Brief Blog from a Factory Virgin...

Monday was my first experience of Factory Theatre. I have to say I was a bit anxious about walking into a workshop I knew little about and where I was uncertain as to what would happen; which was further exacerbated by the fact that everyone in the room seemed to be fully familiar and at ease with actors carouseling around the room. But once I gave up any inhibitions and just joined in, it was a fantastic experience.

It began with actors randomly being assigned to each writer to work on their pieces. After the actors had had the opportunity to read through the pieces once through (or not quite for some groups), TC set up a carousel where each time he clapped his hands (or maybe he just called out…I seem to have clapping in my head) – the actors rotated on to the next writer and continued reading from where the last actor left off – not knowing what had occurred before. This really pushed the different ways the pieces could be performed and making it really “in the moment” rather than following a pre-conceived rhythm and idea the whole piece through.

As the carousel game continued, the actors were asked to bring with them the energy/emotion from the scene they’d last been reading and feed it in to the piece they were picking up on.

Each piece was then paired with another – so that the actors would just keep switching among those pieces. This time, whenever an actor felt like it, they would stop in the piece they were in, run over, and hand over the script to one of the other actors and take over from them.

I was really excited by the freshness this approach brought to the piece and the questions it raised for me. While its apparent to me now that the fluidity of casting is a staple of the Factory’s process, for someone who’d never experienced this before, it was really eye-opening having a character that seemed very set a particular way in my head then being read by both men and women of various ages.

The last part of the workshop focused on one writer’s piece, with 2 different castings and with TC directing the actors to really do line by line in the moment without deciding a predetermined journey or character type to play. The end of this sessions was cut short, but I’m looking forward to further exploring this last part of the workshop further to see then how a writer might use this to further develop their piece – as obviously a lot of the pressure of the exercise was on the actors.

Please add on more detail for those who weren't there as the above probably isn't quite getting it all and I don't quite have the lingo nailed down...busting, and people riding buses...

Most exciting about it all was the collective nature of the process – how refreshing to get to work with brilliant actors and other writers to develop new work, rather than just sitting alone at my laptop.
-Evan