also the element of torture. Are those who are responsible for torture in Zero, also acting from conscience? Information is needed, obsessions grow, and whatever means are necessary can be justified. But Syrah isn’t a thug, she doesn’t look like a monster, she is educated, and believes that morally she is sworn to act for the sake of her unborn child. It’s a compelling standpoint. Conscience can cut both ways. It’s a reminder that to ask a bloodthirsty world to listen to its conscience won’t necessarily save it from further brutalities.
And if conscience isn’t hard enough, where is it all heading? This ‘money’ thing. This system that has outlived communism, socialism and all the other ‘isms’.
ZERO takes place in a camp where ‘terrorists’ are interrogated and tortured in order to gain information about who finances and arms them. But I was keen that ZERO isn’t seen as a Guantanamo Bay play, or a play about Iraq, or Afghanistan. These will be clear references for any audience member, but the play is set twenty years in the future and the stakes for the characters are different; they are pitched beyond struggles as currently tangible to us as religious ideology, or regime change.
In ZERO, the audience are thrown into a nightmare world in which the relentless pursuit of profit, and the politics of envy sit centre stage. I wanted to write a play that imagines the next crisis that we as a human race will stumble into, (although it feels like it’s already there rubbing its hands in anticipation). But we choose to ignore it. No one wants to debate the downside of capitalism because there are so many benefits, yet it is slowly ripping the heart out of us, and reducing us to savages.
If people are angry now in 2008 at British Petroleum making 16 billion dollars annual profit, if we are angry at soaring food prices, if we feel stretched now by taxes and the price of utiltiies, ZERO asks the audience to imagine a world 20, 30 years from now when the world’s assets have been stripped beyond recognition, and the pockets of the rich lined ever deeper. How will people feel, and how will they act?
ZERO is clearly heightened. All of my plays live in ‘what if worlds’; they are dark and blatantly intense. But I think they always feel real. The future may prove ZERO to be inaccurate or unfounded, but as a play ZERO is a guttural airing of modern day fears, shared not only by myself as a writer, but by every day ordinary people, the wisest most unaffected sort, who can often sense something in the air long before it arrives.
Chris O'Connell
July 2008
29/07/08
Really looking forward to the start of ZERO rehearsals. It's our first project since Hang Lenny Pope, in 2007. Co-producing with Warwick Arts Centre is always a joy and for a company of our size with such tight resources, the relationship with a co-producer is key to realising and sustaining an artistic policy.
Matt Aston is directing ZERO - it's the first time we've worked with him, but as was the case back in 1999 when we first worked wth Mark Babych, the prospect of a new creative pulse influencing and challenging the company fills us with both excitement and anticipation.
We're all cast bar one part and due for two away days in Bamburgh, near Newcastle, to have a last look at the script before generating a rehearsal draft.
04/07/08
In June, Chris O'Connell and Andy Garbi spent two weeks in workshop with five actresses developing the script of Forgiven. Chris originally wrote five monologues, loosely based on the premise of forgiveness and injustice. He merged the monologues and created a narrative web that was heavily fragmented, and rhythmic. Alongside this was a symphony of sound, composed by Andy Garbi, that imported devices from film into the theatre space, and was highly emotive in providing breakpoints for actors' trigger points.
The two weeks proved that strong support from funding bodies such as Arts Council England, who funded this project, offers artists a fantastic arena in which to experiment and push the boundaries. Andy and Chris revelled in the idea of 'no pressure'. Nothing had to be shown or proven, all was up for grabs and they worked with a spirit of endeavour that is at the heart of all art.
Forgiven is by no means finished! There is work to be done, and Chris and Andy hope to return to the development of the play later in the year.
23/08/07
So another show, another great time and goodbye to lots of new friends. Some friends we made friends with before, others are new friends, destined to be friends who are thought of as old friends as the years go by!
Thanks to all involved in the creation and touring of HLP, from rehearsal room to the final get out. You are all such total professionals and it was dream to work for you!
HLP played a great last show at the Tobacco Factory in Bristol on 5th May, accompanied by the boozy cheers of a horde of Bristol City fans, celebrating their team's promotion in a pub garden behind the theatre.
We like to think the sheer weight of the emotion on the stage drowned them out, because by the end we'd forgotten they were there.
And so to new work. See our News page for upcoming mumblings, and if you didn't see Hang Lenny Pope be sure to buy it, the script is published, alongside the cloud:burst script, by Oberon, (also see News page for details of how to buy). It can also be purchased direct from Theatre Absolute if you make contact with the company via our Contact Us page.
Please do your darndest to catch our new show when it emerges some time in Spring 2008.
10/05/07
Amazing to read an article about the novelist Jodie Picoult last weekend, in which she discussed her latest book which is about a Columbine type massacre, in a US university. She was saying how people told her the book was controversial and wouldn't sell - that it was too close still to Columbine. Her retort in the main was that the book had to be written because college shootings and gun crime per se is a conversation America refuses to have with itself. The article feels frighteningly prescient bearing in mind Monday's events at Virginia Tech University.
18/04/07
I think my Writing House workshops came just in the nick of time. I’d been working on Hundreds and Thousands for two years already, and – if I’m honest – time was taking its toll and I was starting to get the inevitable 'bit-fed-up-with-it' feeling. I wanted to push the play to a final draft – to be able to say I’d ‘finished’ it - but I wasn’t totally enthusiastic about the prospect of redrafting.
But then - like the literary equivalent of a romantic mini-break with someone you’re thinking of dumping – three days of Writing House workshopping completely re-ignited my passion for the play.
It was brilliant, for a start, just to hear actors read Hundreds and Thousands aloud – experiencing it outside my own head for the first time was completely invaluable. For our initial read-through, Lisa (the Director) and me asked the company to read it cold, without knowing the ending. Pausing, at the end of each scene, to ask them about their characters and the set-up, helped me to see how much of the story and backstory I’d communicated effectively. It was really interesting, too, to hear what first impressions each actor had of their character, and to see how these impressions changed as they progressed through the story.
Improvisation, based on the play, was also dead useful in working out whether I’d pitched the tone of certain scenes appropriately. There’s a few moments in Hundreds and Thousands where the authenticity of characters’ reactions, to extreme situations, are really important. Being able to watch actors improvise these moments was a real luxury; and helped me understand - more clearly than I could on my own - what was really needed from these scenes. And some character ‘hot-seating’– as old an exercise as this is – was great for sparking off new character ideas and developing detail.
Having to answer questions about the story, and talk through the original premise behind it, reminded me what I wanted to say with this play, and how much I wanted to say it. And it was reassuring to find that, for several of the actors, they’d heard the messages and ideas that I hoped the audience would. Getting these reactions, in the workshop, gave me a mini-version of the buzz that comes with watching your work in front of a full, live audience. And it’s that buzz – together with all the decisions that the whole Writing House experience helped me reach – that’s fuelling my final draft now.
16/04/07
Just returned from my final ‘Fifty’ workshop day. Over the last year I’ve recorded my experiences of these workshops and now they’ve come to an end. I’m really going to miss my fellow writers – meeting up every few months to share our lot. In this respect I’m a bit of a stuck record because I think I’ve mentioned this aspect of the experience in almost every posting on this site – only because, for me, it’s been the most rewarding part.
Though the scheme has now ended it’s continuing for me in one respect. Part of the scheme gave all fifty of us access to certain pitching opportunities. I was successful in one of these – my pitch for a returning TV series aimed at the 16 to 35 age bracket.
The TV audience are shrinking for this age group – a fact that seems to send TV land into hysterical panic. I’ve had a longstanding idea for a TV series and this seemed like an ideal opportunity to place it. I hadn’t initially considered my idea for specifically this audience but when I thought about the content I realised the audience couldn’t be anything but this age bracket.
So from my pitch I was commissioned to write a treatment. I found it a fascinating exercise. As a playwright I’ve been learning my craft and feel like I know what I’m doing. I have experiences to draw on. But this was something new and it was a real challenge aligning the demands of the treatment to the heart of my idea. Right now I’m waiting for a response – waiting to hear what, if any, the next step might be.
In the meantime I’m back to redrafting my latest play – more familiar territory. Like the TV idea, it’s an idea I care about. I feel that sense of excitement. The Fifty scheme may be finished – but the writing goes on.
02/03/07
Scroll down and you’ll find earlier accounts of my experiences on a year long Royal Court/BBC scheme called ‘The Fifty’. As part of this scheme fifty writers were nominated by fifty theatre companies (I was nominated by Theatre Absolute) – we’ve received a bursary, industry mentoring, masterclasses, and pitching opportunities across theatre, TV and radio. The programme is about half way through now and has continued to be a valuable source of both support and guidance.
I’ve recently been following the comments on the Guardian’s theatre blog page – responding to Lyn Gardner’s October 30th article, ‘Where are all the good new playwrights?’. (http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/theatre/2006/10/from_page_to_stage.html) In the article the Guardian critic charts the growing culture of new writing schemes and questions whether they have help to produce or nurture significant new writing. From the comments her article has attracted, you can see the idea touches a nerve.
Like many emerging writers I’ve experienced my fair share of new writing schemes. At their best they are of mutual benefit to both writer and organiser. For the writer they can offer increased opportunity to develop both themselves and their work. For the organisation, they can be a vital in developing new talent, and can provide a useful public/fundraising face. Less helpful to the writer are those schemes for which only the latter appears to be true.
But whatever the relative merits are of the different schemes, the reality is that they feature large on the new writing scene. As a writer, I think I have to take advantage of the possibilities they present but also learn to survive them. What are the survival skills? I’m sure everyone must find their own and I’m still trying to find mine – but I’m increasingly feeling that it’s about always prioritising my life as a writer. It’s about safeguarding the rough, imperfect process of what goes on in my head and what comes out on the page.
And so when it comes to participating in schemes, to developing pieces of work here and there for the latest prize or scheme, I don’t feel I should blindly sign up for everything. There are a lot of questions worth asking first. Who’s involved? What’s the process? Where will the investment of time and energy take me? It’s about prioritising and nurturing the very personal process of being a writer. If a new writing scheme has the potential to do that, at least in part, then I think it’s an opportunity worth taking. If it can’t, it’s nothing more than a distraction. And that’s something I don’t need any help with.
29/01/07
You might recall an earlier installment mentioning a writer seeded by Theatre Absolute called Louise Ramsden, and her planned trip to various writer's retreats throughout Europe this summer. Well here is Lou's summary, of what sounds like a fantastic trip.
"I did wonder if we were doing the right thing.
I’d had to pack in my job at the National Theatre to do this. We’d said goodbye to all our mates, knowing there’s be no opportunity for beers for months. And, with our room at home packed up and rented out to a stranger, there was going to be no coming back.
On 1st April me and my partner Ali loaded our lives into a Nissan Micra and drove it all the way down through France, to start a sort of mini-tour of European writers’ retreats. And as we set off I have to admit feeling – as well as excited – apprehensive. I’m a natural worrier, and I found plenty to worry about. Would each retreat we’d booked to stay in live up to our expectations? How was I going to feel inspired to write every single day? Would we go slowly mad with no phone, TV, email, or friends for three months? And how long would it be before the car died? As a born pessimistic, I did wonder - what would go wrong first?
When we reached our first retreat – La Muse, near Carcassone (www.lamuseinn.com) - I have to admit the views distracted me from the worries just a bit. As soon as we got out the car and saw the landscape around the village of Labastide-Esparbairenque our jaws hit the tarmac. ‘Awesome’ was a word that some of the American artists we’d meet over the following three months used a lot. But this was the dictionary definition of it.
Huge tree-covered mountains, rolling down into wide valleys - the kind of landscape that you can photograph endlessly without ever really being able to capture how stunning it all is. And the silence…after two long days driving down through France listening to endless Bonnie Tyler hits (yes, during the drive me and Ali let our fetish for 80s cheese expand into something bordering on the unhealthy) - the silence was incredible.
Our room inside La Muse – a huge, rambling, 17th century farmhouse - was just as amazing. We had our own private study, a bedroom, and gorgeous bathroom, all with windows looking out across the valley. We shared a kitchen, library, and garden with the other residents – seven in all, from Canada, the US, and Hungary - all writers.
The owners of La Muse, Kerry and John, were based in Brooklyn, but took a keen interest in what their guests were up to. The general guidelines of the house were pinned up in each room – including a breakdown of the hours of work that each day should include. The schedule suggested for artists ran something like : 9 – 1, work; 1 – 2, lunch; 2 – 6, work. The guests’ attitude towards this schedule was kind of mixed. There were one or two who didn’t like the idea of being instructed when to have inspiration. But others who found the time framework helpful. I think I hovered somewhere between the two, going through mornings when I found the prospect of a structure for the day ahead quite useful, to mornings when I resented it slightly. Either way, I think it was useful to have a few hours every day when everyone expected everyone else to be working, and people were quiet for each other.
We were entirely self-catered, so our days off were mostly spent driving into Carcassone to pick up food, and to check our emails in a little internet caff called Rouge Alert.
The only regulars who weren’t chain-smoking teenagers or war-gaming enthusiasts, we sat in Rouge Alert for a couple of hours a week using the WiFi (‘wiffy’ in French) on my computer to keep vaguely in touch with the world. And as rushed and inadequate as our emails home felt at the time, we both agreed later that the absence of internetl or mobile reception in our house was one of the biggest factors in allowing us – encouraging us – to write. Because as much as I’d like to think that I can discipline myself when it comes to using the web at home, I can’t. If there’s the option of internetting on the same computer I’m using to rewrite that particularly difficult scene, I’m more likely to be found ebaying or checking my Hotmail (again) than thinking my way around that nasty sticky-out bit of exposition. And I think the same goes for Ali, for whom the BBC football website has an evil lure. So suddenly finding ourselves in a working space without the internet and without a phone (there was a call box over the road, but no mobile reception in the house), was a godsend in terms of creativity.
And, in the month at La Muse, we didn’t half create. It turned out I needed have worried about lack of inspiration. Maybe it was having so few distractions, maybe the awesome environment, maybe the opening of the artistic floodgates after the last few months of working and planning hard. Going running over the mountains in the morning – a real struggle at first, but essential in combating the goats’-cheese-filled spare tyres we were steadily cultivating – was also helpful in making us feel refreshed enough for scribbling. By the end of April, as we packed for Italy, we were fitter, very well-fed, and two-plays heavier.
Our Italian retreat, called A Retreat With A View, (www.aretreatwithaview.com) was in another little village – Baiardo, near San Remo. Literally on top of a mountain - in a part of the village you could only access by walking up almost-vertical cobbled alleyways - our home there was a totally different set-up from La Muse. We had our own separate house, all to ourselves. The street was rubbley and ramshacked, but our pad had been beautifully done up by Arrigo, the owner, who also managed six or seven more properties in the same little area. Unlike La Muse, the house was usually let as holiday accommodation, but, in our case, Arrigo had taken pity on poor artists and given us a discount for staying the whole month.
Our neighbours were few and far between. An American chap called Michael - who editied encyclopedias - and a Turkish girl called Zenap lived a couple of doors down, helping to oversee the management of the houses for Arrigo. And then there was Max - who, in between doing maintenance jobs on Arrigo’s houses, brewed his own grappa (a bit on the strong side).
If we’d thought that the views in Labastide were amazing….they weren’t a patch on what Baiardo had to offer. We were so high up (1km above sea level) the birds flew underneath our balcony. And, despite my initial worries about the car, it never broke down once during our weekly trips down the mountain to San Remo, ferrying us back up 45 mins of hairpin bends every time to reach those views. The journey was usually nauseating but always rewarding. From one of our shared terraces, you could see a whole range of hills laid out underneath, all rising and falling below our village, with only the iced snow-topped mountains above us. And the ancient ruined church next door to our house appealed to our Romantic tendencies too.
But writing…well, it slowed down a bit in Italy. Maybe it was inevitable, that the initial splurge of creativity wouldn’t go on forever. Or maybe it was a combination of that and other things. In the first half of May, the European Spring carried on being quite unusually damp and cold – and as our stone house had no central heating, it got really chilly sometimes. There were days when it felt like trying to write in a three-storey wine cellar, and the temperature got distracting. Having packed in a fit of we’re-going-round-the-Med optimism, I’d brought hardly anything made of wool, so ended up piling on tons of layers. And it can get a bit difficult to lift your arms to type when you’re smothered by two cardigans, a jumper and a coat.
Our motivation picked up loads, though, when we had two other writer friends from London to stay with us. They came with a determination to make real use of the peace and quiet and, as in La Muse, knowing other people were working away in the next room encouraged me to stop procrastinating and get on with things too. I finished a second draft of the play I started for Theatre Absolute, Hundreds and Thousands. By the time our friends left, we were getting ready to head to Can Serrat, our Spanish retreat, for June.
Can Serrat, near Barcelona (www.canserrat.org), was really the place to blame for setting the ball rolling on our retreat plans. Because the previous summer, we’d both been awarded a support stipend there – an offer of a place at the centre at a significantly subsidised rate. And after we’d made the decision to go there together in June….well, then we started wondering whether one month away was enough. Neither of us had ever done the travelling thing, and the chance to experience a bit of Europe whilst fitting in some quality writing time was all too tempting.
We then spent a month or so researching possible places – mostly through the wondrous power of Google. We also found a couple of sites that operate as really useful links pages for writers’ and artists’ retreats around the world. One was the slightly-strangely-Celtic-looking ‘Creative Cauldron’ (http://www.creativecauldron.com/retreats.shtml), which lists a lot of retreats around the US and Europe. There’s also a very useful site called Resartis (http://www.resartis.org/), which has a good search facility, and an area of its site which lists upcoming deadlines for Stipends of the kind we’d been awarded at Can Serrat.
Like La Muse, Can Serrat is an old farmhouse, converted into a centre for artists and writers. It’s bigger than La Muse, however, and has more of a history as a retreat. It was bought in the seventies by a group of Norwegian art students, as a bolt-hole where they could head to to paint and hang around in the sun. They still own it, but it’s now open to arty sorts from all over the world to come and use as a quiet working place. People stay there for a week, a month, or longer.
When we arrived we met the nine other people who’d be staying there for the same time as us – the whole of June. We were the only writers in the bunch, everyone else being a visual artist or a sculptor, or video maker. And it was quite nice suddenly being the exception to the rule. Maybe quite healthy, too, for playwrights to be in an environment where the people around us were all thinking visually.
All the residents at Can Serrat get dinner cooked for them six days a week, by the genius resident chef Anne Tone. Every day she’d whip up an enormous feast for loads of people (there were quite a few others that came to join the June-ers for shorter amounts of time) and it always tasted amazing. Mealtimes were brilliant – sitting outside the house on big table under a canopy of vines. Wine, more wine, and lots of talking. For breakfast and lunch we ate leftovers, bought our own bits and pieces, or chowed down on the whopping slices of bread and cheese that were in the kitchen to share.
As with our other retreats, we escaped the quiet and went into the civilisation at least once a week. And Barcelona is quite a civilisation. Can Serrat is about 50 minutes away from the city by bus (it’s just underneath Montserrat), which meant that it was just about far enough to stop us getting distracted by popping in every other hour, but near enough for us to have some amazing day trips. There’s such an edgy atmosphere of busy-ness and excitement and creativity in the city, and more art than you can shake a straw donkey at.
At Can Serrat I think we both managed to pick up the pace that had drooped slightly in Italy – maybe largely because of the other people around us who were busily working away too. Ali nearly finished a first draft of another new play. I started redrafting something that I’d begun in France, and ended up with a completely different piece, on the same theme, that I was much happier with. We left Can Serrat at the end of the month with two new plays, lots of photographs, and an address-book-full of new friends from all over the place. We drove across Spain at dawn to catch the long Bilbao to Portsmouth ferry home.
Since we came back I’ve thought a lot about what it was about the trip, and the places we stayed, that made us able to write so much. None of my worries had turned out to have any foundation – especially not the one about being uninspired. In each retreat I got lots of work done, really wanted to do it, and really enjoyed it too.
I think the thing I found most helpful about the retreats was just having other artists working alongside us on a daily basis (ironic, maybe, given that one of the things I’d looked forward so much about fleeing London was escaping the mass of people). Having other arty sorts around was really important in spurring us on, if only because it made us feel like we should be working at the same time as they were. In fact I think it might be fair to say that our productivity was kind of proportional to the number of people around us who were serious about getting down to writing or painting – I don’t think it was an accident that our motivation sagged a bit in Italy when we were living on our own, but that it then picked up when we had visitors there.
The other big factor had to be the sheer lack of anything else to do. In France, for example, we were in a village with no shop, no café, nothing. There were lots of beautiful walks to go on if we needed to stretch our legs, but nothing that was a major distraction. And of course with no TV, internet, email, or phone, it was easier to sit down and write than to be your own worst enemy, watching a repeat of Big Brother or emailing a friend you only saw last night.
That said, I think having a biggish town or city within relatively easy reach was also really important to us too. Apart from the need for somewhere decent to buy food and petrol, we found that being able to reconnect with bustle and busyness, when we chose to, was really refreshing - the day after we’d had our weekly trip into Carcassone, San Remo, or Barcelona, I usually wrote better and with more enthusiasm than I had the day before.
And our favourite retreat of the three? Would probably have to be Can Serrat. For several reasons – the number of people there, the kind of great people they were, the beautiful house and arty, sculpture-filled garden, the closeness to Barcelona, the weather, the festivals. And the fact that we were so well looked after – Can Serrat has a small team of people who organise the place and help to take some of the mundane jobs that can be distracting (like food shopping and cooking) off your shoulders, without mollycoddling you (we still did our own laundry and cleaning, and all took turns with washing up after our daily meals).
For all the time I spent, before we left, worrying about what might go wrong, nothing ever did, and our months in the retreats turned out to be invaluable. We wrote more than we ever would have in London; and, away from pressures and distractions of home, I started to get really absorbed by my writing again, to enjoy it.
So…we’re already talking about possibly doing it all again at some point in the future. And we’ve learnt loads from our three months away that we’ll use to choose retreats. We’ll look for ones that are remote without being cut off, peaceful but full of interesting people. The incredible rooms and brilliant food we had in France would be nice, combined with the inspiring views and Romantic surroundings from Italy, and the sociability and vibrant nearby city we loved so much in Spain. We’d like to go back to Can Serrat, but we’re also considering looking further afield for our next retreat. There’s some incredible-looking places in the USA, and in India. And next time I’ll know we’ll be doing exactly the right thing."
29/01/07
Joe Hammond is a writer Theatre Absolute recommended for the Royal Court's The 50 Programme:
Two [The 50] masterclasses now completed – and I’ve been given such a lift by spending time with other writers. We’ve had sessions with Hanif Kureishi, Joe Penhall, Abi Morgan and Stephen Jeffreys – each offering different perspectives on the writer’s experience.
It’s a tough, strange, grinding experience – getting your career going as a writer. You spend a lot of time on your own. Weird things happen in your head. So it’s a relief to be reassured that it’s like this for all of us – and to get advice from other writers on how best to manage the conditions and the relationships that come with the work.
And along with the luminaries, there are the other forty-nine writers. The master-class events taking place over two days, allowing plenty of opportunity to feel almost normal amongst contemporaries who understand what each other is trying to do.
Of course, with the pitching opportunities available through the scheme, these people are my competitors. And whilst I look forward to seeing and reading their work it will be unfortunate if one or two turn out to be inconveniently talented.
But for now, having just returned from the latest BBC/Royal Court sessions, I’m happy to bask in the warm glow of camaraderie that fifty struggling writers managed to muster, and feel reassured that my strange life and aspirations are not so strange after all.
29/01/07