Journey to Journey to the River Sea

Tempus Fugit

2006-01-30T13:13:00.000Z

Well here we are in week five (apparently - so I seem to have lost a week somewhere). Had a very kind notes session from Ros today following our Act II run on Friday (1hr 22 minutes!!!) and we all seem in a pretty good place psychologically to approach the week. There is a long way to go, though...
Looking forward to cracking things technically this week and trying not to obsess about electro-classical guitars, which is my preferred solution instrument wise (and the least convenient as I already have a classical guitar (lovely instrument, but too quiet for the venue - and seriously too quiet for some of the prosc. arch tour venues). Ooops - called in to rehearsal, so must dash!
...
Tempus fugit... I wrote the top bit on Monday and it's now Friday night. Much has happened since then. The electro-classical guitar has become a matter of fact (although the DI boxes have yet to be rigged, so we've not actually tested it in the space...) and we've just completed the first complete run of the show. It's still way too long, so a considerable amount of revision is slated for next week before we open on Thursday. I think it's in pretty good shape, but as I seemed to spend much of the run in Father Dougal Maguire mode, perhaps I'll leave those judgements to the creative production team...

So - more work tomorrow morning, followed by another run of the whole thing - which should help the performers to get a sense of the whole as we've worked in a very focused, yet fragmented manner up until now. There's a huge mountain of work to be scaled in the next few days, but I feel strangely calm about the whole thing - probably because I know I've got Monday free to work on cues, scene order and music parts (oh yeah - and to get a haircut. It seems no-one around hear knows a good barbers to go to around London Bridge and I'd like to avoid a sheep-shearing, so any posts on this subject would be gratefully received...)

Bedtime now. Sleep tight everyone xx

For a few hours the bungalow had been beautiful...

2006-01-17T23:58:00.000Z

Fire in the rehearsal room today. Metaphorically that is. In addition to the daily combustion created by our indefatigable company, today saw the arrival of flaming Lawrence Evans, Theatre Centre Associate Artist, who brought a certain magic to bear on the destruction of the Carters' bungalow. Anyone experienced in the ways of UK health and safety will know that real fire isn't an option for an open stage touring show. (Whereas in most other countries, avant-garde theatre nonchalantly exposes its audiences to naked flame regardless.) From such restrictions creativity can flow, however, and so look out for that moment when it arrives in the show. I shall say no more.

Naked Natives

2006-01-17T01:48:00.000Z

'Can we go from Naked Natives?' asks Ros. (This is a line from the girls at Maia's school, not a costume decision, in case anyone's worrying...) We seeem to have been rehearsing these schoolgirls for years.

In fact we have. The first sketches of this chorus moment came in Clerkenwell in 2004 with the Drama Centre students. Then more last May in the workshop week. And here we are again, finding more detail every time. 'Melanie's the ringleader', observes Ros, to general agreement. 'She's the one with secret copies of Heat magazine under the bed every night.' 'Just like me' observes Willie, who takes to the role with relish (so much so that he's a little blurred above). Sam meanwhile is doing a magnificent yellow-fever death just out of shot. And within moments, all these schoolgirls will be shanty-singing dockers (assuming they can get their skirts off rapidly enough). The magic of the emsemble.

A footnote on rehearsal periods. I saw a terrific piece in the London International Mime Festival last Thursday which had also beeen developed over more than two years. It had also had twenty-one weeks of rehearsal, fourteen on the constructed set. Just as well we've got such a tremendous team on this show to create this epic journey in just five weeks (which for English children's theatre, however, is positively sybaritic - as Miss Minton might say). And as you can see from Nicci's entry below amazing progress is being made.

John points out to me that one of the lines I've written will almost inevitably come out as 'catshit on your tongue', which justifies a minor adjustment. Sam and Donnaleigh are being heroic about a particularly convoluted section of text where the doubling of the crows (detectives Trapwood and Low) and the twins reaches its peak. And we resolve an ambiguous moment when it had appeared that the Professor was trying to remove Miss Minton's corset during their first cup of coffee together. All I'd intended was that he offered (and was prevented) from calling her by her first name. No wonder Willie and Julie thought the scene implausibly racy...

Patience and a good ear

2006-01-17T01:33:00.000Z

A piece I've written for the programme about adapting the book.

Patience and a good ear. They are the things Maia needs if she is to write down the songs she hears in the Amazon. They are also what I’ve needed over the years I have been writing this play.

When I have told people I am adapting Journey to the River Sea, the response from people who have read the book has been to tell me how much they loved it. Which is good – and not so good. Good, because it shows how many people think as I do, that Eva Ibbotson has written a wonderful book. Not so good, because it makes the job of adapting it even more daunting. There are an infinite number of ways to disappoint when you change something which people love as it is.

And adapting is change. Take the length of the play, for example. If you simply read the book out loud it would take many hours. The play will last closer to two hours, so some (most!) of the words have to go. As soon as I start to make decisions about what stays and what goes, there is the risk that we lose something which another reader really likes. There is no way to avoid that, particularly as I want this to be a play which can be enjoyed by people who have not read the book as well. (Although I’ll be thrilled if we inspire people to read it as a result.)

One difference between coming to a play and reading a book is what your imagination has to do. When you’re reading (or being read to) the pictures are ones you create in your head. That’s why people can have strong feelings about what actors look like in a story they love. When I talked to Ros, the director, we both wanted to make sure our audiences got to use their imagination as well. That gave me the freedom to create places by what the characters say and do. There are some early scenes set on a boat for example – I hope you will ‘see’ that boat where Maia and Clovis meet for the first time as vividly as you would if you were reading about it.

This way of telling stories goes back to the very beginnings of theatre. In film and television we ‘cut’ from one location to another mechanically – two events which did not happen in the same time and place can be recorded separately and pasted together. On stage, we will also be switching rapidly from one place to another – and at some points there may be two places on stage (and in your imagination) at the same time.

What I have tried to do when writing the play is to be true to the spirit of the book. I feel there is something special about the ideas and emotions and ‘feel’ of the book. I have tried to be faithful to that, rather than try and fit in every detail. But every change I have made has been done with the aim of giving our audience an experience as rich and funny and thrilling as the book is. Like Eva Ibbotson I was fascinated by the image of an opera house in the jungle – a huge theatre built deep inside the Amazon rainforest. The contrasts in that image are some of those I have explored in writing the play.

I travelled to the Amazon to find out more about the world Maia would have known. The people who paid for the opera house to be built were incredibly rich, but that wealth came from the work of people who were paid miserably if at all, and treated in appalling ways. The opera which was seen in that theatre, with its extravagant scenery, vast orchestra, and huge voiced singers is in one sense the opposite of all that is ‘natural’: the spontaneous living world of the rainforest untouched by technology. I walked through the rainforest and I sat in that theatre and both experiences were extraordinary. I hope the play manages to give you a sense of both worlds.

Look out too for how we decided to tell the story of what happened before Maia came to the Amazon. This is one of the ‘new’ elements – something which happens in the play which does not happen in the book. I knew I wanted to include the story of the ‘curse’ on the place the Carters live, but it would have taken a long time to act out the events, and meant introducing new characters who never had anything to do with Maia. My solution came from what I discovered about how people in the Amazon tell stories. I researched the rhythms and styles of traditional storytelling there and thought about what kind of language I should use to write that section. In the same way as it felt right to make the Goodleys an opera company in the play, and bring the peculiar wonders of opera on stage in the adaptation, I wanted to give a sense of another type of theatre, one which has its roots in Amazon life. I hope that comes across in the writing and the design and staging of that part of our story.

In the end, however, what I want is for you to go on a journey with these wonderful people which is as fulfilling as the journey you take with Eva Ibbotson’s book. It’s a different route to the same place, that’s all.

A day in the rehearsal room!

2006-01-16T20:25:00.000Z

Well what an amazing 2 weeks has passed us by (so quickly)! The rehearsal room has been a colourful place to be in with dancing, singing, exploring and acting! I cant believe we are in week three already! We are at such a positive stage at this point in rehearsal we even did a staggered run of Act One on Friday. The daily rehearsal room consists of lots of exploring of characters, working the staging of the scenes and how are we going to get the props on stage!!! I have written so many notes, ive nearly finished my second notebook!!! Eveybody is working so hard, there is such a fantastic team atmosphere!

Proptastic

2006-01-16T19:36:00.000Z

The Stage Management have props coming out of their ears. Today myself Beatrix and Nettie spent the afternoon in the Covent Garden Antiques market looking for...
Opera glasses
Monocle
Mirror for clovis
silver tray for semolina
leather pouch for clovis
baskets
a whicker bird cage
a fob watch
our trip was very successful finding almost all of the above save for the silver tray, but they are not exactly hard to come by. Now I find my back aching from my all too heavy rucksack. After our covent garden frolicking I headed alone :-( to Hammersmith where the charity shops and cheap market bizarre style tiendas yield all sorts of wonders, it was here that I finally found something that, with a little tinkering could pass for a bird cage, three interfitting baskets (think russian dolls) I plan to upturn them, knock their bottoms out and lash them together thus creating one big tall basket (genius I hear you cry, lets see if it works)

Now I rest tomorrow we have a dance rehearsal and I plan to strut my stuff in the jungle and try to get some of those capoeira kicks to head height, so that passerbys will think me Jackie Chan, and will believe it with such conviction that I myself will start to believe that I am Jackie Chan and... I digress.

After dance tomorrow I don my ASM cap and will head to the national theatre props hire store where I am told an old fashioned insecticide pump awaits, this will be for Mrs Carter to use as she sprays any foreign foods that come her way.

Will I have to stop being your little boy?

2006-01-11T01:14:00.000Z

One week in and work is non-stop. I arrive this afternoon to find on one side of the rehearsal room Matthew working with John on Clovis's opera scene. For those of you who don't remember that from the book, that's another change. Little Lord Fauntleroy is now an opera performed by the Goodley Company, which gives even more tension to whether Clovis's voice can survive. But it does mean for poor John that he's got to sing the beginning of the song in a demanding falsetto.

Willie meanwhile has been working on Mr Goodley's show-stopping (or at least show-stealing) numbers, and I passed David sat in the Unicorn stairwell practising on his guitar. On the other side of the rehearsal room, Ros and Nicci are with Liam and Lucy discovering what goes on for Maia and Finn when they first meet in the jungle. Can Maia trust Finn, can Finn trust Maia?

The rehearsal room is now lined with fascinating spiders - not jungle creatures but diagrams created by the actors connecting names to aspects of each characters' personality, her or his inner life, desires and wants. Tony drops in for a bit of rehearsal and in the break we talk about how rare it is for directors to see how each other work. Ros talks about how over the last two years she's been physicalising more of the process of actors discovering what is going on for their character at key moments of the play. Each section is discussed and those big moments of tension, or change or emotion identified. For example, looking at Clovis singing there was: when Clovis misses the note and his voice cracks; when Clovis regains his voice; when his voice goes irrevocably deep and when he runs from the stage. All of which may happen in one or two minutes, but everyone present (Mr Goodley, Sergei and the twins as well as Clovis and Maia) expresses in a word and physically what they want at each point. It's a version of a process many actors and directors use in exploring text, but Tony, Ros and I have an interesting discussion about the possible variations. Here it's a looser and more pragmatic process than the one I sat in on as an Assistant Director to Max Stafford-Clark. As you might know from his Letters to George, he works with actors assigning a (strictly transitive) verb to every line, which can do your head in. But it gives a ruthlessly specific framework for a scene and forces action to take place on stage. Which isn't so far from the aspirations of the various improvisers I met at the weekend's Devoted and Disgruntled event brought together by Phelim McDermott. But it's too late for more on that now.

the waltz of doom

2006-01-10T22:21:00.000Z

ok so i think i have got this thing workin....

well this is only going to be short but thought it might be of interest to note how i am gettin on with the doomed waltz!!! when willy takes me in his arms and swirls me round, i feel like am absolute princess, not the actual ten tonne elephant my boyfriend Paul described me as i practised with him...thanks! what is proving difficult however, is leading in the dance. i find it really hard to have the strength and clarity of my body to lead the lovely Sam around the dance floor. it usually ends with us giggling as we step on one anothers toes! however we are improving and soon we will be way better than the ever graceful willy and julie!!! Now where is Paul hiding? doesnt he know i have to practise leading him....

The Company Bonds...

2006-01-06T01:34:00.000Z

Hello - David here. Thought I'd be the first cast member to blog otherwise it will just be something we talk about in the pub - where we have been for the first time tonight for essential cast bonding.

Restraint was shown by all following a long day involving Capoeria, singing, instrumentalism, costume design presentation (fab designs from Nettie) and obsessive cleaning (both character based and in the green room... The Guilty Know Who They Are - but can always attribute it to character research).

Good to feel we're getting a hold on the production's concept - albeit a very loose hold at this stage.

More later...

Now come on the rest of you lazy actor types... get blogging!

The life-cycle of the moth...

2006-01-04T23:45:00.000Z

It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence.

Not my words but Harold Pinter's, from his Nobel lecture Art, Truth and Politics which is a tremendous exploration of what it is to write a play as well as a condemnation of the 'tapestry of lies' which sustains our politicians' power. It has a fantastic account of how the openings of Old Times and The Homecoming emerged, so fits with today's title, the opening line of our play. It emerged from a very different place - I'm conscious that the profoundly good things which we've heard yesterday and today in the first two readthroughs come from Eva Ibbotson's book. Not just some of the best lines and situations but the passion and the humour too. Although the surface of the script has moved further and further from the book, I hope the core of both remains the same. I'd be interested to hear (so do post comments or entries) on how people who know both the book and play feel about all that.

We hit one of the areas of departure today when Sam rightly pointed out that The Mayfair Academy for Young Ladies, the Edwardian girls' school where both book and play begin, is in the novel rather a good place to be. In contrast, I've picked up on the comment that 'even the best teachers have trouble trying to make the Rivers of Southern England seem unusual and exciting'. It feels to me a better way to contrast the ideas of education in the story if Maia begins in a Gradgrindian environment of facts and rote learning. But I also realise that from the very first line I'm therefore shaving away complexities which exist in the novel. We've lost the marvellous sisters Miss Banks and Miss Emily for example, but in getting down to a manageable number of roles to be divided between eight actors, some characters (lots!) were always going to disappear.

The challenge is for the texture of the production - physical, vocal, visual, musical - to create its own depths. Like the lovely relationship which emerged this afternoon between Anna (Sam) and Dora (John) - Anna eager to enjoy conjuring the horrors of the Amazon for Maia and exasperated by Dora's softness. Who knows if that moment will find a place in the production - or how may people will consciously notice it if it does? But like a beautifully crafted sentence - and Eva Ibbotson has many of those - it adds depth and layers which an audience can absorb, as readers do good writing.

This was going to be a brief entry. I'm hugely behind with everything else I should be doing, in part because of a coffee spillage all over the keyboard as I was typing up the rehearsal draft last week. But then maybe I should have got it done before Christmas like I planned. I wonder how Harold Pinter is with deadlines?

And We're Off!

2006-01-03T11:34:00.000Z

A new chapter today. Ros sent Tony a copy of Journey to the River Sea in Summer 2002, which must be about when I first read it. Three and a half years later we're starting rehearsals in the new rehearsal room at the top of the new Unicorn Theatre, which was just a hole in the ground (if that) when we all first read Maia's story. The climate in the room may be computer controlled, but it's hardly Amazonian. A vigorous warm-up seems to have befuddled the machinery and left it gushing icy blasts down one side of the room. But the building is wonderful.

If you want to find out some of what's happened so far, have a look here where the blog begins.

As we work, you'll meeet some people again: Ros, Matthew, Nettie and Jeanefer from the creative team as well as Ceri the lighting designer who will be juggling this with being father of a new baby. Julie, Lucy, Sam and Willie are in the company from the May workshop, joined by David, Donnaleigh, John and Liam. Marijke from Theatre Centre has Nicci and Joseph on the Stage Management team, Beatrix is working with Nettie on design, as is someone else who arrives on Friday. Plus the Theatre Centre team, including Michael who's continued the adventure of collaboration in Rio with Nós do Morro. And the Unicorn team, who meet us all tomorrow morning. All of whom have been invited to contribute to this blog.

So rather than it being just my side of the story, everyone gets to put their point of view as we start the final journey upriver to the first performance on February the Ninth. Another new departure...

End of Part One

2005-05-21T23:48:00.000+01:00

A mammoth sharing of the week's work this morning which seems to have both excited and alarmed. Lots of enthusiasm for the richness and depth of the actors' performances as they whirled from capoeira to string playing to mime to singing to acting the words on the scripts bravely clutched in their overworked hands. As well as various speaking parts they ended up being schoolgirls, dockers, boat passengers, market traders, Xanti villagers, masked waltzers, rubber tappers and forest creatures...

It wasn't brief, however, in part because certain sections were still improvised. So there's some concern about how long the show is going to be. It's interesting that one of the comments when we first read through the script pages on Monday was how fast the play goes compared to the book. Too fast? Too slow? When Ros, Tony and I met Suzanne Osten of Unga Klara, she said theatre was all about rhythm. Well, we've got about six months now to try and get that rhythm right.

They have wise feet

2005-05-20T23:49:00.000+01:00

Julie, Natalie and Richard are standing in a blue plastic paddling pool, while the others wrap them in huge polythene sheets. This is - trust me - a transcendent moment in the life of the Xanti. Water, face paints, coloured paper leaves, and lots of laughter, but also hard work trying to create a vivid and appropriate world for these characters in the last sequence of the story. Matthew's work with singing on the in-breath paid off - suddenly everyone went into the piece on which he'd worked with them yesterday. And it felt it might be possible to create this place where 'everyone's life was like a river' on stage (although the paddling pool didn't cope with some vigorous fish-spearing with the bamboo poles and sprang various leaks.

So it looks like we will want to have real water, which creates various logistical challenges. As does the trapdoor for Finn and Clovis (there are no trapdoors in the new Unicorn stage - the floor of one theatre is the concrete roof of the other). Not to mention the crashing megatherium skeleton which appeared in the script today.

Five days work and we've travelled a very long way. Let's see what everyone makes of it at the sharing tomorrow - there's always the danger that what seems thrilling in the rehearsal room doesn't communicate to anyone else: 'you had to have been there'.

2005-05-19T19:14:00.000+01:00

I had acquired the habit of walking in time to my breathing.
The narrator of Alejo Carpentier's The Lost Steps, following his time in the jungle.

Some beautiful moments today. I still haven't seen the market scene, but everyone was full of that excitement when I arrived. Then a terrific round for the Carter family by Matthew and a breathtaking piece for actor Michael on the cello, as Richard playing Finn poled along a creek. Plus some good physical exploration and discussion about the Xanti - how do we create a community of characters so remote from us without falling into stereotypes, both negative and over-romanticised? The discussion, in which all of us drew on things we had read or seen or experienced, was a great example of what a group's creativity can bring to a piece of theatre.

Why do the wise men have no shoes?

2005-05-18T21:53:00.000+01:00

The whole day today at Gayhurst school, showing the results of two days' work on the first few pages of the play (very scary for the actors, who were fantastic, even in parts they'd never looked at before today) as well as working on dance, music, character, drawing and writing stimulated by the piece.

It was heartening to see that the style we've been exploring seems accessible. We're creating specific, vivid images - visual, physical, musical and verbal - to stimulate audience members to imagine the epic journey of the play. It doesn't spell things out, and I had some anxieties that it could prove inaccessible to a first-time theatre audience. In fact one of the school groups achieved a beautiful sequence of dance chorus pieces depicting the Amazon itself, loggers felling trees, wary Indians and then a menagerie of screeching, screaming beasts. All simply through movement - no words.

And the themes: friendship, loneliness, family, voyaging, communicating across language barriers, living with more than one family heritage - they were alive for this group. It was great to feel that this is a story and characters who really resonate with the children for whom we'll be performing - which is a huge tribute to Eva Ibbotson's original vision.

[The title for this piece is one of my favourite lines from the writing work the children did today.]

2005-05-18T01:59:00.000+01:00

Brief again today as there's a workshop to prepare for tomorrow at Gayhurst.

A capoeira market place this morning from Jeanefer, some character work with environments using the rich array of materials Nettie has chosen, then some beautiful pieces for the string players from Matthew. Plus a physical exploration of Maia getting lost in the forest and her first meeting with Finn. Not bad for two days. Everyone's being consistently inventive and hard-working, with the result that there are already some lovely images: the comedy of Trapwood and Low, the silent obsessiveness of Mr Carter, Finn emerging from the midst of a forest of arms...

The Mayfair Academy, Bethnal Green

2005-05-17T02:13:00.000+01:00

The disappointed sigh which greeted "Let's not do English Punctuation just yet" was a hint. These young ladies of the Mayfair Academy included a number of men - and no-one, whatever their gender, of school age.

Matthew Bailey was rehearsing our terrific team of workshop actors: Sam Adams, Saikat Ahamed, Willie Elliott, Julie Hewlett, Michael George Moore, Natalie Moss, Lucy Rivers and Richard Sumitro, in what turned into quite an opening number by the end of the day, thanks to Matthew's music, choreography from Jeanefer Jean-Charles, long whirling skirts by designer Nettie Scriven and Ros's orchestration of the group's collective response to the beginning of the story.

Not too much blog from me - I need to sketch out a scene or two involving Finn before we start tomorrow.

A little background noise

2005-05-13T14:10:00.000+01:00

There's always something that can disrupt a workshop in a school. The arrival of the lunch team who need to set up tables in the hall half an hour before you were told you needed to finish. The constant passage across the space of scowling staff who could do a lovely creative two hours themselves if they could then stroll out of the premises afterwards. Rattling radiators, rooms full of inappropriate furniture, fire drills... I've seen it all.

Until the gun battle outside.

I was chatting away to a lovely group of nine to eleven year olds at the house of theatre company Nós do Morro (We of the Hills?) - the company with whom Paul Heritage had put us in touch. I was explaining that we were making a play out of Journey to the River Sea and just taking the book out of my bag when there was a sort of loud rattle in the streets outside. Which was answered. And so it continued.

For those who, like me, haven't been near sustained heavy gunfire before, it doesn't sound like it does on the telly. It's more, well, loud. But there's none of that pingy ricochet sound. At least there wasn't today - I'm not intending to make any more detailed study of that soundscape.

So what do you do when gunfire erupts outside during your workshop? (This weblog is nothing if not practically informative...)

I was scared enough once I heard the shooting. But I got more scared when I saw how scared the children were. It's a bit feeble of me, but I rather hoped that they would be coolly sophisticated about the whole thing: 'Guns? Oh please, they're so yesterday. Let's do more drama exercises.' But they were really frightened. So I was too.

It was reassuring to be moved to the other half of the room, although it was full of musical equipment, since that had stone, rather than wooden walls. Although it wasn't that reassuring of course, since the implication about how much we needed protection was clear.

So, crouched among the drum kits in a windowless alcove, I conducted the worst drama workshop ever given. It failed on all counts - hastily improvised, meandering, failing to hold its participants' concentration and dwindling into aimless, time-filling chit-chat. My hunch was that it was better for us all to keep talking than just sit and listen to the bangs. We couldn't watch the video as that was in the half of the room with only a wooden screen between us and the bullets. I forgot all of Michael's notes from the Gayhurst workshop and everything I'd prepared as well. We just talked.

We talked about snow. And whether there were icicles in England. Whether I liked hip-hop (I promised there would be children at Gayhurst who did). About a Brazilian children's character with back-to-front feet. About anything. I asked what they would like to ask the children back in London - you can see the questions on the video. Although when one of the girls asked 'do you have war in England?' I did feel myself getting a bit weepy which maybe wouldn't have been good for morale.

The shooting subsided. The door opened and anxious parents came to collect anxious children. School was over for the day. Everyone smiled bravely. I felt like I'd been taken to the limit of what I ever want to cope with. These children, their families and friends live there every day.

A bit of background, which we got from Zezé, the remarkable Director of Nós Do Morro. There's a war going on over drug trafficking between this favela (Vidigal) and its big neighbour, Rocinha. Paul had mentioned this in his e-mail, but I think I´d read it with an old-fashioned notion that war here was being used metaphorically. But no. So rival drug factions shoot at each other in the middle of the day in a residential area where people are trying to run theatre workshops. And live. Although never, speaking to Zezé, has running theatre workshops seemed less fey. The children we worked with, and the others at Nós do Morro are able there to do something extraordinary. It´s a chance to live - creatively, yes, but this living too isn't just a metaphor.

And where were the police during this gun battle? We've seen no shortage of uniformed and armed personnel over the last two weeks. There were police - at the bottom of the hill, outside the entrance to the favela. They don't come in. Their job is to protect the wealthy district just next door (and tourists like us on Copacabana beach). There is no 'law and order' for this community. No security, no safety.

Well, I was all ready for a life-changing experience. If nothing else I've discovered how my priorities polarise at the sound of gunfire. It´s perhaps my most authentic experience of the trip and I would happily have missed it for anything. Although that would have meant missing some extraordinary children, too.

So much for Friday the Thirteenth...

Flying Down to Rio

2005-05-09T16:24:00.000+01:00

I just wanted to use the title, really.

We're feeling very carioca (as Rio folk are known) since just as we'd settled down to a coconut juice on Ipanema beach we saw our friends David and Pedro from London coming over the road. We'd no idea they were in Brazil, so this ranks as the trip's top coincidence.

David wrote a piece about travelling to the Amazon which was up on the wall during last year's Drama Centre workshop, and he and Pedro came round one evening when we discussed the Amazon (among other things) as part of the lengthy preparation for this trip. They're here for a couple of weeks staying with Pedro's family here, so we got a terrific introduction to Ipanema - including some extraordinary ice-creams. There's a lovely bookstore [link] where we saw some of Pedro's mother's books - she and Pedro's cousin turn out to have written books for children, including one set in the Amazon. So without even trying we seem to have stumbled on a whole new set of possible links to explore. Maybe a Unicorn Brazilian season? (We'll be having Swedish and Japanese seasons in the first couple of years so it's a possibility.)

A Night at the Opera

2005-05-08T10:00:00.000+01:00

In one way, Mauaus turns out to be the Bury St Edmunds of Brazil. Although many towns have fine theatres, it's rare for the theatre to be the star attraction. Yet, thanks to the aspirations of the newly wealthy in both towns, a theatre building appropriate to their sense of themselves was put up: the new Bury elite of 1819 and the Manaus elite of 1896 having had an eye to displaying themselves as much as a taste for drama. (And it was on the stage of the Theatre Royal that the most famous line about Brazil in English drama "where the nuts come from" was first spoken.)

But there was no rubber in Bury St Edmunds, and the Teatro Amazonas is on an altogether different scale to the Theatre Royal. Chandeliers from Italy, paintings from France (the dome of the auditorium represents the view up through the bottom of the Eiffel Tower), metalwork from England - these were people determined to enjoy the fruits of their wealth in the same way people could over in Europe.

We'd squeezed ourselves two tickets for the opening night of the Amazonas Opera Festival, a sold-out event and clearly a tropical Glyndebourne, as the cars and the frocks pulled up at the theatre (now rubber-paved only at the rear, but originally the whole circuit of the theatre was like that, to avoid noise disturbing the performances).

The stalls seats, with their underfloor ventilation, are numbered. In the boxes, however, it's first come, first served in each five seat box. Since we were already sat at the far side of the stage with a restricted view, it seemed wise to queue up and at least be able to see something. The synopsis of Das Rheingold I'd printed out for Jonathan didn't seem to have reassured him that the whole affair was likely to be remotely comprehensible.

It being a gala night, we were greeted as we entered the gilt and marble foyer by people in rubber clothes (that's rubber-era clothes rather than a fetish outfit - and one I imagine unlikely to catch on in this humidity...) Clearly Manaus has some real opera enthusiasts - the festival also includes a lot of free open-air performances - but the ticket prices for this event were, I suspect, steep for a lot of the pensioners and students perched like us at the top and sides of the theatre.

Unlike, say, the Royal Opera House, the Teatro Amazonas has no Balcony or Gallery seating. Which means that no-one is quite so far from the stage as you can be at Covent Garden. But it also means that there's no scope for cheap seats - this wasn't a theatre where the rich sat downstairs and the poor sat upstairs. The very rich sat downstairs, and the modestly wealthy filled up the rest of the space. Although perhaps the rear of some of the boxes (from which visibility isn't great) provided space for servants with fans and cooling drinks.

Because it must have been pretty sweltering. Things got warm even with the air-conditioning after two hours of Wagner. In Maia's time the seats were open-weave rather than velvet, to improve circulation, and the windows were all left open (hence the need for the traffic-quietening rubber cobbles), but still...

Just as in Maia's time too, I imagine, this was a night which was about more than seeing a show. People were just trickling into the stalls fifteen minutes after the curtain was supposed to have risen. And despite the sold out notices, there were plenty of empty spaces (sponsors? patrons?) around the theatre once it started.

Everything was an interesting mixture of the pompous and the casual. Although high Manaus society (and - it seemed - a fair proportion of national and international visitors) preened in the foyer rather than come in for the show to start, we meanwhile had a good view of the rows going on between members of the orchestra and what seemed to be theatre staff, shouting at them into the pit from the front row of the stalls. Presumably this uneasy atmosphere explained why half the orchestra packed up their instruments and walked out at the end even as the curtain calls began.

Plasma screens either side of the auditorium made the usual mobile phone announcement and the less usual (but maybe Brazilian regulation) aircraft-style safety briefing. These may be a new innovation, however, since when they showed an sponsorship advert from one of the season's supporters, Coca-Cola, sections of the audience started booing, a bit of an own goal if the aim of supporting the season had been to win cultural brownie points. I couldn't tell if this was crude anti-US feeling or a local issue about money and the festival, but the applause which greeted the covering of the plasma screens made it clear they were not a welcome innovation.

Having thought that doing the Ring Cycle here was simply an appropriately gigantic undertaking, I'd forgotten that it's actually a big river opera. The idea of treasure from beneath the mighty river is a terrific metaphor for the Amazon, and the production seemed to be exploring that. A palm-leaf floor, contemporary miners digging into red earth as the dwarves, and overalled builders as the giants, all suggested that this was about the local environment. There also seemed to be a sort of DNA design theme at points, perhaps referring to the way the gene sequences to natural remedies of the Amazon (and elsewhere) can now be patented for profit.

It's an interesting dilemma. Presumably many of those attending a gala performance at the opera house are - as they were in Maia's time - those whose wealth and ability to support grand opera comes from their profitable activities. Was that why the parallels seemed a bit fudged, with the gods largely in to me unfathomable Blakes Seven outfits? Or is it that the grandiose symbolism of the Wagner actually lends itself to everything and nothing at once, so that even the most promising allegory goes astray?

The audience went wild at the end, even the young woman in our box who had spent much of an admittedly demanding interval-less two hours, rattling her (very noisy) handbag, unwrapping (very noisily) her gum and arguing with the people in the next box about whether they were in her eye-line or not. Very twins.

Snow?

2005-05-07T15:51:00.000+01:00

I've just spoken to George in Norfolk and he reports hail and snow. In May? So maybe Jonathan and I should be grateful we're dripping with sweat (very much not perspiration) here as we step off the boat and back onto dry (or at least steamy) land. Off to the Opera House tonight which has apparently been air-conditioned since the 1970s with a rather nifty ceiling and under-floor vent system. Which is rather more than we've been able to afford in the new Unicorn. Mind you, we open Journey to the River Sea in February, so it shouldn't be too tropical an experience for the audience in there then.

Really keen readers will note that the next few entries don't come in order. I think the blog automatically puts the most recent one at the top, whereas I'm going to start typing up some of my entries from our jungle days now. Just in case you're suspicious that I'm actually just sat in Holborn making all this up.

2005-05-07T15:00:00.000+01:00

Following on from the great football in pants debate [link] - on the way through Manaus this afternoon I saw a cheerful hefty construction worker on site in boots, a hard hat and nothing else but swimming trunks. Even Village People never hit on that combination...

2005-05-02T21:45:00.000+01:00

Continuing by candelight. There's a furious storm on, which was providing a suitably epic lightning backdrop to our night-time river trek earlier. Jonathan has overcome his anxieties about mosquitos, other creepy-crawlies, lizards and the like, and seems comfortably asleep. I've fumbled around in the total darkness for candle and matches (forgetting, until I got them lit, that Jonathan had had the foresight to both bring a torch and leave it right next to the bed).

In the flickering light I feel very Scott of the Antactic or Alexander von Humboldt as I scribble weblog notes to the accompaniment of pounding rain and scary thunder. Amazon-lite feels a little heavier just now.

Jungle noise

2005-05-02T19:00:00.000+01:00

Something is squeaking very close to here. A relentless dodgy-hinge sound which I assume is one of the local birds. Not, I think, a macaw (one of which whisked a bread roll off the lunch table in what I suspect is a regular party trick out here in our jungle lodge). Now there´s a toucan, whose call our very helpful guide Angelo demonstrated for us earlier, answering a call from across the bay as we boated along the river.

My London ears need retuning - they operate a constant filter system at home to screen out traffic, voices in the street below, the rumble of the tube and the whir of police helicopters. These London ears focus ruthlessly on just what I need to hear amid the cacophony, stripping away background.

Alone in a boat in the forest at night it´s not so much a wall of sound as a cube - noises from above, below, back, front, left and right. An entire castanet sonata in frog clicks - other frogs make the low rumble of a motor, eery whirrings or a high frequency buzz like a radio being tuned. To hear the jungle symphony, beautifully described in The Lost Steps [link] will take some different listening habits. Let the orchestra sound.

Amazon-lite has got a bit less lite today with our depature from hotel luxury to the (relative) simplicity of a lodge ninety minutes away by boat from the edge of Manaus. It could therefore be where the Carters pitched up, although I´m not sure if there´s sufficient rubber here. We have seen our first rubber trees today, though, etched I suspect by numerous tourists taken on the same trail before us rather than by century-ago tappers.

As it´s virtually the end of the rainy season, the river is high (and the fish are indeed jumping, thank you Mr Gershwin). But when the river round here gets high, it goes through the roof - literally in the case of the submerged huts we saw on our canoe trip. Back in Manaus, the floating docks (brought from Liverpool along with an English sewage system, we´re told) manage the fifteen metre difference in height between October´s low water and the current high. This means that a lot of what we´re drifting across on the boats is actually submerged forest (and in one case the nearby settlement´s football pitch, which is apparently in good nick despite currently being the height of a small building below our boat).

All this creates a distinct ecosystem - the igapó. That´s black water flooded forest. We´re in black water here just after the Rio Negro (tea coloured) meets the Amazon (or the Solimoes) at the Meeting of the Waters. Where they do indeed run for ages side by side, a fluvial marble cake striped brown and black.

We´ve been canoeing along past the very tops of submerged trees, like Noah and company in the last days of the flood, eye-level with the summits of huge evergreens. Just as these trees can switch between living in water or air (more both / and - amphibious trees), their co-habitees also adapt. So we´re surrounded by vegetarian fish, who take advantage of this new swimming opportunity to snack on fruit which the rest of the year dangles high above them in an alien element.

We floated through the very top of the forest canopy - endless trunks and lianas (open-weave roof to crown tendrils) reflected in the dark glass of the still, black river, It´s magical - infinitely profuse and ever-changing combinations of green vegetation, shards of blue sky and tiny flashes of red leaf.

Monkeys leap from treetop to treetop above us and (so it´s rumoured) from roof to roof of the cabins in which we´re now staying. Birds flutter and call, and fish fill the river beneath. The acidic black river environment is (igapó apart) less hospitable to fish than the white river is. But that hadn´t prevented a creditable catch having been bagged (with stick rods and merely bread as bait) by thetime we returned for dinner. Having been assured that this was a good swimming spot, I'm perturbed to discover that among the haul are a couple of piranhas. And not some local gummy vegetarian varient, but the genuine, razor-toothed article.

We have delicious catfish for dinner. And the last of the day's savage-fanged creatues was a sharp-toothed (but baby) cayman, whose red eyes flashed underwater as it swam away.

Traditional Amazon life, this close to Manaus, shows little sign of being linked to the feather-loinclothed folk who greeted us at the airport. (They - or at least fellow tribe members, the Dick van Dykes of Amazonian cockney chimney sweeps -featured as an intriguing dance foursome backing a singer at the Ponta Negro open-air Labour Day concert last night. Imagine Mamma Mia performed in an open-air amphitheatre with Portuguese lyrics and Indian costumes and you get a hint of the event´s idiosycracy. For us, that is - the crowd found nothing strange and seemed familiar enough with the material to join in with every routine, reproducing the near-naked but befeathered Amazonian dance routines across the concrete auditorium with the good-natured abandon of a low-tech barmitzvah or a tribute night at G-A-Y.

It's been a day of marvelling at the primaeval, untouched landscape, feeling as if we're the first humans ever to see a particular sight, or like Cortez stout upon a peak in Darien (was that right?) the first European eyes. In fact we´re simply the last lot before the next boat-full of trippers round the lagoon. Our fantasies of remoteness are helped, however, by it being low season. Our lodge has only two groups staying - the pair of us and a party of five Germans.

Out here in the jungle, the only local people (caboclos) we´ve met so far are inevitably part of a well-worn tourist itenerary. That disappoints some visitors, apparently, hoping to penetrate virgin forest and meet as yet unmet isolated tribes on a two day package tour. In Rio David and Pedro tell us of an article in the recent New Yorker travel isue about just such a trip, to New Guinea, I think. (Although this Observer article tells a different story.) And although canoeing to the Amazonian equivalent of a Turkish coach-trip carpet shop with its day-glo flip-flops on sale may feel less authentic than stumbling on some hallucinogenic shamanist ritual, who's to say? It's as authentic as most of Holborn.

I´m happy just to get a taste of the forest´s suburbs, given that we´re within the boundary of what would be Manuas´s M25 if it had one. And judging by the strips of communications towers announcing Sony and other factories on the road out to the harbour, the city may well have one in no time. Manuas is, we´re told, growing second only to Sao Paulo as a Brazilian industrial city, with micro-electronics ahead of tourism as the economic motor. The free trade zone that has powered that growth is presumably connected with the drive to integrate the notoriously international city with the rest of Brazil.

How far this boom benefits or suits the region's non-city-dwellers is not clear. That doesn´t worry some of those trying to make money here, however - on the programme Michael taped which we showed at Gayhurst School, one Brazilian pointedly asks where the [North] American Indians are now? Were they allowed to retain vast homelands against the tide of US economic expansion? Is Northern environmentalism a case of do as we say, rather than do as we do (or did)?

Both/And Families

2005-05-02T18:00:00.000+01:00

We meet a man who is from one of the hundred or so Jewish families in Manaus. His sister is a missionary, however. His story has the big Manuas themes: rubber, migration, people and geography stretching.

Both / And (now with improved typing...)

2005-05-02T17:00:00.000+01:00

On the road into Manaus, a new evangelical church next to a 'love hotel'. This is not a place of either/or. It's religious zeal and sexual license, built and ruined. In the centre of modern Manaus, once-proud houses are stripped cadavers - the opposite of piranha victims, their skins intact, facades still ornamented as they were in the dates proclaimed at their heads: 1896, 1900, but the carapace is empty, like that of the exploded cicadas - triumphant foliage overwhelming the strangled belle epoque villa. Land and water mingle, as do male and female, clothed and naked, in one moment.

Even the elements are less delineated here. Earth and water share the same locations, ceding dominance to the other, Persephone-like, for half the year as the forest becomes submerged, or rises to become dry land again.

And in the humidity, air and water mingle. At times it's as damp and slowing as if we had been transported to some Little Mermaid-like underwater kingdom, where life goes on recognisably, but submerged, slowed down by the weight of water. Lighter too, though - gravity loses some of its power and life floats a little bit. And during the torrential rains it really does make hardly any difference whether you're on solid ground or under water.

Fire is the one element humans bring to the Amazon - we will watch later as our guide lights tree sap on the sodden leaves and it will seem a tiny gesture of defiance. (more on that in another entry, eventually)

Writing in a hammock - a piece of furniture that's almost a bodily extension. It moulds itself to you, responds to your movement, tranbsforms gravity into comfort.

Manaus like Darlington - proud of havimg built itself, not without a certain ruthlessness towards those too weak to survive the process. Its monuments are of Trade - the Market and the Customs House are more imposing and lavishly styled than the Cathedral. No prince's palace, no lavish seat of government - places to buy and sell (these on every scale) and houses for its rulers to display their triumph on a bloated but still domestic scale. Does Darlington have an Opera House? Wakefield certainly does. What would Manuas make of Hansel and Gretel?

With its aerobic swimercise in the wave-machine equipped pool (led for an exclusively female group by the leaner and more indolent of the two lifeguards) there's a potential for White Mischief-style decadence here. But I suspect Manuas 1900 is more like a contemporary oil state, catapulted to wealth and demonstrating the fact by defying its location. Before we left I read a review of a restaurant at a luxury Dubai hotel where all the ingredients were shipped in, frozen. The perversity of that in Manaus being, as Journey to the River Sea brings out, that this is a city amid a profusion of delicious, naturally occuring food. But the point is not the taste (at least it wasn't according to that Dubai restuarant review), it's the flamboyant indifference to the merely practical. Manaus was simply before its time - all its wealthy residents wanted was the year-round choice consecrated by our supermarkets.

Our guide shares jungle survival tips from his national service. Military bases line the road into Manaus, one proclaiming its effectiveness in effecting Brazilian Amazon 'integration', But he says they're all just lazy and the vast Brazilian army, with no wars to fight, simply a hedge against unemployment. I'm not so sure - what state puts so many soldiers in one place for nothing?

Snacks

2005-05-02T10:00:00.000+01:00

The eaten: we pass on the road out of Manaus a sign on the road offering turtle meat, which we're informed is expensive and tasty (and illegal surely? although the sign promises its trade is "under license"). There's not much you can't trade in Manuaus, I suspect, now or then.

The eaters: from the illegal to the ill eagles (sorry), or rather the vultures which circle everywhere. Their sense of smell is amazing, we're told. In a way the waste-strewn city and the vultures have their own special ecosystem: the birds flicker above civilisation's offal, spiralling flecks like embers rising from a giant pyre.

Dressed / Undressed (football in pants)

2005-05-01T23:51:00.000+01:00

Clothes and their absence (both dressed / and undressed). Brazilians carry off carrying on with nothing much on at all ages rather better than the English. Or do I just mean better than I do? Maybe it´s being near the beach (although the Manaus market dress code seemed similarly skimpy), but clothing here is casual, not just in design, but in attitude. It´s stylish enough, but convenience rules. Shorts and t-shirts are univesal - neither of which I´ve brought with me.

And is it common - I mean frequent - to play football in your pants? Without closer inspection (and this weblog is a literary resource for a general readership, so there was no great excuse) this may have to remain unanswered. I suspect the pants in question may in fact have been a chic swimsuit designed to resemble a pair of white M&S briefs. I´m assuming these weren´t the only clothes this footballer had - his fellow players sported a variety of outfits including some rather fancy team strips - it was a choice. And yes, they were playing on the beach and he did have the figure for it rather more than I do. If it catches on, however, how will spectators follow who´s on which side? In any case, I propose football in pants as additional evidence that the clothed/unclothed divide is more fluid in these parts. And see a later post [link] for more...

I´ve a feeling we´re not in Wakefield any more

2005-05-01T23:50:00.000+01:00

A correction to my theory that Manaus is the Wakefield of the South. Strolling along the hugely popular Ponta Negra beach the last two evenings, it´s clear that this is a very different place to spend a Saturday night. And I don´t just mean the temperature. Although a feature of Wakefield - and indeed of so many other parts of Britain that it could well come under ´traditional local customs´ should an Amazonian villager come investigating our way of life - is the determination to dress for Saturday night as if for a Brazilian (or at least British) beach however inclement the weather. One of the reasons I always feel a bit too camp for central Birmingham after dark is that on an autumn or winter evening I like to wear a coat or a nice sweater outdoors when the sun goes down. Whereas real men parade Broad Street in shirtsleeves whatever the season (and they´re wrapped up compared to the ladies). Can it just be an avoidance of cloakroom charges? Or is it some traditional survival ritual?

Back at the beach... Although there is plenty of passion in the air - sport, music, sex - the groups who line the beach are (again unlike English town centres on Saturady nights) entirely unthreatening, even as two of the gringo-est gringos you could imagine wander through the crowd. The groups are much more mixed: in age, male and female, different skin tones - than their counterparts back home. And I got no sense that the lads who were parading themselves felt it necessary to intimidate a middle-aged couple sat in their midst, or the excited children running in and out of their space. (I´m also intrigued to see that a children´s street entertainer with a Michael Jackson themed routine remains extremely popular with all ages.)

They had reached Manaus. They had arrived.

2005-05-01T23:26:00.000+01:00

Panda-faced (deep red but for pale white eyes where my glasses deflected the sun) and in Manaus. In fact a little to the West, on the Ponta Negra, where the Rio Negro, the colour of overbrewed Earl Grey is supposedly so acidic this is the one part of the trip which should be mosquito free. Jonathan, trusting the evidence of his eyes in our room, demands maximum prophylaxis neverheless.

I feel it's necessary to crank up the adventurousness of the trip so far since it might be considered frankly Amazon-lite. We're in a sort of compound, which is inhabited by the same two indigenous tribespeople we saw welcoming people off the baggage collection carousel at the airport. I suspect they may not be from one of the remoter tribes (it may be the elegant spectacles worn by one of them to augment a costume otherwise consisting of only a few feathers).

But Manaus has had its challenges. Dropped off at the Cathedral, appropriately for a Sunday morning, we've had little but benevolent looks from residents who clearly feel two sweating gringos with a video camera have enough to worry about. Old Manaus is not hard to find - the Cathedral, the Market and the Docks were all a short walk from each other, but they now nestle in a city whose pirate DVD stalls, Coke stands with portable TVs and ubiquitous plastic beach inflatables rather overwhelm the 'Belle Epoque' Manaus advertised on various architectural imprtovement projects (including what looked like a remarkably gap-windowed central police staion - and I don't mean it had lots of khakis on sale). Yet for all the soundtrack of what seemed like Brazilian Carly Simon surging from every hole in the wall bar, there was underneath it all a spirit I decided I recognised. Resolutely commercial - every Manuasite we saw was either selling or buying something. Vigorously energetic - commerce still went on during our Mad Dogs and Englishmen historical itinerary, with streets lined with stalls in front of shops closed for Sunday that were themselves carved out of mercahants palaces of a century ago. The docks still welcome cargo on the floating harbours imported from Britain back in the rubber boom. The Customs House (Alfandega) was, so all the books say, shipped out in sections from England too. Its tower-cum-lighthouse is still there, just as it must have been for Maia as she and Miss Minton arrived a hundred years ago.

The docks look like they are being 'improved'. Some of the streets where the guidebooks give dire warnings about being knocked unconscious with drugged beverages (what gay guides identify with the ambivalent acronym AYOR) seem to have been given over to redevelopment, with a new theatre promised for the dockside as far as I could make out from the hoardings. It looks like it's planned to offer films and demonstrations of traditional Amazon life, however, but it's hard to tell. In any case, a new riverside theatre in Manaus seemed like a good omen for Journey to the River Sea at the new Unicorn.

We strolled through the market, filming fish and meat and fruit and grains that must have been there in some form when Maia was shopping and the Les Halles-like structure was young. We saw an igape still visible in the midst of twenty-first centuiry Manuas, its green-topped water lined by the stilt-supported backs of houses for which the vegetaion covered surface looked like a back garden. We saw black birds circling the refuse of the dock waters.

And we saw the Teatro Amazonas. Closed for Sunday, but extraordinary gleaming gold at the top of the hill. They're doing the Ring Cycle there which seems an appropriately Fitzcarraldoish bit of programming. More on that later, I'm sure.

Descent into Broccoli

2005-04-30T13:30:00.000+01:00

From the air, which is of course not how Maia first saw it, it's a pale scar, quivering ragged-edged through thick green fur, splintering off in meandering veins into the horizon. This is a landscape etched through dialogue between land and water, an elemental geography. Whichever dominates this season decides the shape of the map. (Or indeed this millenium, as whole sections of river slice off to become oxbow lakes - is that what they're called? So much for O level Geography - or, further back in geological time, as the Amazon switched its whole oceanic allegiance from West to East, flipping its mouth from the Pacific to the Atlantic. It's nearly the end of the rainy season, so the banks are fuzzy-edged - the water has now covered almost all the land it will take this year.

What landmarks I can make out are not the work of humans. No human endeavour: no building, no pattern of cultivation can be made out as we fly over the forest. I know that's not the case everywhere, however. But such mammothness does make some of the rhetoric about poor, vulnerable Amazonia feel strange. How could something this vast not dominate? What could humans do to something so beyond our scale? Yet of course like other giants, this one is threatened, and seriously. Perhaps that very size is part of the challenge - the Moby Dick effect; the big quiet guy in the bar jumpy little homo sapiens has to pick a fight with to prove itself. Knock this down, nothing is bigger than you. Maybe, although I suspect we'll find out the economics have more to do with it than my airborne species psychology.

It was a good school...

2005-04-23T22:10:00.000+01:00

On yesterday's sunny Friday afternoon Michael from Theatre Centre and I went to Hackney in East London to visit Gayhurst School, who we hope will be working with us as we prepare the production. We met a lively and enthusiastic group who had volunteered to stay in school a bit longer (and on a sunny Friday!) to find out what we were up to. We'd not expected so many keen takers - about twenty mainly nine to eleven year olds, although with a couple of younger sisters and brothers.

Michael explained about our planned adaptation of the book, which some of the group had already read. Indeed a couple of Eva Ibbotson fans appeared to have read everything she had written, which was great to hear. We looked at an extract from a documentary about the Amazon [link] which showed both indigenous peoples and those involved in using the land for other purposes. Quite a few of the group already had strong feelings about the environmental questions raised by the video.

We then said that I would be going to visit a school in Brazil - although in Rio, which is as far from the Amazon as Hackney is from Moscow! Michael deftly filmed the group asking questions they would like to ask their contemporaries in Brazil: what music do you listen to? Is it the same as your parents? Do you wear uniform? What do you study? What times do you go to school There was a lot of interest in whether the Rio children have slang, some of the Gayhurst pupils being noticeably proficient in backslang.

And then Michael took his children and their friends off to capoeira (appropriately enough).

The Meeting of the Waters

2005-04-20T18:05:00.000+01:00

Today was a chance for the two companies producing Journey to the River Sea to meet each other. Although this project has been planned for ages, this was still the first time some people from Theatre Centre and Unicorn had met. Theatre Centre provided lunch at their offices in Aldgate, East London, just around the corner from the Whitechapel Art Gallery. It wasn't a meeting with lots of business - that's going on anyway. Thomas, Theatre Centre's Administrator and Emma, Unicorn's Marketing Director have already been e-mailing possible images for the show's publicity back and forth. Chris, Unicorn's Executive Director and Charles, Theatre Centre's General Manager, have been making it possible to imagine a show on a challenging scale. The cast size is just one example - Ros and I worked out early on that we would need at least eight performers, which is a large cast by the standards of most British theatre companies at the moment. It's essential to be able to work on that scale at times, but you need the support and expertise of producers like Charles and Chris if that's to be possible. And I bet that isn't the last mention of money in this blog...

The two companies are very different. Theatre Centre is a smaller team: a touring company without a building to build and run as Unicorn has. So Carolyn, Unicorn's new Theatre Manager has no direct counterpart there. Marijke, Theatre Centre's Production and Company Manager, does elements of jobs Andy, Petrus, Ana and as yet unappointed others do for Unicorn. Becky (Theatre Centre's Office Co-ordinator and Tour Booker) and Rhona (Unicorn's Assistant to the Artistic Team) have overlapping but different roles, as do Michael (Theatre Centre's Associate Artist) and Alison (Unicorn's Education and Youth Director). Both companies currently have management placements on a Fast Track scheme from the Independent Theatre Council, Deborah Townsend at Theatre Centre, while Paul Brewster at Unicorn has inherited my formerly script-piled desk there.

Tony from Unicorn talked about the long parallel histories of the companies, both over fifty years old and shaped by charismatic founders, Brian Way (Theatre Centre) and Caryl Jenner (Unicorn). Journey to the River Sea is just one way in which the companies can work together in the new Unicorn Theatre - other Theatre Centre shows will be seen there, at least. But this co-production will be a significant collaboration in the new theatre's opening season. Tony's determined that the Unicorn is not the Children's National Theatre - 'we're all the National Theatre for Children', he said.

For Theatre Centre, Ros talked about what had drawn her to Journey to the River Sea after hearing it recommended by Charlie Lee-Potter at a Literature Festival in Spitalfields in 2002. Ros celebrated that the book was by a living author, and talked about Eva Ibbotson's remarkable writing life. She talked about Eva Ibbotson wanting children to be able to lead 'big lives', and about what an exciting heroine Maia is. She talked about Finn, the child of an English father and Amazonian Indian mother, and Clovis, the boy actor who make up the trio of children at the heart of the adventure. And Miss Minton, the governess whose lost love, like the three children being orphaned, brings out a sense of bereavement which simmers throughout the novel. She talked about the book having the spirit of her favourite childhood stories: The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, Little Women, and the many fans it has. A recent article on children's writing called it a classic already.

The Confidence to Make It Up

2005-04-19T20:04:00.000+01:00

Now I've started this, I realise one of the things it means is more writing. So maybe that wasn't such a good idea. Will I really want to add to this after a day of writing the play? Not that I'm planning to be doing that while we're in Brazil - although I haven't investigated how I'm actually going to add anything to this while we're away...

Is the research trip really necessary anyway? After all, in an interview on BookSense.com Eva Ibbotson says what she did to write the book:

'I read books, looked at pictures, watched films and videos of wildlife, talked to travelers, and tried to learn some Portuguese. There was a lot of historical research to do on the rubber boom, which brought the settlers to the Amazon at the turn of the century.

I think being married to a naturalist (who kept an ant nest under the bed when I first met him) was more important than my own physiology background -- physiology is more about the insides of animals, not their habitat and habits. Usually I go to the places I write about, but Manaus has changed so much that I decided to keep it in my head.'

If Eva Ibbotson didn't need to go to the Amazon, why do I? Partly I think because her imagination is directly present in the book. As an adaptor, the risk is that because what I'm writing is at one further remove, the world of the play won't be sufficiently rich. It's also a way to bring the rest of the team closer to the place in which most of the play is set. Hence this blog.

What novelist Jim Crace said in The Guardian about researching his novel Quarantine also rang true:

'I only spent a couple of nights in the Judean desert, and those were only to give me the confidence to make it up.'

The Journey So Far

2005-04-18T22:44:00.000+01:00

I'm writing a play based on Eva Ibbotson's wonderful novel Journey to the River Sea.

The book was published in 2001 and has many admirers of all ages. Among them are me, Rosamunde Hutt, Artistic Director of Theatre Centre and Tony Graham, Artistic Director of Unicorn. In 2002, Tony and Ros discovered they shared the feeling that the book could work on stage, and started to plan a co-production for the new Unicorn Theatre, due to open in London later this year. I joined as writer early in 2003 and Ros and I have been working together to create the piece since then.

In May 2004 we worked on the piece for a week with a group of third year student actors at Drama Centre London , along with the project's designer, Nettie Scriven, and its composer, Matthew Bailey. Next month we'll be working together again for a week with another group of actors and the rest of the creative team. We then start rehearsals next January and open in early February 2006.

In about two weeks I'm going to Brazil on a trip which is in part to research the writing of the play. I thought I'd try out this blog as a way to share that process with the rest of the team working on the piece. It may have other effects as well - let's see what happens.