That’s a scary thought!

Alan Howley here.  I’m one of the performers in The Performance Corporation’s Absolut Fringe Festival show Power Point.

So, yes rehearsals for the show are fast approaching the home straight.  Yesterday we had a day in the venue – the Camden Court Hotel.  Usually by the time one gets to the venue, as an actor you’ve made most of your decisions about what you’re doing and how you’re going to play the part.  So, the transition to the set is one of adjustments to the different space (“oh really, the door is all the way over there?”, or “is the table actually going to be that high?”).

In this case however, we’re performing in a ‘real’ place – a conference room, so getting to see the hotel yesterday allowed us not only to make those mental adjustments but also to get a sense of the room, and, crucially,  to remind ourselves that we’re not in a theatre, we’re in a conference room.  This demands of us, as performers, a different approach, a different sensibility, a different tone.

Today we’re back in the rehearsal room in Castletown and, as I said, we still have a full 11 days left.  Buckets of time, you say.  So, although we’ve been to the venue, we need to switch off the part of us that wants to pin things down.  We need to remember that we’ve time to keep challenging ourselves, to keep trying things out, to keep falling flat on our faces, time to keep playing.