Nothing to blog about for ages, and then loads comes along at once!

I’ve spent the last 3 weeks in sunny Devon, (well, mostly sunny, this being British Summertime and all) working on a great little show for The Common Players.  It centres around an old man whose house is falling off a cliff, and is so adverse to change it takes 3 visitations from his ancient ancestors to convince him it’s time to move on.

It’s exactly the sort of work I love making - we have a set full of old sea-junk, which is manhandled into creating various worlds and scenarios to facilitate story-telling of the show, and we’re singing, multi-role performing, and touring open-air locations with a laid-back ‘come and join us’ attitude.  The audience are a part of the show, and we have nothing to hide - we’re just 4 performers here to share a story.

(We also have the invaluable Mike Reddaway as our StageManager - a total luxury for small-scale touring such as this!)

And, as always seems to be the case in life, when one thing slots into place, many others start to follow.

I’m currently engaged on a project to convert an old passenger coach into a travelling theatre space, which I’m sure I’ll blog more about later (in the meantime you can follow here).  In the Common Players’ ‘Smuggler’s Gold’ tour I’ve found myself working alongside director Tony Lidington, who has a particular passion for preserving traditional forms of British theatre entertainment, and Eddie Upton, who runs Folk South West, with a particularly fascinating line in Forest Schools work, all of whose influences will no doubt shape the future of Skylight Theatre (as I’m currently calling it!)

So I decided to put in a proposal to the FirstBite Festival at mac, thinking I’d probably hear nothing back, and now it seems we have our first performance venture booked for the 24th September - there’s going to be a lot of DIY going on in the back of the bus over the next couple of months!

And it’s all fairly scary - it seems the closer you are to living your dreams, the more daunting the prospect of failure becomes.  Just have to remember that the surest way to fail is to give up, or never get started at all.