Progress

I don't know how your Sunday night was but mine was fantastic. Last night we showed For Our Tomorrow to a small group of invited audience members  (eg. My parents, Alex's mum and assorted pals). It was great to have a proper audience - albeit one that was predisposed to positivity. The idea behind last night was for us to get feedback on how the play is shaping up and how we're staging it. Luckily everyone we invited had notes for us: parents can be surprisingly cutting - I'm looking at you Valerie!

It's always nerve-wracking to ask for feedback on work, especially when it's at such an early stage, but it has given us a few things to think about during the next few weeks.
By choosing to perform a play set during the First World War we've given ourselves a lot more work than we needed to. Low and I have spent a long time talking about how our limited (non-existent) budget will affect how we can make it clear to an audience when the play is set. Our thoughts, in general, are that naturalistic setting and costume only work when they can be done well. Realistically we can't create an authentic looking 1914s living room inside Roxy Central and so we aren't going to! Likewise our costumes won't be historically accurate either! Instead we're going to be giving a nod to the period without being too precious about naturalism!

Our other challenge is performing in the round. If anyone saw Sex and God, Low's first foray into directing in Dundee, you'll know that we love a play in the round. However it isn't easy to block, or light for that matter - but that might just be my inability to use a lighting desk. Roxy Central is a beautiful space too and so we want to make the best use of it we can.

Low and our actresses have a few more weeks of rehearsals before the show opens properly in October. I'm going to try not to send over too many rewrites in the meantime!

A reminder- Tickets are on sale on the Assembly Roxy website and we'll be selling them on the door too.

Sweeney x

Introducing: For Our Tomorrow

TwentySomething are back! After a few months of rest and relaxation... who am I kidding?! It was Fringe - Low and I are just happy to be alive! But anyway, the three of us are back in business and getting ready to share something entirely new. 

Our latest project, For Our Tomorrow, has been brewing in my mind for the best part of a year and a half now. It started in a classroom in Dundee and took me to the Progressive Playwright event at Tron Theatre, and now it's going to the Roxy. It's a period piece (something I'm always worried about telling people, less they think I've tried to dramatise Jane Austen) set during the First World War. I've always been fascinated by the lives women lived during both world wars; the way they took on jobs and responsibilities that would be handed back over to men a few years later. In particular I've always been struck by how their lives would be irrevocably and immeasurably changed by a war that would take away almost all the men they knew. 

For Our Tomorrow follows theee women from before the war starts to halfway through. Mairi, Anne and Lucy are each affected by the war in different ways and deal with it in different ways. I wanted to show the scope of what could happen to a woman during that time, and what a woman could do herself. 

Our characters will be played by three marvellous women; Jacqueline Thain, Alex Forrest and (we didn't scare her off in Prague!) Rowan Hall. We started rehearsals last nighr and despite the hilarity (keep your eyes peeled for an egg motif throughout the play) we actually managed to get a fair bit of work done: with Ms Low at the helm we were always going to be in safe hands! 

Tickets will be available from the Roxy website very soon and on the door each night of the performance. Keep up to date with our rehearsals on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram! 

Sweeney x