anniversary
Just goes to show how on the ball I am, on the 24th May I totally failed to notice or commemorate the fifth anniversary of this blogs' conception. So, belated happy birthday, I haven't written about parrots or bananas for quite a while, maybe forthcoming trips to Helsinki and Bremen will give me an opportunity to be less boring.
I will probably have more to say about recent theatrical events when the dust has settled, and certain parties are safely out of the country.
escape from Stalag Luft 69 (apologies to Mike Green)
This week finds me working with international extremists La Fura dels Baus, rather bizarrely we are rehearsing the show in Dunblane, before performing at The MacBob at the end of this week.
We are rehearsing in the sports hall (always a favourite rehearsal space) of a school which is run by the Ministry of Defence to educate the offspring of those serving in the military, part of the deal is that I am also accommodated and fed in the same place. It has been a curious experience, the food has been institutional and strangely familiar, how do you make chewy stew that tastes that way? A flavour that instantly transported me back to the reprehensible prep school that failed to prepare me for anything. The skool sausage too, is a curious fruit, a crunchy outer, with a soft interior, tasting of very little, yet oddly addictive. Fortunately, in so many ways, my schedule has prevented me from attending many of these meals, my first couple of encounters convinced me that the (ex) army chef was doggedly working his way through 1000 Winning Ways with Mince, subsequent reports have done little to dispel this suspicion.
One of the difficulties about performing on MOD property is that there are all kinds of restrictions placed on what you can, and can't do, combine this not entirely logical scenario with a spanish company that likes to shock, and you can imagine that there has been friction. Fortunately, in some ways, the total failure of communication between the army and the spanish, has produced an uneasy truce; we have explained at length that there is no smoking except in a special little shed, and finally they have accepted that they cannot even smoke outdoors. I have left the issue of firearms to the festival production manager, there is a unique sensitivity to weapons in Dunblane, and although I'm sure that the school has enough firepower to subdue a sepoy uprising, they are extremely discreet about it, I'm not sure a semi-naked spaniard hurling fake money and waving a revolver would go down very well. The company have taken the ban on flames and pyrotechnics in rehearsal remarkably well. Although we have now discovered that the demonstration of how flames are used in the show was entirely irrelevant, as they did a bit from a different show for the fire officers, we just have to hope that they don't come back.
Dunblane boasts a butcher that has taken the pie to a new extreme; chicken, coriander and orange was just one of their unusual confections, I have bought a haggis pie, I'm not quite sure why, it seemed like a good idea at the time! They also claim to have award winning sausages, I will report back on this one...
