Sanctuary at Edinburgh Fringe 2013

SANCTUARY 

At Edinburgh Fringe Festival 12 -14, 16 August 2013

"McFarlane and his Black Dingo Productions should be commended for the emotional honesty shown here" - Annals of Edinburgh, Thom Dibdin

Photographs by Sam Baxter

Sanctuary is a play I directed and designed for Edinburgh's Leith Festival in June, written by David McFarlane of Black Dingo Productions and starring Cara Louise Wickes as Janet and David Rob as Michael. After the Leith run of the play we did some re-writes and re direction. We created something even stronger for Just Festivals line up in St John's Churches Chapel as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2013.

"Sanctuary deals with a young man's guilt over a relationship breakdown and the difficult circumstances surrounding it. A subtle exploration of lives unformed, the play introduces Michael and Janet as young sketches of themselves. A shock wave surges through their romantic bubble and neither is able to deal honestly with the enormity of what has happened to them - until it's too late".  David McFarlane.

Initially the set was intended to be a reference to Michaels surroundings: at first, when he is deeply in love, he barely notices them and all he can see is Janet. But as the relationships gradually crumbles his surroundings merge into Janet and everything becomes confused and un-clear.

We used acetate boxes to create the set. As the play goes on Janet brings on more and more of her things, all of which are brightly coloured. In climax the set is destroyed by Michael. We planned to fill the acetate boxes with Janet's things as symbols of memories she leaves behind. This was so that at the end of the play when Janet leaves, Michael is left in his broken down sanctuary  and surrounded by the ever lasting impression and memory of Janet.

The white nettings were a continuation from the last show however this time we used them differently. The words "clean and clinical" resonated with Michaels acetate box surroundings and the curtains as they were pulled back and forth on their hooks resembled hospital curtains. 

And so our set became something that slowly showed itself to be a hospital or at least the vague memory of the hospital Michael would have of it.

This time round the play focussed more on the characters. We gave Janet more depth and the characters more of a chance to show why they loved one another.

This made their demise more believable and heart breaking. What is so beautiful about this play is it is true to life - nothing really breaks them apart, not even the abortion. It is simply a result fo life and time.

We used Lana Del Rey's Disco to play pre and post show and also for the shows scene transitions. 

Everytime I watched this show I was sucked into the world and immeresed in the beautifully real and recogniseable relationship portrayed on stage. And it wasnt because of my direction or set, it was because of Cara Louise Wickes and Dave Rob and their poweful performances on stage. The two captivated the audience - made us believe in their banal existence and then feel their hearts break at the end. 

Rather, it focuses on the relationship at the heart of the matter and presents it in its uncomfortably believable, fragile glory" - Broadway Baby

For more photos please see The Two Leaves on Flickr

With thanks to Sam Baxter who acted as AD.

SANCTUARY - LEITH FESTIVAL

SANCTUARYLEITH FESTIVAL

 "...like Black Dingo’s Sanctuary at the Whitespace Gallery, a downbeat but painfully observant show about a young couple driven apart after an abortion, featuring two moving performances from Rob David and Cara Wicks" - Joyce McMillan

A play produced by Black Dingo Productions, written by David McFarlane, starring Cara Wicks and Rob David and directed and designed by me.

The play is about a young couple driven apart after the decision to move in together and have an abortion.

One of the key things I picked up on in the script was Michael's constant tidying up after Janet. I designed the set so that his home could easily be pulled around and pulled apart - made messy and made tidy again.

The boxes have furniture drawn onto them and so if one piece of the pile is removed the piece of furniture becomes unidentifiable. As the play moves on these boxes get knocked down and put back together but never in the same way they were to begin with. As well as this the netting above the set falls and is left in a heap amongst the debris of boxes and props. 

The characters then discuss such things as clothes they've bought, work, gestures of love lifted from Hollywood films and sex tips learnt from women's mags, foregrounding the two dimensional banality of their existence. That is until a moment of profound reality interupts and the set comes crashing down. The boxes are then re-assembled in the most as hoc manner in an attempt to salvage some previous normality out of the detritus - TV Bomb

They were painted white to try and help detract from the fact that they were cardboard boxes and so in tying with this all the props were painted white also. The idea being that everything in the flat that belonged to Michael was white and everything Janet brought in from outside was colourful. This added to the idea of Michaels home as sacred and something Janet could visually invade upon.

My initial visual desire was to create a child like tent for them to use as a bed. This could create a sanctuary that belonged to Michael and one that Janet could help build and then destroy. 

Sanctuary played at The White Space Gallery on the 13th, 14th and 15th June at the Leith Festival with positive reviews. It will be back, new and improved for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival on the 12th, 13th, 14th and 16th of August at 6pm at venue no 127 St Johns Church on Princes Street.

The Revolutionary Upstairs

THE REVOLUTIONARY UPSTAIRS

A PLAY AT THE TRAVERSE 27/4/13

Scrapyard is a new project set up by a group of Edinburgh based ladies. The projects first outing was this April and called upon theatre practitioners from all sorts of disciplines to apply to collaborate in the project. All successful applicants were put into groups, given a stimuli and two weeks to create a ten minute piece of theatre to be staged at the Traverse Theatre, Edinbugh.

I was allocated the director/designer role in my group and together we created a ten minute play called The Revolutionary Upstairs written by our two writers Andrew Wiles and Sam Siggs. The play told a story of two lovers and how the governments' strict reduction on all things, from the front wheel on a bike to the amount of sexual intercourse allowed per week, affects them both personally and as a couple. Protagonist, Linz, is cut off, depressed and day by day losing meaning in her life. Ian is a loyal employee of the government and happily spends his days reducing the length of Shakespeare’s plays. The play cultivates when Linz leaves Ian to join a revolution of people fighting against any further cuts and he stays behind. The play ends when she returns to find Ian in a state similar to the one she had left in – broken and empty.

The play starred Liz Strange of Strange Theatre as Linz and David McFarlane of Black Dingo Productions as Ian.

The design shown above was inspired from Ian’s actions on stage – reducing Hamlet by ripping pages out of the text. Pages of the play or plays hang and peel off the furniture and off the characters themselves. 

Linz grabs and gathers the pages throughout the play creating a sort of nest for herself on the mattress.

Linz’s dress, secured with Velcro at the shoulder seam, drops in her emotional speech at the end of act one as she stands up in front of Ian to declare that ‘you can’t reshape the peel into the fruit. We’re dead already’, leaving her vulnerable and delicate in just a skin toned slip dress. 

The next scene, post revolution, shows the stage bare of all set.

Initially I had planned on using projection to enforce the emptiness in Linz’s head. I filmed Liz staring into a camera as she recited her lines in her head. I then edited the clips together and blackened the background before scoring it with a song by Bush called ‘Out of this World. This video was intended to play throughout the entire first scene and end as Linz leaves the stage, in time with when she leaves the camera shot. However due to time restraints the play was never realised with the video.    

                 

Below is also a version of the above video but cut and edited to act as short transitional tool between scene one and two. Again we didn’t use it.       
              

The play itself was filmed but the quality of the film is poor.

             

Production Photos