Some months later...

Last winter, I ended a blog post with a breezy promise to confide in you the techniques I used to learn 60 plus minutes of monologue for my solo show; an English version of M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A by Lena Kitsopoulou. Perhaps you read that promise. Perhaps you believed it, or even anticipated the big reveal; unlikely, but possible. Perhaps you even checked occasionally, as digital dust drifted out of the void to settle on these neglected pages, as the pause grew longer and longer and was revealed as silence.

I’m sorry.

I’ve been known to complain that theatre-makers rarely show process in their blogs; the wrong turns, the frustration, the bickering, the doubts. How much better it would be, I railed, if all the vulnerability and stupidity and mess were out in the open, so people understood that no-one’s work is effortless, unflawed, pristine – everything has life’s grubby fingerprints all over it. That’s how the light gets in.

And then I started working on my show, the show it had taken me a year and a half  and weeks and weeks of translating (and two directors whose schedules didn’t quite fit before I found a marvellous one who gloriously had just enough time) to get to start work on. And I was frustrated and scared and angry with myself and stupid and vulnerable and full of doubt. And I couldn’t bear to tell you what a fraud I was.

So time passed, and we were rehearsing and more time passed, during which the backlog of M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A work that I’d have to tell you about before I got to the bit we were working on just then got longer and longer. And posterous closed down, so maintaining my blog suddenly meant uploading all that stuff all over again and consequently became even more daunting, and in the middle of it all the all-female theatre company we were talking about starting became a show and a performance date and there was so much to blog about I didn’t know where to start and here we are.

The blog is still a mess, and most of the links are broken. I don’t know when I’ll get around to fixing  it up. I don’t know if I’m going to write about learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. I don’t know if I’m going to write about the whole warty process of re-learning a show you’ve only performed once, some 10 months after that one performance. I don’t know what I’m going to write about, and I’m not making any any promises. Except…. I promise to write. To keep on writing.