What will people think?

How I learned to quit reviews

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Artwork by the brilliant Esra Gülmen

I’ve just opened a show - Conversations After Sex at the Park Theatre. I’m extremely proud of it. It’s the first show in quite a while that I’ve directed where the script was completed before we started rehearsals. I love working on new writing - I find it incredibly exciting when the script is shifting, changing, up for grabs.

But, at the same time, there’s a special kind of anxiety reserved for when your moving into previews without knowing for sure what the end of the show is yet. [Previews are the time when the show first opens to audiences but the show isn’t ‘locked’ yet - that is, changes might still be made. This can be everything from moving some lighting cues or changing some elements of tech to completely cutting a song or rewriting the ending. Ahem.]

I find we learn so much from an audience that the show is often transformed by their presence. So, it was a wonderful opportunity to have, in Conversations After Sex, a script that was incredibly robust, a script that I loved, that I didn’t feel the need to alter.

During my rehearsal process, I often joke with actors about my ‘preview pep talk’. My directing style is all about levity - I like not to take myself too seriously. It’s a much trotted out cliche that we are making a play, after all. My current associate director, the brilliant Alessandra Davison, put it beautifully when she said this week “I hope we take the work seriously without taking ourselves too seriously.”

So, in my preview pep talk, I address something that is vital for creatives taking a show into the world - but also, something I think everyone can learn from. It’s this.