An Exciting Announcement

As Rebecca said in our first post, this is the year things start, and we are chuffed to bits to be able finally share more with you about exactly what is starting. In particular, I can now tell you about a BIG EXCITING THING that’s happening this summer: we are taking a show to the Prague Fringe Festival!


From the 1st to the 4th of June 2016, we will be staging a production of Hell Has No Fury, a new play written by our very own Rebecca Sweeney. This one-woman play is a powerful reinterpretation of Medea, told from the point of view of Euripedes’ infamous anti-heroine herself. I can’t tell you how excited we are about this opportunity; as our first major project, it’s a pretty big deal!


Rebecca has worked as a volunteer at Prague Fringe Festival for the past few years, so she has first-hand knowledge of what it’s like, but for Claire and I this is all brand new. So for our sake – and for the sake of anyone who didn’t even know Prague had a Fringe Festival – here’s a bit, lovingly paraphrased from their own website, to tell you all about it:
The Prague Fringe Festival was started in 2002, and since then has become the largest and longest-running English-language theatre festival in Europe. Taking place over nine days from the end of May, Prague has been dubbed “Edinburgh’s naughty grandchild”, and features performances from hundreds of artists from all around the world. Much like Edinburgh, venues are found all over the city, in bars and restaurants, in museums and, in our case, in the basement of a boutique hotel.


So, we’ve got our play and we’ve got our venue – now the real work begins. At the beginning of this week we held a workshop for Hell Has No Fury. Reading the play with everyone who came along was incredibly helpful, with lots of thoughts-provoking responses being tossed around. As a result, we’ve had a play around with the structure of the piece and now have a final version we’re all happy with, as well as lots of fresh ideas to take into rehearsal.


The next stage is creating a design that is both effective and works with the limited technical resources we will have in Prague – by which I mean two lights and an on-off switch. I know Claire will create something beautiful nonetheless; we managed to put together some great promotional images with nothing more than some greaseproof paper, a lamp and an Instagram filter, so I know she’ll make it look amazing.


As for me, I’ve started my own research into the Medea myth and how she has been portrayed throughout history, as well as beginning to put together a rehearsal schedule. Before our run in Prague, we’ll be having preview performances of Hell Has No Fury, the first of which will be at Assembly Roxy in Edinburgh on 16th April. That means that if you can’t make it out to Prague in June, you’ll still have the chance to catch our first production as TwentySomething!


In the meantime, you know where to find us on Twitter and FB, and be sure to keep an eye out for the official launch of the Prague Fringe Festival 2016 programme! We’ll keep you updated with all things Prague, including how rehearsals are going once everything kicks off - this is one big step into the unknown for us, and we’re mega excited to be able to tell you all about how things are going.


Here’s to getting started!
RLx

The Beginning

5th January 2016 

I’ve deemed this the year that things start. It’s not catchy but it’s accurate. I’m also hoping it will be some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the year that TwentySomething starts. Although we’ll probably always claim it started in 2015, when we’re writing our memoirs etc.

TwentySomething is made up of myself, Rebecca Sweeney, Rebecca Low and Claire McPhillimy (we thought about making her change her name so we could be the three Rebecca’s but that seemed a little ridiculous). We’re loosely based in Dundee – loosely because I don’t live there anymore and Claire is more ‘Dundee adjacent’ than actually in Dundee. As a company our aim is to make new theatre that makes people think. That might sound obvious but it seems like a pretty decent place to start. We want to make theatre that we want to watch, theatre that entertains and sparks debate, theatre that people can enjoy.

TwentySomething was born from a bottle of fairly nice red wine (probably a Tesco offer of the week) drank out of glasses that we liked because they wouldn’t have looked out of place in a scene with Mark Rylance in Wolf Hall, in the drafty living room of my flat in Dundee, on a weekday evening because we were students and didn’t have to be up early.

The three of us were about ten months through an MLitt in Theatre Studies at the University of Dundee – we graduated in November and drank more red wine to celebrate. We had played with the idea of starting a theatre company before; I write, Rebecca directs and Claire designs, it seemed we had everything we needed. Several times during early 2015 we thought about doing it, becoming a company and making theatre, but it wasn’t until that night in June that we sat down in my living room and made it official. By ‘official,’ I mean we wrote TwentySomething down in a notebook alongside a list of plays we wanted to put on.

I’m very lucky to get to work with people like Claire and Rebecca. We had opportunities to make small pieces of theatre throughout our time at university and I honestly couldn’t have enjoyed working with them more. Rebecca is an amazing director and I can only imagine how much better she’ll become with work that wasn’t scribbled out on the back of an essay plan by me. Likewise Claire has ideas about design that we could never fully bring to life with our non-existent budget, but she certainly made all the pieces look pretty damn amazing.

In the next few months we have a lot of work to do. We’re workshopping Hell Has No Fury, a one-woman piece I’ve written which tells the story of the Greek heroine/ villain Medea. We’ll also start work on For Our Tomorrow – a play about women living through the First World War. All this and more coming your way in 2016.

This is the year things start.

Sweeney.