My favourite moment in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is the scene where Jules and Vincent (two hitmen played by John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson) are panicking after accidentally shooting the black kid in the back of the moving car. In true hierarchical fashion they push the problem up the chain of command, calling their boss Marcellus and demanding that he deal with it: -
MARCELLUSYou ain't got no problems, Jules. I'm on the motherfucker. Go back in there, chill them niggers out and wait for The Wolf, who should be comin' directly.
JULESYou sendin' The Wolf?
MARCELLUSFeel better?
JULESShit Negro, that's all you had to say.
Enter Winston Wolfe (Harvey Keitel) the fixer who charms those who need charming, brooks no dissent from those who need ordering around and so resolves the gory problem with absolute efficiency before riding off into the sunset with the beautiful Raquel.
In the script Tarantino capitalises 'The Wolf' to create the brand. Keitel's character has absolute high status whenever he is on screen and he deserves it because he gets the job done. He is Red Adair and Robert Towne and Guus Hiddink. He is the guy you go to when the stakes are so high that money has ceased to be a factor.
Every consultant on the planet should want to be The Wolf. The Wolf is recession-proof. The Wolf gets to pick and choose his jobs. The Wolf rides in, gets the job done with absolute efficiency, gets out and gets paid.
Last night Andrew Watts and I did a London preview of our show about Test Cricket.
I find the idea of previewing an Edinburgh show in London counterintuitive. The American showbiz tradition has it that you do your out-of-town tryouts before taking a show to Broadway. This acts as a sort of extended dress rehearsal, a last chance to iron out the kinks before the final assault on ubercritical New York.
Yet in Britain every July this logic is reversed as the metropolis is flooded with underrehearsed shows frantically preparing for a provincial debut.
Andrew and I staged the cricket show as the 'second half' of a regular comedy night where we both perform regularly. Because the promoters really know what they're doing the room was jam-packed.
This was a mixed blessing for a show as specific as Watts & McCure Know the Score. Given the breadth of variety of shows on at the festival Edinburgh audiences are self-selecting. A hour listening to an Englishman and an Australian bang on about cricket certainly isn't everyone's cup of tea but if it is then we're the show for you. If not then there's about another fifty shows on synchronously with ours.
Last night's audience wasn't given that choice. They had paid their money to watch stand-up comedy and that offer was changed halfway through the night. The 10% of punters who love cricket thought that this was great. The 90% who either hated or in some cases had never even heard of the game were understandably underwhelmed.
Without discussing it beforehand on stage we each reverted to quite a lot of more general (ie non-cricket) material and I think most of the audience went away happy. So the show was a success but as a preview I fear that we learnt precious little as to whether the cricket-specific stuff works.
At least the 10% said they loved us.
After a long drive to and from a gig in Stroud, late last night I found myself reading comedy reviews. An observation: -
Stand-up comics are judged on their strongest joke, improvisers on their weakest scene
Last night I did my first stand-up gig in a while and it was one of those nights.
Free entry is never a good start as audiences often don't value what they haven't paid for and there was a 50-50 split of younger punters who seemed to be there for the comedy and four older drunks who didn't quite know where they were in the first place.
As I was on towards the end of the night I watched act after act attempt to engage the drunks in conversation in the vain hope that they'd focus on the stage or at least shut up so that everyone else could listen. However, any attention given to them was fuel on the flames and they just got louder and more disruptive until everyone just stopped caring; comics, compere, punters and drunks alike. By the time I got to stage they were just gleefully yelling out random nonsense. I opened by mentioning that I'm Australian and was greeted with the opening verse of Rolf Harris' Two Little Boys.
Perhaps the strangest heckle I've ever had. Alas, not sung as well as this.
Our Ashes show opens in Edinburgh ten days time and I've had a timely reminder that pre-writing jokes for something like this is fraught with danger.
Those Ian Bell gags just aren't flowing quite as easily.
On Friday I reached an 'in principle agreement' to stage a version of Scenes from Communal Living in Sydney with an Australian cast in December. My thinking is to see if the idea is replicable and possibly even franchiseable. I'll co-produce the show with Marko Mustac, an old friend who is also one of the best producers of improv in Australia and who will also be its director.
What's the point in living and working 'globally' if I don't leverage that experience to create something interesting?
As I mentioned, Katy and I spent last week with my parents in Provence. We spent six days on a barge eating and drinking our way down the Rhone from Provence to Aigues-Mortes, an experience that was as good as it sounds.
Le Phonecien had eight other guests; a Frenchwoman, two American couples and three Ukrainian men (I know this sounds like a bizarre retake on the Gilligans Island premise). Our three Ukrainian shipmates were friendly, interested and interesting but they had almost no English between them. Not to be bowed by this they were quick to point out that no one else spoke any Ukrainian or Russian whatsoever.
Roman and Andrei declared that they businessmen, meaning that they were self-employed. Naturally I braved the exhausting labyrinth of half-grasped meaning to see what sort of connection could be established between my world and theirs.
I learned that there is still plenty money to be made in post-Soviet Ukraine if you're smart enough (read: brutal enough) to win the battle for ex-government assets like hotels, factories, farms and mines.
Conversely, the idea that I made my living helping companies solve problems was so incomprehensible to them that I came across as basically effeminate. Far more interesting was my father, a farmer in Australia who also had a resort property in Far North Queensland. Here were proper assets. Tangible things. Things worthy of the conversations of men.
I'm just glad I didn't lead with 'theatre producer'.
There's a moment when you stop building the boat and concentrate on repairing it in the hope that it at least floats when launch-day comes along
Last December I declared that 2009 would be my Year of Playing Nicely with Others, something that doesn't always come easily to a long-term freelancer like me.
This Friday is the improv show's only London preview before Edinburgh. It will be the first time the (expanded) cast has ever performed together so I arranged for two rehearsals this week. Finding synchronous diary time for a director and seven performers the fortnight before Edinburgh was always going to be tough and I should have realised that it was too good to be true.
One actor texted me 90 minutes before last night's rehearsal to say he was double-booked. Another button-holed me five minutes before the rehearsal to say that he was unavailable tomorrow night. Both actors went to great pains to tell me how committed they were to my project yet each presented me with a fait accompli.
What really annoys me is that I was forced to rewire my quite carefully considered rehearsal plans at short notice.
Because many actors are sensitive to anything they perceive as criticism a lot of directorial comment (aka 'notes') can only be successfully delivered away from a performance environment. The pre-show tone must be 100% motivational and a harsh post-show assessment can be unfair, especially if directed at one individual who has no opportunity to work on the 'note' ahead of the next show.
Rehearsal time is a director's most precious commodity. I am nervous.
My parents have been visiting us from Australia and we spent last week in Provence.
(Tough, I know)
What we didn't know ahead of time was that the Festival d'Avignon runs for all of July. It is the oldest and largest francophone arts festival in Europe and certainly a decent rival to Edinburgh in August with the same tension between the formal event and the Fringe (Le Off). The same festival buzz was palpable; random posters plastered on every available surface and streets jammed with flierers begging us to see their show. All very exciting.
Except that obviously and frustratingly everything was in French.
So when I went along to see La Compagnie Du Capitaine perform Soiree Impro I was intrigued as to how much I'd understand.
Within minutes it was obvious which actors were genuinely funny and which were merely clever. The better performers were the same ones as in every cast; committing to character, overaccepting every offer and physicalising the story at every opportunity. The witty wordplay was lost on me but there were more than enough moments where I laughed aloud to justify the cost of the ticket. The 'alpha improviser' (there's one in every cast) was as good as any I've seen in a long time.
I don't speak French but I do speak improv.
At school the retort we used to indicate that we weren't troubled by something was care factor zero. Every school and every age must have one. Catherine Tate's schoolgirl catchphrase Am I bovvered? springs to mind.
The reality of self-employment means accepting care factor zero. Aside from close family and friends no one out there is willing you to succeed. Not that they want you to fail; they really just don't care. The deal you've struck is that the world will celebrate your successes but failure will render you invisible. It doesn't matter that you got sick or your kid got sick or that you overextended yourself financially or overcommitted yourself or whatever.
All the world will see is that you failed and by the time you stutter through your excuses as to why, its gaze has moved on.
On that cheerful note I'm off to the South of France for a week...
Another day, another out-of-town stand-up gig for Mirth Control and thus another four plus hours in a car with a perfect stranger. And so another strange, roundabout conversation about the merits of the Edinburgh Free Fringe.
My interlocutor, another comic obviously, was trying to reconcile two contradictory positions: -
- Much of the beauty and excitement of Edinburgh is that it is entirely an 'open access' event. Unlike other 'curated' arts festivals, if you pays your money you're in the Edfringe programme
- The Free Fringe allows unsuitable acts on stage and both devalues the punters' experience and dilutes the audience numbers that rightfully should be paying to see 'proper acts'. It must be stopped
You can't have it both ways and you never could. Even before the likes of
Alex Petty and
Peter Buckley-Hill formalised the 'free' concept there were only ever two factors stopping an act, no matter how dreadful, from appearing at the Fringe: money and fear of public failure. As all comics have long since overcome the fear of humiliation money was the only barrier to performing at the Festival. Proper (read: committed) comics will drop £4,000-5,000 to 'do Edinburgh' and they feel that this figure weeded out all but the most deluded.
The real grievance against the Free Fringe is that it allows the dilettante stage time. A counterargument might be that the lowering of the financial barrier to entry enlivens the entire experience by opening it up to a new collection of poorer delusionists.
Hey, if you don't like it you can always walk out.
Courtesy of Seth Godin: -
Avoid obvious mistakes, don't follow obvious successes.
Many years ago I was involved in a discussion about the qualities needed to be a good theatre producer. I said that whilst the job obviously entails intimate dealings with 'creative people', the essence of being a producer is not of itself especially creative. It is essentially an organisational role best summed up as: -
Living in a constant state of low-level paranoia
I can't direct what hasn't been written.
Two truisms: -
- A project is just a sequence of tasks that have to be done by someone
- Projects crave momentum yet collaboration means that real progress occurs at the pace of the slowest contributor
When working as a supplier in a purely commercial context (ie consulting) I happily take on as many tasks as I can. By so doing I take implicit responsibility for the momentum of the project thus giving me a greater chance of seeing the thing through to completion.
Theatre is a collaborative process and that's generally agreed to be one of its intrinsic rewards. But if you're an impatient type like me it's also a primary shortcoming. This week I've been reminded of a valuable lesson: -
It is hard to remain responsible for a collaborative project if you offload all contingent tasks to others
A successful project manager allocates at least a few tasks to herself. That way she maintains at least a little leverage when the inevitable 'deadline looming' conversations emerge. It's the difference between emailing or calling a colleague and saying: -
You said you'd have completed Task A by Date C. Where is it?
And: -
We agreed that you'd do Task A and I'd do Task B by Date C. Now, I've completed Task B...
The latter has at least a chance of sounding reasonable whereas the former just sounds like you're ordering the staff about. And that doesn't even work with the staff.
Last night I went to watch a friend perform at a London hip-hop event that showcased works-in-progress from artists working in that culture. The idea behind the night is to give hip-hop performers (rappers, dancers, poets, etc) the chance to develop stage pieces that may one day have a bigger future in front of less sympathetic crowds.
After each piece there was a Q&A and the audience gave focused and positive feedback. The night is run by Jonzi D who has created an environment based on his belief that hip-hop is an authentic dialogue between performer and audience.
It was a quite wonderful experience until the very last act; two sexily-dressed women in the All Saints mold. Incredibly they lip-synched to their song, a vacuous rap about not much at all. They certainly looked great and their dancing was superb but even a newcomer like me could see that they just didn't fit.
Authenticity: we know it when we see it.
Stop Press: the session started at 10:00 and the first mention of the weekend was 10:09.
I am in Denmark to run a workshop for a pharma client that is launching a new product. The launch is vitally important (aren't they all?). So important that they've gone to the trouble and expense of inviting me over from London to run the day-long session.
Except that I've just been told that now my workshop won't be starting until 10am.
That's not a problem is it?Of course not.
So I'm down in the hotel lobby having a coffee and watching lovely Copenhagen cycle past in the sunshine. And wondering how much usable time I'll get before everyone's thoughts turn irrevocably to the weekend.
I've just noticed that of late my posts have focused more on my comedy than my consultancy.
Given the state of the world economy I must say how nice it is to work in pharma, a sector that is proving to be better than recession-proof. Not only are my clients still launching products with the same regularity as ever but because of the GFC even more is riding on the success of those launches.
This week I'm in Zurich and Copenhagen working with separate clients who gave me identical briefs: -
This time we can't afford to not 'get it right the first time'*
Higher internal stakes are always welcome news for external consultants like me.
* Apologies for the mangling double-negative but that's essentially what each client said in the meeting