A little drama

I think - I hope - I have finally done the last lot of edits on the script; for one thing the group will need plenty of time to rehearse it (it didn't help that most of the main wheels in the group were away for lengthy and overlapping stints during the summer), and for another thing I need to go all out making the nets now.

The main problem was that our Tom Razey didn't want to be our Tom Razey. She was rather coy about saying why she didn't, but various people read between the lines a little and concluded that she wanted a bigger part. And, indeed, she's a good actor (she played the Mad Hatter in Alice, and she was superb); so normally you would sort that one out by giving Tom some more lines, probably taken from some of the minor characters, because if someone wants to play a minor role it's usually because they don't like learning lines and don't want to have too many to deal with. Job done.

But it wasn't quite as simple as that. Being good at acting and being good at learning lines are two quite separate skills, and she absolutely has the first one, but she struggles with the second. So our organiser and her unofficial second-in-command (who has a lot of professional theatre experience in various capacities) put their heads together and decided that what we needed here was a narrator. And if we make this person the narrator, then she doesn't need to learn any lines at all because she can just read them; but she's in every scene (with the possible exception of the very short one - I'm not sure I managed to get her in there), and she gets to act as much or as little as she's comfortable with.

So I had to shoehorn in a narrator. Don't get me wrong; I thought it was a brilliant idea, and the perfect answer to what you do with someone with that particular kind of skill imbalance. They also wanted it cut a bit, despite the fact that it was already down to 45 minutes, and they went so far as to suggest a few cuts. I just looked at those and thought... nope. We are not going to need any of those. Bringing in the narrator will take out some quite large chunks of dialogue, and that'll shorten it anyway. In particular, the Princess originally had a lot of fairly heavy explanatory dialogue. She's going to be played by the lady who was the Queen of Hearts in Alice, so she can very much do the whole royal presence thing (much less scary, but still quite formidable); and she's a lot better at learning lines, but she did have an awful lot of them and it might have been a bit too much. That, then, was another benefit of adding the narrator.

Nonetheless, it was a fair bit of work. It is, however, now done. I was originally asked if I could get it done for last night, and I said... not going to happen, sorry. I have had an entire concatenation of unrelated awkward circumstances over the last week or two which has involved a great deal of time and mental energy trying to find work-arounds; things are now looking up, but while it was quite as chaotic as it was I didn't have the headspace to re-jig a script. I said I'd be happier if they said they wanted it for the weekend, and they decided that was fine because then everyone would have a chance to look at it properly before the meeting on Thursday (and if they want any more changes I shall really not be happy). In the end I had it finished by about 9 pm last night, which would have been too late for a Thursday meeting, but it was before I'd said so everyone was happy.

The first thing I had to do was establish who the narrator was. In the case of Alice it was obvious; the narrator was Lewis Carroll, who was writing as the play progressed. Since this isn't a story that is already widely known, I couldn't do that. I had a think about it, wondering if I could make her a relative of one of the crew; then it occurred to me that I am always telling stories about my best friend (as, indeed, is everyone who knows him, since his life appears to be made up of roughly equal parts of music, geekery, and narrativium), so the narrator could do the same. Her name is Gita Reddy, and she's telling a story about her best friend, who is the Captain. Gita doesn't concern herself with the morality of piracy as a profession, but she is very proud of the fact that her friend is extremely good at it.

That was great! She didn't need to go into any long complex backstory to make it clear to the audience who she was. She could do it in a few words - "I want to tell you a story about my best friend." That immediately places her, and I should think most people can relate to it.

My next job was to give her as much to do as I possibly could without interrupting the flow. This was harder. In Alice, there are quite a few scenes (notably at the beginning) when Alice is, for the most part, talking to herself (although we did have her address the line "What is the use of a book without pictures or conversation in it?" to Lewis Carroll, as if daring him to write her out of her current state of boredom), so having a narrator is almost automatically going to help the flow rather than hindering it. But there are several pirates, not to mention a pair of talking flamingoes, so the narration had to be handled rather more carefully. While there were scenes where it was obvious that a narrator would be very useful for getting rid of the explanatory dialogue, other scenes were much more action-based, and I'd read through them and my first thought would be "we don't need a narrator here". Then I'd go through again and find the odd three or four lines of dialogue which could be compressed into a single short explanation from the narrator. That, really, was putting her in because now we had her we needed to use her; it would look a bit odd if she was heavily involved in some scenes and not at all in others. I think I got it sorted effectively, though.

They wanted a few other small changes. In particular they wanted me to change Samson's name to Phil, because apparently there is a modern Disney film about Hercules in which Phil is his trainer (who I think they might have said was a centaur, but I could have got that mixed up with something else), and they didn't think most of the children in the audience would even have heard of Samson. They also wanted me to change Stoneport for the name of a local town which is not, in fact, anywhere near the sea; I pointed this out, and they said, "yes, that'll make it all the more funny," so I thought, fine, I'm not going to argue. There were also a few small bits of wording they wanted to make a bit simpler so it wouldn't lose the children, but since all of those ended up getting subsumed into the narration anyway it didn't matter.

So that, I hope, is that; and I have the go-ahead to order 2 kg of jute twine, nets, for the making of. What with that and the SCA garb I'm going to be up to my eyes till Christmas, by the look of it. But I have, at least, finished fettling up the shop; the original 24 listings of 10 items each are now 244 individual listings (the other four being a few recently-made pairs of earrings I hadn't listed yet as they didn't form part of a group of ten), and these listings are conveniently organised into collections, so that if you want to look at all my red earrings, for instance, you can just click on the "red earrings" collection and there they are.

And right now I plan to make some more earrings, and abandon the high seas in favour of some of d'Artagnan's high Cs (why, yes, he can still get them). If anyone wants to talk to me about the script today... shhh. You haven't seen me!