Anyong and Sayonara..for now

The Korean and Japanese members of the company have disappeared into the sky above Birmingham, and the latest leg of our journey together is over. We will be having a writer's meeting in Seoul on the first of November, and then it is e-mail and skype all the way to April, when rehearsals will begin in Seoul.

So it is great to be able to report that we are well ahead of our self-set schedule, and that after the meeting in November we will have a first draft. It seems likely that this will be a firmer draft than might have been envisaged, and that is testament to the way the fortnight in Birmingham has gone. The characters and rough structure squeezed together at the end of our time in Tokyo stood up well. The actors grabbed the characters and made them very firmly their own, and responded with such a quantity and quality of invention that the writers have had material for a whole canon of plays.

The final chapetr was another of those saturday mornings... perhaps a slightly more tired one, after the very full schedule of the stay in England, but nevertheless a very useful one. A wide-ranging discussion, joined by Caroline, Rachel and Simon from the REP, and by Yeon, and Judy, Byung Ho, Ayako and Minato, took us to the very end of our list of needed decisions, and a summary of those does bear witness to a successful time.

The characters are solid, and work vey well together. We have changed Norang's focus slightly in that her background in the country is stronger, and the idea of her being a victim of bullying has lost significance. We feel a need to make a little clearer that Aka has a strong motive for his arrival at the site - a need to prevent, or at least protest the damage that 'monsters' are doing to his favourite place of play.

The structure, breakdown of scenes and main action is in place, and we are happy with it.

We are happy with the time scheme of the play, and with the conventions for language, and with the design ideas, the rules for fantasy and reality, and much of the specific action and even lines.

We are really happy with the actors, and the way they and the creative team have worked togther.

With all these positives already in mind, we addressed the key issues that we have to bear in mind, and decided approaches to them. The check list for the script itself will be written up and attached to this blog in due course.

The musician will be decided by the end of November. It will not be Minato himself, but his presence during the workshop has given him a strong sense of the kind of skills the musician chosen will need to have. There will be a meeting about design in Seoul on 1st November, by which time Yeon is intending to have a storyboard. There will also be a first meeting about costume at that time.

Photos and video of the workshop will be collated and copies shared in Seoul. [All these meetings etc, are happening during a visit I am making to take part in an international symposium at the Korean National University of the Arts] Decsions have also been made about timings and parcticalities in relation to the rehearsal and performance stages of the play. If you are a casual passing reader, keen to see the play that emerges from all of this, please watch this space.... at some time it will be coming to a theatre near you.