Four Flat Whites in Italy

At the end of the year 13th November to be exact this play will be on at Howick Little Theatre.  It is the second play I will have directed for HLT and already I am feeling excited.  Directing a play is like stepping off a bridge in the dark in an unknown city.  You have some people around you whom you have encountered but whom you still have to get to know. 

You have a range of problems/challenges with the arrangement of the set, the setting of the lights, the production of the sound, and how well the costumes look.  Colours of fabric can change dramatically under lights – after working on wardrobe and finally putting together a good looking outfit for the leading character in one play I worked on, the lights changed her soft pink top to a dirty brown.  So the director has to be aware of a range of things, and needs to be constantly looking and looking and looking as the play develops.  The first play I directed a year ago had four fantastic women who worked hard learned their lines and were ready to try out anything – I was very very lucky.  Will it be like that this time?  I don’t know but the excitement of the challenge makes my fingers tingle.  This is a play with 19 different locations – so the lighting plot will be complex.  The set designer and I have had a few brief conversations but I like a sparse set with just a few things to give the indication of time and place and then leave it to the actors.  Roger Hall writes plays for actors and there is plenty for them to explore it will be a terrific time from auditions on the 5 September until the play is opened on the 13th November.  I can hardly wait.

The third group and the one I now belong to is a mixture of the two.  Good discussion and good wine and nibbles.  There are a range of ages and we meet every six weeks.  That gives those who have less time because of work commitments to have time to read and it means that when we do meet we are all very keen to talk about the books.  The system we have is that each meeting we all put in $10.00 as there are 12 of us in the group that is $120.00 to spend on books.  Each person has a turn as the book buyer and they can choose any books they want.  They can be new or second hand and at the end of the year all the books that are left in the boxes go back to the original purchaser.  It is a way to extend personal libraries. 

There are various ways of buying books and we try to support the indpendent bookshops.  It was Tess’ s turn to buy for our last meeting so she went to Doris Mousedale’s new shop Arcadia.  Doris recommended ‘The Museum of Innocence’ by Orphen Panuk a book set in Turkey – all 537 pages of it.  Tess took it home and read it and thought it was boring and dreary, so she went back to Doris and told her so.  It is to Doris’ s credit that she listened and although she didn’t agree with Tess she gave her a book which she thought the group might enjoy – Tess went on to buy several more books, but a cheer for Doris who values the business from a book group. I am about to read the new book ‘The Vagrants’ by Yi Yun Li and after a brief glance at the first page I think it will be a winner.  There are often tart comments about book groups – “You just drink wine and gossip” is one I’ve heard.  Well yes we probably do but we also read and talk about our books and we have a damn good time.