Lemonade Anemone

Last year, I started puttng together my first ever play, KINGMAKER, and I documented the research and development process here .  It was a really fun project, and despite some trepidation about working in a new medium, I really enjoyed the creative process of working with a director, actors and a producer to develop the show. Sadly, our second Arts Council bid didn't get funding, so we decided to put our plans for touring the show on hold until later this year.  The play is a quirky little comedy about village life, friendship, and ellaborate archeological hoaxes, and we originally conceived it as a piece to tour rural venues in the Midlands.  So, while we were waiting for autumn to roll around, we were invited to showcase the play at the National Rural Touring Forum , a conference specifically set up to support theatre in rural places.  We were given a five-minute slot at the conference to showcase the play, in the hopes of connecting with other touring schemes and ...

We did it!  In case this is your first time here (Hello!) my name’s Leanne, and normally, I’m a poet. But this year, I’ve been working with a team of creative people on a Research and Development programme for a play that I’ve written.  It’s called Kingmaker and it’s a comedy about good intentions, bad ideas, and finding a place to belong. Our story follows a tour guide in a sleepy rural village, and the problems that arise when an internationally important archaeological specimen is discovered in the local churchyard!  You can read more about my journey through the R&D process in the previous three blogposts .  Last Friday, we invited a selection of cool people to come to see a work in progress version of the show. The audience watched four scenes from the play, and heard from the creative team speak about their ambitions for next steps. Then, we facilitated a Q&A where audience members could give feedback on what they’d seen.  It was a really useful ...

I’ve just sent two weeks thinking, writing, re-thinking and re-writing. A couple of weeks’ ago, our creative team did a week of research and development , working on the script for a new play that I wrote earlier this year.  By the end of the first week of R&D, we’d removed the interactive elements, improved the narrative pacing, moved the interval, added five new scenes, and completely re-imagined the ending!  All in a week's work!  The next stage of the project is a sharing of the show with industry professionals and invited guests on Friday 6th September. So, I had two weeks to do all the re-writes, before rehearsals started up again.  Given how many notes I’d made, and how many changes we'd initiated, it seemed like a Herculean task. So, I did what I always do when faced with a monumental writing commission. I procrastinated.  One clean bathroom, two mowed lawns, and email inbox clear-out, and a fully-hoovered house later, I figured I’d really better ge...

 As a poet, I mostly write stuff on my own. I draft a poem, maybe I take it to an open mic, or to my crit group for suggestions, then I polish it up. Perhaps it even gets published somewhere – if I’m very lucky! But I'm used to a pretty solitary writing process.  So, I was a bit apprehensive going into the first week of research and development on a new play I’m working on, in collaboration with director Vivi Bayliss .  Theatremaking is often a collective process – the actors, director and other members of creative team get involved with writing or devising the story – and I was a little bit wary about that aspect of the project.  I – like many creative people – really hate being told what to do.  But, I also knew that Vivi is an excellent director and a very safe pair of hands. So, when I showed up on the Monday morning at the rehearsal space, I was ready to experience a new way of making work.  But I’m getting ahead of myself. What is an R&D in the c...

I’ve been writing poetry for about twenty years now, and I mostly write narrative poems. So, when I started going up to the Edinburgh Fringe in the late 2010s, I got really into the idea of producing long-form live literature shows.  The first show I wrote was called Skip, Skip, Skip , and it was an autobiographical, one-hour piece that I performed at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe. It was a nostalgic and heartfelt show about music, friendships, and accidentally becoming a teenage goth in rural Norfolk in 2002.  I really loved the process of writing the show. I liked telling a cohesive story in a long-form, theatrical context – something I’d never done before – and I loved making something that really seemed to resonate with people. But I found the performance side of the process really challenging, especially having to learn an hour’s worth of words. My brain just doesn’t work like that, and the nerves really got to me.  Next time I write something like that, I thought to mys...