Tick Tock

This is my first blog for the Edinburgh section of What’s On Stage. All the usual warm welcomes apply, but I’m afraid I can’t spend too long on all that, I can’t spend too long on anything.

It’s less than two weeks until the Fringe properly kicks off and there’s very little time for my preferred form of arty babbling. I have now minimised all email responses to ten words or less and my producer and I have decided to eliminate the word ‘hello’ from our phone calls. We’ve calculated that this is going to add up to two full minutes of spare time at some point- preferably during our 12am to 3am technical rehearsal. I plan to squander both minutes on a power nap when the technicians start to ask me questions in jargon I can’t understand.

So how is it that Fringe preparations started so many months ago, but still haven’t been completed? Because I make devised theatre. Pesky, changeable, devised theatre. This means that all the press releases, promotional images, sound and lighting states that were planned back in March now relate to an entirely different show to the one that we have ended up with.

I have to admit, I knew all along this was happening. It is the way of the deviser. So apologies to all the people who I am currently sending updates to, I was telling you lies back in March and I knew it. You’ll be happy to hear though that karma is now firmly on your side, as it has kindly put thirty items on my ‘to do’ list. Well it might be more than that, I’m trying not to count above thirty at the moment, it takes too much time.