Another Fine Mess – The Production Blog

12 July 2013

“You’ve not done a blog this year” was a message from Marketing – well I thought everyone had heard enough from production and someone else would take up the baton. It appears it is no to both …

Since I last blogged some fabulous shows have come and gone – quite literally in some cases. As you know The Watermill has always lead the way in green issues and this year every single show has either been recycled by us or passed to other amateur groups for their future productions. We do this via http://www.set-exchange.co.uk/ which I know I’ve mentioned in the past but is now growing with all sorts of items listed as on offer or wanted.

I must say, as ever, one of the highlights for me was our biennial schools federation project this year. Decent weather meant the children were not cooped up in the buildings when not on stage – though that had some down sides – as one poor child told us in a report they wrote about the project “it was fun but the ducks stole my lunch!”

We are now just a week away from putting in to the theatre The Witches of Eastwick. In fact I’ve just unloaded a star cloth made by the same firm that supply Strictly Come Dancing (I’ve tried to put it on Craig’s account!)  So, we are sadly in the last week of Laurel and Hardy which has been a show where we’ve had as much fun putting it on as there is happening onstage. For us the biggest challenge was the wallpaper paste slop scene.For some reason you can no longer just mix up a packet of Solvite and throw it over an actor for fear of chemical reaction – even though it would stop them having mould and mildew. Fortunately TJC one of our old Company Managers gave me the lead to a safe food additive we could use. Even so, the question to a supply company, “Could you let me have a small sample“ was then met by “Oh, you’re a theatre not a pie maker. Yes, this is the stuff you want – it was used on Tiswas.”  

Nelly ( Assistant Production Manager) and I tend to try stage effects in the small space at the back of our office, whether it be the ‘shooting’ of plates on Sleuth, or in this case a how far you could flick slop to make a nice splat. I’m never sure if this is the best place as the department that overlooks the area is Accounts, notably Michele who does the wages. I’m sure there must be days when her finger is hovering over the send button for our wages when she thinks “Do we have to pay them for this?” Now the strange thing about this slop was how it was mixed. The company said the easiest way was by hand – literally! We tried different mixers, even paint blenders but the only way that worked was poor Amy (Assistant Stage Manager) with her arms up to the elbow in buckets agitating it by hand.(I have a vision of hundreds of staff at Mr Kipling doing this) Then she had to find just the right degree of “slop”.  Now there are many actors for whom the prospect of pouring a bucket of gunge over their heads time and time again with, “Sorry, that’s not quite right” is very appealing. Gavin, who plays Ollie, is not one of them so it was great that we could get it right first time.

“What’s that? Projectile vomit? On our way …”

Lawrence T Doyle – Production Manager