The more I think about it, the more impressive the Factory’s performance on Saturday becomes. Of course there are a hundred things we can regret – some within our power to have improved, most not – but what the hell does that matter compared to the achievement? Look at it this way: in the course of the entire festival I saw well over eighty events. Most of those I saw for thirty seconds or so, as I walked past them and thought ‘glad I’m not in there’; the next biggest group was those that I watched for a couple of minutes, before my attention returned to my intended destination. About twenty events I watched for between five and twenty minutes. I watched two events that lasted longer: The Early Edition with Marcus Brigstocke (one hour) and Joanna Newsome (one hour ten). Now here’s the really important fact: Apart from the thirty second group, I enjoyed them all. The two minute investments all felt worthwhile and left me thinking well of the participants; while the 5-20 minute category contained people like Seasick Steve and Franz Ferdinand, about whom I spent the rest of the festival raving. There was only one group whose work held me only by a combination of claustrophobic seating and horrified fascination. In other words, if I left a show, it didn’t mean I hadn’t enjoyed myself. But even when I loved something, I tended to be satisfied by twenty minutes of it. This is the festival mindset: there is so much stuff going on, one finds oneself thinking perhaps it would be better to move on from this, of which I have had a delightful dose, in the hope of getting more delight elsewhere. At the risk of overkill, let me put this another way: only two events in the festival held my attention for their entire duration, and if either of those had gone on for another twenty minutes I would have been out of there. Now consider this: A good many people watched Hamlet for three hours. This is in spite of the fact that the acoustic was unfriendly wherever we played, and with the sound checks and whatnot it was often nigh on impossible to be heard; in spite of the fact that it rained twice, once to monsoon levels; and in spite of the fact that, wherever we played, we were more or less prey to the comments and conversation of passers-by. (Of course, the passers-by represented an opportunity as well, to which I shall return, but there is no doubt that they diffused the audience’s attention.) And yet by the end, between the two groups, we had over a hundred watchers. If you focus on this, you get a sense of something remarkable. If you focus on the fact that we leaked audience, you are (a) a chump, (b) a chump, and (c), crucially, a chump. (a) because many of the audience would have been expecting amplified sound (like in the theatre tent) and been disconcerted by its absence; (b) because many people would have come with the intention of watching only an act or so, and gone away perfectly happy (as they often did in Shakespeare’s time, by the way); and (c), crucially, because people at a festival have special events in their diaries that they are not going to miss whatever else they may be watching in the hour or two beforehand. One factor that I could tell was preying on the mind of the group I led away was the fact that, by the end of the show, they had a smaller audience than the group that started on the lake. This is a natural reaction, and a bit of healthy competition was implicit in the idea and added to the fun of it. (That is why, when we finished, I announced that we had won by four minutes – ‘now let’s go and see how their show finishes.’) But actually, there are so many reasons for the discrepancy that I am not sure anything can really be read into it. To begin with, a lot less than half the audience actually came after us; I think we had between a quarter and a third. This immediately robbed our group of the potential to create the kind of big-group hysteria that makes it exciting to stay around. Also, I took our group to a relatively secluded spot straight away. From the point of view of acoustics, this seemed a good idea (though once the bands started up I wondered if it made any difference), but it did mean that, in that first act, where people can check their programmes and see that they have hardly missed anything so let’s sit down and catch up, the Lake Stage group had the advantage of passing trade, to offset the distraction of those who were passing but not stopping. By the time we were in a similar location, it was act three, and people could see that we were well into the play. It didn’t mean they didn’t stop and watch; just that they did so as I would have done, for five or ten minutes, before walking on glad that they had seen it. A final factor that may or may not have relevance is the MC-ing of the two groups. Several people mentioned to me that Liam had done a great job with the other group. I wasn’t able to do such a good job for mine, as I was called away to go and meet a stranded son. Even before that, I am not sure I did a great job. I set up an obstruction in the second act, for instance, that was, depending on how you look at it, either brilliantly daring or suicidal. This instruction, to sing the text, was not, in fact, motivated by a desire to make an impossible task even harder: I had it in mind that, since audibility was such a problem, the higher frequencies with which most of us sing might cut through the ambient noise better. Whether it worked or not is open to debate. In my terms, it worked brilliantly: it took us all, including (though for different reasons) J’ox, into realms way beyond our comfort zone. It may have cost us some audience, but again, in my terms, this is not a fact to mourn: it pushed them, too, into a place where simple delight in our cleverness was not an option. All of that being said, the reason the Liam group had a bigger crowd at the end may not be that they had the bigger crowd to begin with, or a better opening pitch, or more exciting obstructions; we have to accept the possibility that they played the better game. That’s possible, and also pointless to dwell on. We all did our best. That is why I am so proud.

Now, onward: Things to bear in mind for the Secret Garden Party: What Mike Alfreds was talking about when he described the ‘stagecraft’ points of concentration could be very helpful to us. We sometimes forgot a basic fact: that, in the absence of a back wall, if you face away from the audience, it is harder for them to hear you. When we played in and amongst the audience, or across the audience, or with one in and one out of the audience, it helped enormously in keeping all our directions useful acoustically. When both players were in front of the audience, facing each other, it was not so good. And when both were in front of the audience but the speaker was facing ‘upstage’ to speak, one sensed a strong wave of ‘what the hell are you doing that for?’ coming from the watchers. Interestingly, if you turned ‘downstage’ and spoke to your partner without facing him/her, none of us felt like complaining, especially if we felt that we were being called to witness the other’s unreasonable behaviour. Stagecraft. A watchword for SGP. Also on the theme of audibility (I make no apology for banging on about it; I honestly believe that it is very hard to bail on our show when every word is heard): dropping one’s voice below audibility for an ‘interesting’ effect does indeed have an interesting effect: it makes us loathe you cordially. That’s not to say there aren’t times when we can get away with speaking quietly (and it goes without saying that shouting just tires everyone out), nor that there aren’t times when one’s voice will drop the better to achieve an objective; but the rule is simple: if we don’t catch it, you either didn’t earn the attention it would have required, or you didn’t cash in the attention you had earned with enough skill. Dearth of props is no bad thing. No one blames us for the fact that, at a festival, there are only brollies and cameras. Relax. Don’t think you have to multi-use the things that are there. That is still a bad idea. If a brolly has become one thing, don’t make it another. Above all, don’t think you have to go prop crazy. The audience will be just as delighted, given that they know you have never played there before, by your lively engagement with the place and the stuff that comes with it. Above all, they will be delighted by your engagement with the most unique thing at every performance: them. A drop, by way of example: I suggested a while back that we could use stuff to tell the story of Fortinbras more clearly. That has now become a hindrance, as we scrabble with unpromising material to do something for every reference. Drop it. Go for a ball further down. Look at the lines. It might be an interesting to do a high-speed line run during the evening before the show – when, let’s face it, you are going to be faced with the task of staying sober. On reflection, I should have called one on the Friday night at Latitude. But for one thing, it seemed just as important that we should all get out into the festival and sniff the air; and for another, I had no idea that the lines would go so badly awry. I don’t know to what extent you were aware of it, but in my group at least, whole lines were being left out, word orders scrambled, and cues picked up almost never. I am sure you will play with more confidence if you don’t run into line quicksand early on in the play. Don’t be afraid of coming straight back at your partner with a response. Our work on deepening our responses has done its job; now we must guard against the pendulum swinging so far the other way that every speech is preceded by a pause you could drive a bus through. Make sure the Player King story and the Mousetrap are communicated. With the latter, I think that, unusually, we have dropped something too soon. I think we rarely, if ever, play the scene as beautifully as do two people from the audience listening to our prompting and doing their best. We tend to create a confused piece, in which the interjections from the watchers are embarrassingly unconnected to what is going on. Partly this is because we are unsure of when they come in the text, and partly this is because we are not waiting to see what we need – don’t trust, perhaps, that it will come. ‘The lady doth protest too much’ is a litmus test: have the audience seen a pair of lovers in which one is proclaiming her love for the other – who is perhaps unsure of her protestations? If they haven’t, what are you going to do about it? Rest up. The playing time at SGP represents a great opportunity, for two reasons. One is that we have reason to believe that we may have much quieter conditions than at Latitude; another is that we may, by then, be competing with far fewer competing attractions. But there are two great dangers, at least, are there not? One is the obvious one: that our audience will be tired and/or off their faces. The other is that we will be one or other of those things ourselves. I hope I can trust you not to be off your faces. There is an adolescent school of thought that says ‘let’s release our performance creativity by taking drugs’, but as one who has spent evenings listening to the scintillating conversation of people in that state, I know how interesting it is. (The role of drugs in the act of creation is more complicated, but completely irrelevant here. Here we are talking about not letting down your colleagues.) I am pretty sure I don’t need to say any of this. What might be more worth suggesting is that you really try to be rested before the show. If you have slept for a couple of hours, it will give you, I am prepared to wager, an almost magical advantage over the audience: they will marvel at your energy, which will in turn suffuse them with the ability to stay awake till five in the morning. When tiredness does start to grip you, as it will, and you have to run on adrenalin, you will already have broken the back of it, and you won’t reach the stage where your mistakes start to outweigh the exhilaration of your exhaustion frenzy. That’s how I see it, anyway. Help each other. Several people at Latitude commented to me on how marvellous they thought it was that the company cupped their ears or called out “can’t hear’ to aid each other in communication. And, you know, I really think it is marvellous. One of the things I was struck by, every time I wandered past the theatre tent, was that we, The Factory, are a company. And that’s how it feels when we have the courage to keep each other on track, and the humility to take it from each other. The sum of our parts is pretty impressive; but the whole is something unstoppable. Onward.

Tim Carroll.