Digest

House plans now lodged with the planning office at Borders Council. The long wait begins.

Went to see Rapture Theatre's rendition of Hamlet on Friday night, set in modern day Glasgow at the infamous Elsinore Corporation. Superbly done despite the potentially cheesy setting. Hamlet was played vulnerable, unpredictable, emotional. The whole production was tight, sparse, pacy. The ghost scene was successfully played for laughs, unlikely as it sounds, and the gravedigger was ironic and self-referencing. A good show, and right on our doorstep at the Eastgate Theatre.

Our rehearsals for Myriad race on, with only two left before the performance. I have a soundtrack to put together before next Monday, consisting mostly of explosions, electronic beeps and clicks, accelerating spaceships and menacing ambiences of one sort or another. What's not to enjoy ?

Macbeth rehearsals have also kicked off quietly with a workshop for some of the principal Weirds. This Thursday is a textual analysis of Act 1 Scene 3 and some playing around with movement and voice.

I'm reading The End Of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas at the moment; part novel, part thought experiment - an interesting mish-mash. A friend lent me The Road by Cormac McCarthy but I might have to wait til the weather's more uplifting before subjecting myself to that

Went food shopping and noticed my momentary discomfort at taking a Sainsbury's reusable shopping bag into Tesco. What's that all about ?  Actually Sainsbury's promotional slogan for their reusable shopping bags "Take An Old Bag Shopping" almost deserves switching, but the prices don't.

Digest

Spent the weekend fighting with the new spiral binder machine, reprinting mis-cut pages and failing to find a quick way of working out which way round to put the binder combs into the machine. Notwithstanding, the Myriad scripts are now bound, labelled and ready for tonight's read-through and audition.

On Thursday I saw Roger Llewellyn perform Sherlock Holmes; The Death And Life at the Eastgate Theatre. An impressive one-man performance of a clever script.

House plans are ready to go to the planners. We're both feeling reconnected to the build project and excited about getting started. Now the trees are cleared and the snow has mostly melted away the place looks ready for a house to grow on it. Next hurdles are planning, engineering and costing.

Our family movie on Sunday was What's Eating Gilbert Grape ? Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio as you'd forgotten they were.

Simon and I saw Invictus at the weekend, and his DVD of 9 arrived. Screen feast.

New Year, new socks

This week saw the launch of my new range of drama offerings for kids and young people. A course on Macbeth, a course in performance drama (leading to a small show in Feb) and weekly drama classes for little ones. It was an exercise in blind faith, with bookings so few that I considered cancelling each in turn when the day arrived, only to be surprised three days running with extra bookings, last-minute new arrivals and - in one case - a recommendation from someone who had attended the night before. Most promising set of bookings is for Myriad, the sequel to Oddity which we performed as a live radio show in the summer.

My sister in law has been staying with us, so lots of chats about theatre and business and self-employment and not losing heart and starting out small and having the courage of your convictions and holding one's nerve. Useful and relevant. I have to keep reminding myself that this theatre stuff is what I love to do and it always comes back to that however many side roads I go down. All roads lead back here. It's T. S. Eliot all over again, dammit.

At present my desk is littered with fabric masks, three empty coffee cups, an Elizabethan-style money pouch (with no money in it), a couple of scripts, a book of Celtic prayers, a pile of unanswered correspondence, an electric stapler, two computer magazines, a pocket watch, stamps, a Windows XP installation disk, a wooden ruler, several house designs (don't ask), a pair of gloves, a letter from the Borders Hospital, a book by John Taylor Gatto about approaches to education, a torch, a pair of socks (new) and two passports. An installation of my life.

Five days to Twelfth Night

I spent the week directing a production of Twelfth Night for a team of homeschooling families in South Auckland. The kids acted and the parents were the production team. A fine week working with fine people, and a superb two nights of performances; sharp, bright, pacy and alternately hilarious and poignant. The cast, many of whom also took part in my drama workshops a few weeks ago, was aged between 5 and 15 but would put the paces on actors twice or thrice their ages.

It was an ambitious project and today I've emerged blinking into the sunshine not quite believing that it's only been six days since we started. The joy of such projects, and the reason for their irresistible gravitational hold on me, is the alchemy of talents and skills they generate. I love directing that traffic, having faith in people's ability to surprise, and even the game of dodging the reflected glory that can so easily make directors think more of themselves than is healthy.

Example: a casual conversation with one of the mums a couple of weeks ago about scenery. I described a three-sided rotatable flat and we sketched something together on paper that might just work. The next day she produced technical drawings from her husband, a few days later he'd made two of them in the garage. We got them to the theatre this week and puzzled over what to paint on them. Another dad, a graphic artist, drew six architectural sketches of Italian streetscapes and gardens. Four mums, two overhead projectors and a can of paint later we had the ideal elements of a stage set that would endure wind and weather throughout the play.

Meanwhile another dad created Shakespeare's father's coat of arms on a banner which decorated an otherwise forlorn corner of the stage, several mums generated exhaustive lists of props, costumes, scene changes, prompts, exits and entrances. Consequently the backstage management rivalled air traffic control over Heathrow. One of the fathers even made REAL SWORDS (we didn't tell OSH) and so on it went. A community of families selflessly blending its skills and talents to produce a golden production which I'm proud to have been part of.

These children and young adult performers have had a rich immersive experience of theatre which will stay with them; an infinitesimal deflection R S Thomas talks about. Who remembers maths lessons with fondness, or at all ? But most of us remember childhood performances on stage, and the impact they had. My interest in, and respect for the homeschooling phenomenon grows as I see the opportunities for rethinking the fundamental priorities we bring to educating our successors.

Entrances and exits

Every exit being an entrance somewhere else, I've now turned my attention to this week's trip to Dunedin. A hauntingly familiar city when I visited for the first time last year, I'm looking forward to spending more time there.

Last Friday I shared some fruits of the past two weeks' work at an exhibition of drama skits and sketches by the 30 children and young people who have taken part. I enjoyed seeing the subtle changes they've undergone, the emergence of new confidence and the excitement of performing for their parents and friends.

The Spring progresses, but through mood swings of torrential downpour and dazzling brightness, an adolescent season of promise.

I'm enjoying tamarilloes, Vogel's bread, seeing Tuis in the bottle brush trees, strong sunlight, the sea.

I'm not enjoying the Auckland motorway.

Young promise

The blossom is in full flower here in Auckland. The first dusting of green on the deciduous trees is lime-green, changing by the day, and tonight the new moon lay in the old moon's arms. I started my second week of drama workshops with a younger group; a day spent shifting my expectations away from those set by last week's deep teenagers.

Dramatic tendencies

A week in New Zealand and I'm half-way through the first week-long workshop of drama activities, this one with a group of creative and enthusiastic home-schooled teenagers. They are a pleasure to work with; full of fun, focussed and genuinely interested in learning.

Don't get me started on the countless times this isn't the case.

Home-schooling is sometimes regarded with suspicion, or a cynical air, but this network of families home-schooling their children is a model of good practice, with living evidence of success and difference in groups of kids like the one I have the privilege of working with this week.

I've been travelling

July is holiday season and we've been travelling about the UK catching up with friends and family, rediscovering the huge variety of urban and rural landscapes in this country.

A couple of days ago we navigated the post-modern wilderness that is Milton Keynes, thankfully with the help of a satnav system. Like Canberra this city is encircled by concentric ring roads punctuated with identical roundabouts. Even the satnav was losing the will to live as she recited "At the roundabout go straight across, second exit" for the ninth time, though she did eventually direct us into a concrete shopping centre the size of a small European country. Yes, I hear your cries of "why ?" and "what were you thinking ?" so let me just say that this was part of a larger story arc concerning new school shoes. Let's not go there.

Beyond MK (going North) is that indistinct area of the country known as The Midlands. Lying somewhere between The North and The South it includes Leicester, where old friends now live and whom we visited overnight and caught up on five years. A fine time.

The drive north cut through Shropshire, the homeland of the speed camera, which seems to be suffering in the recession. Most of the towns and villages we passed through had boarded up pubs, shops or industrial sites with weed-strewn car parks barricaded with concrete blocks. Even wealthy Macclesfield has empty shops, gaps sites and endless sales.

On the upside were two relaxed and pleasant days in London enjoying the Science Museum, a photographic exhibition, The Globe Theatre (we sat in on a rehearsal) and a stroll down the South Bank amidst street performers and living statues. London has an amplified familiarity because of its ubiquity in BBC dramas like Spooks and I thoroughly enjoyed rediscovering its vitality and rich sense of history.

Before this trip I completed the first of two planned drama schools at the local theatre. A group of ten children learned and performed Joe of Arabia, which I'd rewritten for the week. It worked out well and there was favourable comment from the audience of parents and friends. While easy to please at one level I always look for the next level of surprise at the accomplishment of the kids after only a week, as well as enjoyment of the dialogue at an adult level. My spies in the audience reported both reactions, so I was pleased with it.

Next week sees the second of these events; a video, sound and lighting course with a sci-fi theme. Could be fun.

Bad Apple

My smugness since acquiring a Mac has been almost unbearable.
"It just works" etc.

And it does. Years of driving around in a Windows PC jalopy with my head regularly under the bonnet fixing, updating, scanning, debugging, reinstalling and rebooting made the experience of the Mac like stepping on to the bridge of the Enterprise.

Unfortunately I ran into the Romulans this week (keep up..) with Apple's latest software update killing off my printer drivers. This just as I finished my publicity leaflet for my two drama schools in the summer holiday. There's a way round it (I won't bore you) but it's annoying and switches me straight back to that computercidal red mist that was a regular feature of my week. If anyone has some photon torpedoes for this problem do let me know.

Info about the drama schools is at www.centrestagedrama.com