Bob Frith's VEIL BLOG for JULY 2007

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28.07

Today I’m taking off on holiday. Alison is already in France taking her break. When we return Katherina will be joining us again and there’ll be a spurt in making for Veil. Last week we put out the ads for a Technical Director; a few days ago ads went out for the cast, announcing a date for auditions. More and more bookings are getting pencilled in for a Veil tour.

I had planned to finish the woodwork for the set by yesterday, but the Class 1 problem has left it 8 or 9 days behind schedule. The winged bull, and its attendant gods, are finished, just waiting to be painted, and Alison (with help from Laura and Hayley) has been creating the masks for the Iraqi women. So, a lot has already been achieved.

Helen is working on a new bid for the touring grant. If this isn’t successful, the whole project is put on hold. I can’t find it in myself to write what I did at the beginning of this blog – ‘we are very optimistic’. In the current funding environment - I just don’t know anymore.

22.07

Typically, I’m way behind the rest discovering Lyn Gardner’s theatre blogs on the Guardian Unlimited website. Fascinating, for me anyway, and probably anyone working in theatre in England. A lot of the things that Lyn writes about are day-to-day conversation topics in the H+B office, yet despite our best efforts Waterfoot does sometimes seem just a little outside the reach of – of, well, the rest of the world let alone the rest of the theatre world. But here, in Lyn’s blog - and the comments that follow in its wake - we find that we’re not alone with our worries; that up and down the country artists working in theatre are facing exactly the same things.

I particularly noticed the March 30th blog ‘This Arts Council cut will devastate theatre’, about the withdrawal of lottery monies from Grants for the Arts in order to spend on the Olympics. Perhaps this is what’s behind our problem in finding financial support for Veil? Certainly the comments section, with contributions from several Artistic Directors of respected companies voice concern, despair even, at similar problems to those we’re experiencing right now.   

20.07

I’ve finally sorted the Class 1 plywood. It wasn’t easy – no one in the North West of England seems to stock 15mm ply. Anyway I’ve found 12mm and it’ll have to do. Nearly £500’s worth should be delivered by Wednesday next week. So that little problem has cost a week and a half from the timetable.

Anyway, Alison has been joined by Laura and Hayley, students on work experience, so there’s a nice production line of masks upstairs in the workshop. The next problem belongs to Helen. She needs, on the advice of the Arts Council, to shave another £20K off our funding requirement for a tour of Veil. How? Well things can be cut to the bone, really to the bone, and we’ll save maybe £5K, even £6K. We can look for a sponsorship deal, but that’s risky and risk isn’t a word anyone wants to hear in these days of financial prudence. There’s pressure on me to trim our rehearsal time too, as ever.

H+B have relatively long rehearsal periods, it’s true. Usually we rehearse over 8 weeks. Many theatre companies have only 3 or 4 weeks. I argue that synching together the forms we use – puppetry, music, film – takes longer than most theatre; also that rehearsal is literally ‘where a show gets made’, and cutting back on it will inevitably be reflected in the end result. Anyway our 8 weeks has been reduced to 7 for Veil, and this is going to be close to a 2 hour show – longer than anything else we’ve attempted. Plus it will be technically more complex, and there’s the whole ‘moving to mid-scale’ process which is new to us, the implications uncertain. After some heart searching yesterday afternoon I decided that I can’t risk cutting rehearsal time any further. Sponsorship deal anyone?

14.07

Friday the 13th. Crisis – the Lowry’s contract (small print, page 49) says all staging must be constructed to BS something which means using Class 1 wood. Otherwise the booking is null and void i.e. we don’t get to do Veil. This relayed to me via Richard having met David at his house near York and fine-toothcombed the contracts together. He also points out that this is a pretty basic contract – other theatres will have the same sort of clause.

Hurried emails and phone conversations ensue. Of course we’ve always built our sets to fire-proof standards, but because there are so many props and visual material in our shows (often combining wood and card and papier-mâché and so on) we’ve tended to use non-Class1 wood but then sprayed the whole thing with a tried and tested product like Roscoflamex W40 which I always thought brought it up safety wise to the same BS standard.

But the problem is that Rosco is a US company and their products are tested by The Chief Fire Marshall of California (who is the hard man of US fire-safety, apparently), but it isn’t tested by the British authorities. So it’s a grey area, open to interpretation. And in the new bold 21st litigious century that probably means nobody will take a risk.

Does this mean my last three weeks work and several hundred pounds worth of wood are wasted? Well after all the aforesaid emailing and telephoning; asking theatre stage staff like John at the Dukes, it appears that it isn’t quite such a crisis. The framing wood over 22mm is exempt; and that means all the collapsible rostra I’ve been making; the question is over the plywood panels, which need to be 18mm, whereas ours are 15mm. So at worst I’ll have to re-order 6 sheets of plywood, and will have lost 2 or 3 days of work.

So, a kind of relief by the time I go home. Friday the 13th could have been worse. I should have realised the kind of day it was going to be when that man collapsed in front me as I was waiting at the pharmacy.

06.07

We’ve finally heard – the Arts Council has awarded us a research and development grant for Veil. Of course, this doesn’t yet mean that we can tour – but it does mean we can continue to make and develop the show, and it gives us confidence about the eventual outcome. Helen has done wonders – her first bid for a grant!

So now we can work with less of a day-to-day worry about spending money on wood, glue, bolts, fabric. Katherina has phoned to confirm that she’ll be joining us for a fresh burst of work on the set in mid-August, along with her brother over here from Bulgaria. And now I can plan the next production meeting, when we get down to discuss the details to make certain that we have everything in place to make the most of the technical rehearsal in October.

 

03.07

We'll be hearing from the Arts Council soon about our third application for a grant to develop Veil. Work continues - I'm building rostra, and Alison is working on the laqlaq puppet. The winged bull is nearly finished too (see photograph). What if we don't get the development money? This time it will be critical - it will be almost impossible to see how our Board of Trustees could allow more money to be spent on the project but, at the same time, it represents two years work.

 

 

READ AN INTERVIEW WITH BOB FRITH ABOUT VEIL HERE.

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