Wednesday 25 March 2009

Odds and Sods - The Verdict

I thought I should write a wee bit on 'Odds and Sods' our rehearsed reading which played to a sold out Ramshorn Theatre last night.

It seemed to go over pretty well with the audience and certainly everyone I spoke to said that they enjoyed it. A lot of people decided to hang around afterwards as well, which was nice.

It was slightly unusual as this was the first production we've undertaken where neither Fraser nor I took a part in it, so we watched proceedings from the back of the theatre.

The cast we put together were all really good. Moira Byrne of course we know and love from Glue and we wrote the part of Janice especially for her. It's easily the best part we've ever given her and she really excelled.

John Love fitted the part of Shug really well. He got the character from the off and really gave his all to it. The wee tender moment he has near the end John performed with aplomb.

James Keenan relished the opportunity to play a bastard in Sandy and seemed surprised when people told him afterwards that they were sympathetic to his character. Just proved how much he put into him that made people care about him, even if he isn't the nicest guy.

Robert Radcliffe handled the part of Frank brilliantly from the get-go. Along with Jen Byrne, who gave the character of Shelagh a lot more sass than we'd envisaged, he formed a great romantic duo.

Scottish Comedian of the Year Scott Agnew, making his acting debut, perfectly fitted Jordon, the washed up former boyband singer. We always had Scott in mind for the part and he did a really good job with it, using his comedian's improvisational skills when the need arose.

Last, but definitely not least, was Will Speirs as Milton. Will brought a manic energy to the part we never saw coming. Always explosive in rehearsals he was a real hit with the audience on the night.

With any luck 'Odds and Sods' will be back as a full-length play in the Autumn.

There is a review on our mate John's site.

6 comments:

Squirmy Popple said...

Great show guys - I really hope you do a full production later this year!

Anonymous said...

I really enjoyed the play. Fine acting and good witty dialogue.
Scott.

Doctor Logan said...

How did you go about the script writing process?

Fraser said...

No hard and fast method really - Tom came up with the premise and the central theme of there being a bet running through the play to give the story a drive - he also came up with the basic characters. We got together a couple of weekends to thrash out the frame of the story, who would interact with who, who the characters were etc. A couple of characters were tossed at this point 'cos there was nothing for them to do. We then started writing based on the notes we'd put together. This is where Google docs really helped because Tom and I could both work on the same online document and refer to the same set of notes as we worked separately from there, occasionally liaising by phone and email. We would write a bit and then pass it back - if we got stuck or thought what we'd written was rubbish or could be bettered, we just passed it back and forth until we were happy. Once we had finished a draft, we looked over it a fair bit to try and take out all the continuity/spelling mistakes and rubbish bits - this is still ongoing.

The play as performed at the reading was the third(ish)draft - if it goes to full production, it'll go through a good few more before we're happy I'm sure. There are already loads of notes from rehearsals and the performance. As I say, the fact that we could write the thing using a reliable (for the most part) online document we could both edit was invaluable - in the past we've often had a lot of hassle emailing each other word files etc that corrupt or we lose etc.

That sound about right T?

Tom said...

Aye that pretty much sums it up. I kept a notebook and jotted down wee bits of dialogue or stuff that I wanted to have happen that could be included. Not all of it was.

The script has a lot of pencilled in lines and scored out stuff based on the rehearsals and we'll incorporate that into the next draft before setting about a more major rewrite of it to take in some of the things we discovered in the rehearsed reading that didn't work or could have been better.

Doctor Logan said...

Thanks for the response guys, really handy to get your views on it. From a hopeless writer, cheers!