Preview: Pool (No Water)

The challenge of it, the freedom and intrigue that the text gives us as well as the subject matter of the piece. Personally, I’ve been working in creative roles for a long time so it really caught my eye. This piece is about the feelings of jealousy we can all experience when it seems someone else is doing better than us in a creative endeavour. I think this is a really interesting topic to discuss and share, because it maps across art, music, theatre, film, all forms of writing and really, anything creative.

You can be talented and skilled at what you do, but how you get your work out there? How you become “successful”? It’s based on so many other factors, many of them can be outside of ourselves, and…what does that success look like anyway? Is success that role, that contract, that gig? If or when you get it, what then? Does the goal post shift to the next success point? Do we take stock of what we are doing now and how far we have come on our own path ever? Does society value artists and creatives as much as it could, or are they left alone to figure it out? What can we do within ourselves to work with these feelings? What happens if those feeling turn very sour?

All these questions are endlessly interesting, and it’s been a wonderful experience to explore it with this cast and crew in the spaces at SLT, a creative melting pot in itself.

The format of the writing is rather unconventional to start with as it’s just written with no stage directions, no characters, just one, rather short piece of text laid out almost like a monologue. The lines mix tenses, so we go back and forth in time and it’s unclear who the character is talking to at any given moment.

We have had to work out who these characters are, how many, what they are doing and who they are talking to for each and every line and word. I say “we have had to” like it sounds negative, but it’s been a joy to work through this like a puzzle, trying different things, and the cast of six and my assistant director Ali have all been a delight to work with on discovering how to tell this story.

In terms of our show, you’ll arrive into an art exhibition on the private view night. You’ll see the artists, their artwork and then you’ll be invited to take your seats and watch the after-party. The Group will then start to tell you a story and go about their lives. I took some inspiration from my art school days, and in terms of the performances, a little from Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads series of monologues, televised on the BBC in the 1980s and 90s.

You will meet “The Group”. An art collective who in our version all live, work and exhibit in one warehouse-style space. They work in things like print, photography, drawing, painting, collage and poetry, and they bring all of these elements together to create one exhibition and sometimes work on the same pieces simultaneously. In a way they are all individuals, with different ways of approaching relationships, emotions, situations and their creative practices, and in other ways they are one. For better or worse, we shall see!

Everything!! In the best possible way. We have not only created a setting, created characters pretty much from scratch, but we have also created essentially a real art collective. All the pieces you see on stage are made by the performers during our art workshop sessions, which we ran within our rehearsal time. A huge amount of work has gone into this, from everybody. Big thanks to SLT for letting us do something so ambitious and unusual.

Challenging, creative, immersive.