Waiting...
Friday 24th April 2009
The High Level Cleaning read through went well at the City Varieties – it was very nice of Peter Sandeman (theatre manager) to let us use the theatre - The actors were fantastic and our creative team worked really well. It was an exciting thing to do and I got a real feel for the play. I did a lot of pruning and editing – my God sometimes I do overwrite – and the reading was still two hours long! But I got some great feedback and most people had a similar response.
I met David Pugh (my producer) a week after. He suggested losing the X Factor strand I had in it and making one of the characters older, to focus it more on Lillian’s story. The rewrite was bigger than I thought – took me about 10 days – but I was able to submit it before I went off to EuroDisney with the four grandkids. That meant I managed to have a bit of brain space and relaxation – if you can call it relaxation with four kids!
I also had some really nice feedback from Laura Mackie and Sally Haynes about a project I’d been writing called Women of a Certain Age, so I was chuffed to bits about that. They thought the piece was really good and just needed a bit of an edit and more of a sense of where the show was going towards the end of the episode – quite easy to do. Actually, I really quite like writing for my characters Sue, Gail and Linda. I think they’re all facets of me really. So it kind of flows naturally. It’s gone to Peter Fincham now, so we’ll wait and see. It’s funny, there seems to be a lot of waiting and seeing these days. I suppose in this current climate commissioners are more cautious than ever – which is a shame really as new and innovative work is going to be more difficult to get through.