Setting the scene

We had a meeting about the script on Thursday night, and it was... quite a long way off the wall. Which is what you want when you're going for comedy. There were only five of us there, and only four at any given time, because one person had to leave early and another had to arrive late; but I think they were the right five. They were the people with the crazy ideas.

That doesn't mean it's always easy. They want references, which would be simple if we were culturally all on the same page, but we're really not. For a start, I'm quite a lot older than anyone else in the group (apart from our director, who I think is about my vintage, possibly even a little older); and for another thing I was born in England. Most of us weren't. So we're coming from very different worlds. Someone said something about a pop song, assuming that of course everyone knew it, and I explained gently that most of my favourite music was written before 1745.

"1745?!" someone echoed.

"Yes. That's when Handel died. I mean, not quite all of it. I do like more modern stuff, such as Gilbert & Sullivan..."

"Who?"

My fault, I suppose. If your musical centre of gravity is somewhere around 1700, you think of a pair of Victorian operetta-writers as "modern". Nonetheless, I did think it worth explaining to them in some detail who Gilbert & Sullivan were, if only because they wrote The Pirates of Penzance and so it might be appropriate to "borrow" a few tunes from it (with the words rewritten for the occasion). In particular, I thought we could do a version of the Major-General's song.

They'd never heard of it. I sang them the first couple of lines. "It's famous!" I protested. "I mean, even the Minions from Despicable Me did a version of it. In Minionese. I'll have to see if I can find it on YouTube for you. It is so stinking cute..."

Polite bewilderment. At least they all knew about Minions. Then someone decided we needed a Titanic reference, and we should use "that song", which is very famous, apparently...

"I'm sorry," I said. "I don't know that song."

"You've never seen the film?"

"Nope."

General astonishment. "Oh. Well. What sort of films do you like, then?"

Unintentionally loaded question. I grinned. They're getting good at reading me now, even if we don't quite live in the same world. "You don't like films?" someone hazarded.

"Not really. I watch Alastair Sim playing Scrooge on Christmas Eve, every year, and that's about it. I'm not really a film person."

"Oh." Slightly awestruck voice. "So... you like books, then?"

"You bet I like books!" (Thinks: and you should see my flat.)

We'll get there. There is always Wikipedia, which contains a lot of excellent summaries of films I've never seen and am never planning to see; and there is YouTube, so someone will no doubt at some point send me a link to "that song", and in return I'll send them one to the Major-General's song (in fact, two links, if I can find the Minion version). And, in fact, this is all good, because it means I can include both the kind of references I know (which will tend to appeal to the older members of the audience) and the ones the rest of the group know (which will get everyone else).

So there was all that. Then someone decided we needed some cross-dressing, and I said, well, that's pretty much inevitable, given the nature of our group. There are only two men in it, and both of them got dragged in later (no pun intended); one is the husband of our White Rabbit, who played the King of Hearts, and I don't know who managed to persuade the other one to join us, but he was a guard (non-speaking role - all he really had to do was look impressive and hustle the Mad Hatter in and out of the courtroom at the end). And probably most of the pirates will be male, so...

Ah, no. That wasn't what the speaker had in mind. She wanted our two blokes dressed as women for some credible plot reason. I said, "Right, well, if you're pirates, that probably means they have to infiltrate somewhere. We'll dress them as maids." This was when I was asked if they could be twin brothers, which is hilarious, because they look totally different and one of them has a heavy Spanish accent. I said, fine, they can be twin brothers... I'll just find some suitable explanation.

Then there were the children. Apparently various members of the group have children or grandchildren who'd love to take part in the next play - up to six of them altogether. So someone suggested they could be another gang of pirates, and someone else suggested it would be really funny if they were in fact the most vicious gang of pirates on the high seas, and I said, "oh, yes, entirely credible," and someone raised an eyebrow and I explained that I'd been bullied throughout my school career, so, yes, children can be stunningly vicious. Anyway, they wanted a scene where this gang of terror-kids boarded our group's ship and caused mayhem, and I thought, you want mayhem, I can absolutely give you mayhem. I've already written the scene. Only two of the children get speaking parts, but the rest are going to have entirely too much fun running round getting in all the adults' faces.

It was probably about this point that our organiser got the idea of the "sea horse", which would, in fact, be an actual horse... well, not an actual actual horse, but two people in a horse costume, pantomime fashion. And I laughed as much as anyone, but I also said, "Nope, I reckon that's a bridge too far. I don't see any plausible way I can explain a horse on a pirate ship." But she wouldn't let go of the idea, and I ended up telling her that I really didn't think I could shoe-horn that one in, but I'd see what I could do with it.

Well, as you see from the feature photo, I managed to get, at the very least, an allusion to that one, right there in the very first scene. Oh, and Lyudmila talking about eating frozen bear in Siberia? That's one of those "truth is stranger than fiction" things. I actually know someone who comes from Siberia, and she told me this very story. It seemed a waste not to use it here.

I think I'll manage to get everything in that they want me to, at least in some form. The real fun, of course, is pulling it all together. For instance, take Lyudmila; she exists because one member of the cast wanted a minor role who has quite a large part in one or two short scenes and then disappears. The only reason she's Russian is that I had to flip something over (I can't even recall what), and it struck me that "Flipitova" sounded like a fine Russian surname and would work well in the play. But once she was established as being Russian, I could pull in some Prince Orlofsky vibes and give her a rather shaky grasp on sanity (she even flat-out quotes him at one point, which will make a few of the older people laugh); and then I had the scene with the vicious child pirates, and I thought: ah. They need an excuse for coming on board, plus I need to get rid of Lyudmila for the rest of the play. How about if she's the mother of their first mate (known as Vlad the Butcher), and they know she's a pirate so they've been searching every other pirate ship they find for her, and now here she is? Perfect. So Lyudmila ends up leaving with scary little Vlad and his mates, and they're grateful... so they give our crew some helpful news, which I'd been wondering how I was going to get to them. After all, they're on a pirate ship. No Internet, probably even no radio, depending on how historical we're being. But they had to get hold of this important piece of information for major plot reasons, and... well, you can always hand-wave a bit and have one of the crew pipe up "I've heard..." and hope the audience doesn't think too hard about how that came about, but I'm not satisfied with that. It's all got to hang together. (Which our crew might also be in danger of doing at some point in the proceedings, of course...)

This is really not like anything else I've written before. I'm used to creating more or less solo, but this is more like conducting an orchestra. You're still in overall charge of the finished sound, but you couldn't do it without all the instrumentalists (even if, as some conductors manage to do, you're also playing an instrument or singing yourself). But it's coming together really well at the moment, and it's a ton of fun in a bun. I'm learning a lot.

And not just about film references!