Goldilocks

Easily Done

After walking up hundreds of hills and endless flights of stairs I have lost all perception of where the top is. Half the cast (the male half) is housed on the fourth floor of some Edinburgh University student accommodation.  Five bedrooms, shared kitchen and three (I counted them) toilets...two with showers.  Identical flats stacked on top of each other. It takes me back to my student days of labelling the milk in the fridge.  One morning I had to grab some flyers from the flat so borrowed a key to get in as all the cast were out. Up the hill, up the stairs, up, up, up...never down. Got the keys out...but...the door was on the latch. Typical. Gone out and left the flat open. How irresponsible. I dumped my bags by the entrance and thought I’d quickly use the loo before grabbing the flyers...that’s odd I thought.  The toilet with a shower is now just a toilet. Maybe I’d got confused, that was it. That’s funny...the toilet doesn’t smell like a toilet used by five boys...it’s got air freshener for a start...oh well...they were obviously a cast of “new” men. And the seat was down...very odd. I’ll grab the flyers I thought...then I’ll have a quick cup of tea with the labelled milk. The cupboard full of flyers was empty though.  Who would steal 20,000 flyers? It now becomes startlingly obvious. The clues were there to see. Scented toilet with lid down...this is not a boy’s flat. The fire escape map pinned to the inside of the front door confirmed my worst fears. FLOOR THREE. A sound came from the shared kitchen. Oh shit. Someone’s home.  I’m now feeling like a male Goldilocks....this toilet smells too nice....Do I sneak out or come clean?  Are the residents ready to accept a strange man in their toilet? No. I’m off. I picked up my rucksack and slipped quietly out of the flat one floor below the one I had a key for. As I left the flat I was confronted with a staircase that continued to rise to the fourth floor which just goes to show you can never reach the top in Edinburgh.  

So, if you’re currently staying in Darroch Court and wondering who used your toilet the other day...it was me.

D.

Sometimes words fail me...

Sometimes words fail me. Rarely. But sometimes they do. And what is it they say? Why use two words when one will do (actually I have no idea if people say that but it seems the sort of adage my father would have come up with). 

What all this about words and what’s it got to do with Edinburgh? Well if I called it Edin Burgh you may find it more difficult to find in the Atlas? No, because it would be in the same place alphabetically. Google? I tried it. It assumed my folly and gave me Edinburgh. However, type in Chicken Shed as two correctly spelt words into the Fringe website and it gets confused, takes a while and then gives you a choice of shows connected to chickens but not cancer. However, type in one single word – Chickenshed and before you can hit the return button up pops Slender Threads. This would be bad enough if it wasn’t for the fact that this is the system the box office use as well. I was alerted to this by a colleague who tried to book a ticket for the Chickenshed show and was told “No. There’s no show on the system for Chickenshed”.  So I popped down to the Fringe box office and asked for a ticket for Chickenshed. The lady duly typed in Chicken Shed (I chose not to correct her at this point). “No.” She said “There’s no show under that name”. That’s not the show name I said, that's the company name. She tried again. “No. There’s no show listed under that company name”.

If you’re booking for the show please tell the box office it’s all one word. It’s difficult enough selling a show in this town without making the art of ticket booking then transaction equivalent of Count Down.

Dave Carey.

Just recieved

Dance theatre isn't my thing. As an Edinburgh native and a Fringe Festival veteran I've been subjected to too many sub-student level interpretive dance offerings to take the genre seriously.

And as regional press manager for Cancer Research UK, the thought of using dance to communicate any messages about cancer sounds like it could be inappropriate.

So I took my seat at Chickenshed's latest production, Slender Threads  - the story of a woman's cancer diagnosis told through dialogue, dance and audio-recordings - fearing the worst.

One hour later I was congratulating the cast and creators on a truly memorable and moving piece of theatre.

Chickenshed isn't a company that shies away from difficult issues. Its last offering focussed on youth knife crime. Slender Threads at Edinburgh's Zoo Roxy tackles a woman's cancer diagnosis and its effect on her family.

And it does it well.

Using dancer's bodies and two simple white doors, the confusion, hopes, fears and desires of a family following the mother's cancer diagnosis are elegantly portrayed, even to a dance theatre philistine like me.

Professionally orchestrated lighting and multimedia projections add to the atmosphere and bring the story along smoothly.

But it is the careful use of audio recordings of interviews with oncologists and cancer survivors that really hits home. Hearing these clearly genuine voices created a link between the stage action and the reality that so many people face. It is pretty powerful stuff, and it really underlines why we put so much emphasis on working with survivors to get our messages across.

The piece clearly struck a chord with the audience. Looking around I could see a few teary eyes. It wasn't a tale with a happy ending, or really an ending at all. The last words were "I've stopped fighting cancer - I'm too busy living."

Inspiring, intelligent and moving theatre at the Fringe.

John Fyall
Regional Press Manager - Scotland
Cancer Research UK

Highs and Lows

Highs and lows…that’s the festival for you. Like the sun and the rain. Day two started in glorious sunshine. Things got better. The Times critic Debra Craine named us as a critic’s choice for the festival…the venue was awash with appreciative comments from the Zoo crew…we were on an upward curve. Nothing could stop us. Then the rain came. And it bought the dark clouds. Somehow we couldn’t convert the Times recommendation into ticket sales. The get in for the show was squeezed into an impossible 5 minutes. The lighting technician got a cue behind in the show…suddenly darkness appeared during light scenes and then those still moments of subtlety were bathed in light. Two reviewers sat in the front row - bathed in that light - as they scribbled away in front of the cast. Nothing like that to settle your nerves. But the lighting caught up. The cast steadied their nerve and 20 minutes in all was good. They held it to the end to rapturous applause from the smaller than hoped for audience.  Onwards and upwards…up the Royals mile with flyers and fingers crossed for a review that missed the lighting faux-pas. If there’s rain and sun, surely we deserve a few stars.

Last minute. panic

I have developed the familiar Fringe company managers “rabbit in headlights” look.  Even waking at 5 in the morning (unheard of in calmer times) my eyes spring wide open with fear painted deep inside them. If your eyes are truly the window to your soul then my eyes are currently a window to van hire, accommodation bookings and press packs. For day and night, that is all that consumes me. I have taken to reassuring myself quite regularly (twice a day) that the flats I’ve hired are definitely dated for 2011.  (They were this afternoon). But even that doesn’t assuage my fears…what if the demon ghost of theatre companies past hacks into my computer and changes the booking? What if the venue turns out to have a stage 5 feet by 5 feet and not 5 meters by 5 meters? The humiliation and pain of realising the lovingly crafted set won’t even make it past the loading bay is too much to bear. The music’s on the laptop, backed up on the time machine (only Apple can persuade you that a hard drive is in fact an invention of significant scientific breakthrough) and I’m considering burning it in triplicate to sets of granite incrusted plutonium CD’s. However this is just reckless paranoia. I mean, the train tickets are definitely for tomorrow and last night (when I checked) there were enough for the whole cast.

Feel free to drop into Zoo Roxy at 5:15 and see if we have a set on a stage that’s big enough and a cast that don’t look like they’re sleeping rough.

Bare Chested

A track from the show. Sampled speech is self explanatory.

An audience perspective

When life is hanging by Slender Threads

Cancer isn’t the easiest subject matter for a play, but then Chickenshed doesn’t take the path of least resistance. Their new play ‘Slender Threads’ sensitively charts one woman’s journey with breast cancer and follows hot on the heels of ‘Crime of the Century’ which tackled knife crime. At the same time the sub-plot to every Chickenshed production is their ethos of inclusion and breathtaking ability to challenge conventions of what makes ‘good’ theatre.

But Slender Threads isn’t a play about cancer - it is about love, fear, anger, despair and ultimately life’s lesson - that things aren’t black or white or fair or right but often it is about living as best we can with uncertainty and the cards that life deals you.

It is powerfully staged with a simple monochrome set that expands and contracts to tell us about claustrophobia, loneliness, separation, the indignity of treatment and the diagnosis you want to escape. The story is narrated by the voices of doctors, nurses, those living with cancer and their families, whilst the script is brought into sharp relief with dance and a haunting song that weaves through the cadence of emotions and experience.

In under an hour the audience is taken on a journey from diagnosis to treatment but perhaps the most important outcome is that we leave the play better equipped and with a more sophisticated language to talk about cancer. Slender Threads says let’s stop whispering the word cancer and end euphemisms like ‘The Big C’. Its message is let’s talk frankly and openly and only then can we better support those people and families – which let’s face it is, or will be, most of us - having to deal with it.

Cheryl Campsie

July 2011