1. Stupid ideas.
The Lockdown Theatre Company started as a not-at-all-thought-through Facebook post. But having put the post out, and gained a really positive response from tons of people I didn’t know, the only way forward without looking like a total dick was to do what I said I’d do. I also realised that calling it a ‘stupid idea’ was and is, in part, an act of self-protection. It’s a way of acknowledging the absurdity of what you’re attempting, but still doing it anyway.
2. Don’t look down.
There were all kind of reasons why this endeavour was going to fail. The biggest being that all this was happening through 2020, when the UK was seriously Locked Down, so I couldn’t meet any of the people I’d be working with. On top of that, for the work to have any chance of happening, tech would be vital. And tech, for me, is as much an arena of anxiety as a landscape of possibilities. Time to Roadrunner it. Keep the legs pumping, stare straight ahead, and don’t look down.
3. In a world of fear, positivity is a precious commodity.
2020 was nightmare. A nightmare that was everywhere. So many people were dying. And the coverage of how our health system was battered, and struggling, was, deeply scary. I’m writing this in 2023 and I think we’ve forgotten what it was like. But that’s fair enough. If you live through a nightmare why would you want to go back there? Given this backdrop, someone saying ‘I’m going to make stuff happen’ was a beacon. I know that now. I’m not 100% comfortable with stating that, because it seems to be me bigging myself up, but I know it’s true. In a world of fear positivity is precious.
4. Four twenty-one AM.
When you’re locked into a cycle of continuous production, with a new film being made and put out each week, you wake up early. Because your mind is already whirring.
5. Richard Burton.
To stop my mind whirring, at 4.21 AM, I would find Richard Burton reading Dylan Thomas’s ‘Under Milk Wood’ on YouTube on my Ipad and listen to it on headphones. It often distracted, or enchanted, me enough to nod off again. Thank you Richard. Thank you Dylan.
6. Actors are amazing.
They really are. The amount of time, energy and dedication they clearly put into their performances was humbling. One small example. I never asked any of them to record their performances in a single take. But almost all of them did. Many of the films were between 10 to 15 minutes long. That’s a lot of words. To put that into perspective, go to a movie and you will never see a shot that lasts for even two minutes on an individual’s face. So to make a film that for 10 minutes-plus is just an actor speaking, they have to commit. It was awesome. And flattering. Flattering because it meant that the actors thought my words were worthy of that amount of dedication. Thank you.
7. On directing.
I developed my own way of directing the actors. It was lot to do with giving them autonomy. A large part of this was out of necessity because I was never going to be in the same room as them. So I quickly learned to be open to what they brought to the table. I think my ‘process’ evolved into four stages. 1: Write half-decent words. 2: Pour belief into the actor. 3: Get out of the way. 4: Tweak (if neccessary).
8. The Blag.
Okay, this is going to go a bit South London now. Or, to be phonetically accurate, a bit Sarf Lunnun. I grew up in Sarf Lunnun in the 1970s. While I may not have been from the streets, I did walk along them. And where you grow up is the world you absorb without even knowing it. It’s always a part of you. To ‘blag’ something is equal parts bluff, ‘front’, misdirection and charm. So – and keep this to yourselves – The Lockdown Theatre Company is a blag. Rewind to the start of it all and there’s me typing that first Facebook post in which I said I wanted to pay actors to self-tape monologues. That’s when I was hit by one very big doubt: Why should anyone listen to me, or take me seriously? I was just a bloke with a laptop posting something on Facebook. But if I called myself ‘The Lockdown Theatre Company’….. To be honest, I didn’t think it would work. But it did. I had blagged it. In the shiny new millenial world of tech start-ups there’s the phrase ‘fake it till you make it’. But I’m from Sarf Lunnun. Sarf Lunnun in the 1970s. I blagged it.
9. Money isn’t everything.
I thought that the most important thing for the actors would be that I was paying them. It wasn’t. The most important thing was the chance to work. The chance to practice the craft that was in their bones and their blood. That is a lesson that has stayed with me.
10. A different way to write scripts.
Even if some of the scripts already existed, writing others to hit the one-film-a-week schedule was creatively hard. My way past this problem was to start with the actor. From the replies to my initial post I’d find someone I wanted to work with, then write a script for them. We’d have a phone/zoom conversation and, usually, an idea would emerge from that. Except that makes it sound that the development was linear. It wasn’t. Even now I can’t pin down the exact process. All I can say is that listening openly was incredibly important. And all the actors I was drawn to had some indefinable quality I can only describe as the right energy. And I could see the outsider in all of them. The ‘outsider’ thing is massively important to me. I’m the son of immigrants, I grew up in South London, and I’m completely the wrong age to be trying to achieve anything in the world of theatre. That’s a triple strike on the outsider front right there. But I do know who my people are now. They’re the ones South Of The River, North Of The Wall.
11. Momentum + flexibility = ?
When you are constantly creating work you generate momentum. And when you’re committed to producing a film a week you find the only way to do it is to make decisions quickly. You can’t over-analyse what you’re doing because you haven’t got time. Whatever problem you hit, you have to work out how to get past it as best you can. And if there’s no real way to turn to others for help, well you’ve just got to figure out things for yourself. But if you keep your wits about you, and your eyes open, and you’re willing to bank the risk you’ve already taken, and build on it, you might just spot interesting possibilities out there on left field. So you take your momentum, season it with flexibility, then chuck in more than a pinch of Sarf Lunnun blaggery and you might just come up with a quite outrageous thought.
12. Maybe I’ve created a REAL national theatre.
Well, think about it. I’m writing scripts, finding actors, rehearsing them, having them make films of their monologues, and then distributing the work nationally or even globally, all from my desk and my laptop. At no point in the process does geography come into it. I am not at all constrained by the need for physical proximity. So, theoretically, I could create work with anyone in the country. Once you start thinking along these lines another blindingly obvious insight soon sticks its head above the parapet. In 2020 how can the National Theatre be a big building in London? How does that make any sense? Well, it doesn’t make any sense. Obviously what is needed is someone to come along and prove that there is a different way to do things. And seeing as no-one else was stepping up, looks like it was down to me to give it a go. But when I looked at the first twelve films I’d made, despite not being constrained by geography, most of them were with people in London. Which is one of the big reasons I didn’t call it a day after 12 films. I wanted The Lockdown Theatre Company to go to Season Two. And in Season Two I would deliberately look to work with people from across the country. I wanted to build my own National Theatre.
13. Unexpected bonus revelation.
This is a line from my initial Facebook post. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I just know I’m doing it.’ I’ll leave that thought there, because I think it still holds true.
Coming next Friday: The Geordie Baby.