Life Lessons from Edinburgh Fringe 2017

Don't worry, the Fringe didn't destroy us, we're still here. However some serious post-Festival detoxing has been required. I've almost forgotten it happened at all...

We had an amazing Fringe, great audiences, brilliant feedback, all in all a fine old time. 

At the grand distance of almost two months PF (that's Post-Fringe) I've tried to pull together all the things we learned over our first Edinburgh Fringe. 

And here it is, the TwentySomething Guide to Surviving the Fringe 

1. Flyers are not that vital.
   
   The two unopened boxes of flyers in my flat are testament to this truth. When we looked at buying posters and flyers the quantities all seemed huge, so huge in fact that we asked to reduce our flyer order. In hindsight I would have halved it. People came to see Hell Has No Fury because we spoke to them about it and whilst sure, sometimes that involved passing over a flyer, it didn't always. Less is more, for sure.
   Not to mention the trees guys - think about the trees!
   
2. Small spaces are not to be sniffed at.
   
   Our venue was a 60 seater black box with seats on three sides, pretty standard. Add to that three chairs, three mirrors, a dust sheet and a smattering of LED candles and what do you have? Well a pretty swanky looking set, if I do say so myself. Little venues and small budgets really aren't the hindrance they can appear.
   
3. Outside life happens.
   
   Whether this be a building site with an over-enthusiastic pneumatic drill (oh, I wish I was exaggerating!) or work schedules that relentlessly beat on, the real world continues in August. Something to remember when booking a show for lunchtime when 1.5 members of the company have full time jobs.
   
   
4. Any ticket sales are good ticket sales!
   
   We knew this already but it's worth reiterating, the average Fringe show sells 6 tickets. That's across the hundreds of performances, from one-to-one shows to sold out 500-seat venues, the average is 6. So appreciate every person who comes to see the show, because they came to see yours, not the others.
   
5. Turnaround? Lol. 
   
   Turnaround times are literally non-existent. 5 minutes feels like 5 seconds (and we had a pretty basic set!). It's worth thinking about waaaaay in advance, because the stress of throwing set together in mere minutes, isn't healthy for anyone.
   
6. Make pals with the venue staff and companies.
   
   With these tight turnarounds, the venue staff and other companies are super important. Helping someone else with their get-out will definitely help you with your get-in - simple.
   And friends are great.
   
7. Look after each other.
   
   Buy chocolate (or lacto-free treats for some) and drinks, and check-in with each other.
   
8. ENJOY EVERY SECOND CAUSE SEPTEMBER IS SO DULL. 
   
   
   

Sweeney x

Basically just photos

I wonder what Hell Has No Fury looks like, you ask? 

Well wonder no further because here are our some of our beautiful production photos taken by the lovely Cat Thomson!

I'm not going to lie, this blog is mostly an opportunity to show off Rowan looking fantastically moody in some stellar dusk light. 

And as the Fringe has started today, I'm exhausted in anticipation of what is going to happen in the next four weeks and my brain has already turned to mush. 

With only two and a half weeks before Hell Has No Fury comes to Edinburgh we're in the final stages of prep. Soon our flyers and posters will be in and around Edinburgh. Tweet us if you spot any, cause that'll be a little too cool for me to handle. 

Have a happy Medea to finish off. 

Sweeney x

#WorldFringeDay

Happy World Fringe Day!!

I'm unreasonably happy that there's now a day dedicated to my favourite thing - FRINGE. 

As I (ever so wittily) commented on Twitter this morning - 

'I didn't choose the #fringelife, #fringelife chose me.'

And World Fringe Day has come just as TwentySomething begin rehearsals for Hell Has No Fury at the Edinburgh Fringe. It's kinda crazy to think that we're bringing a show to the original Fringe Festival in it's 70th year, like a lot crazy, like ohmygodwhatarewethinking crazy. 

My first Fringe - yes this is when I get nostalgic - was in 2010. I started what would be a seven year stint working at Assembly Hall every August. I can't believe it's been that long, but I also can't really remember a time when my year didn't revolve around Fringing. I love it so much I now travel to Prague, just to get to do it again. I've met some of my best friends at Fringe, seen the best (and worst) theatre of my life at Fringe, I've laughed so hard I've cried and cried so hard I've laughed at Fringe. To me, it's absolutely astounding that we get to be part of it every single year. 

We did a little Q&A for our Insta last week and I was asked, "What's your favourite thing about #edfringe?" I had to think for a bit, mostly because I wanted to be funny, but also because there are so many answers to that question:

I love the way Edinburgh comes alive during Fringe. I love how many new people get to experience the city. I love the number of new companies who've chosen Edinburgh as the place to share their brand-new work for the first time ever. I love the people who come back year after year, like there's a magnetic pull that stretches across continents and oceans, bringing them back to the Fringe. I love that there are now Fringes all across the world who took inspiration from Edinburgh and decided to dare to be different too. I love walking down the Royal Mile and seeing warring companies vie for flyering privileges. I almost love getting annoyed at tourists in town who don't seem to understand that, 'I'm late for work plz move!' 

I could have said any of those things - instead I went for, "my favourite thing is that you can say you're having an early night when you go home at 4am." Which I promise is more poignant than it sounds! Edinburgh doesn't go to sleep in August, there's always something going on, no matter what time of day or night and it's that buzz, the hum in the background, that I love. 

I feel incredibly lucky that we're getting to bring Hell Has No Fury to a whole new Fringe audience in Edinburgh and I cannot wait. 

A reminder that tickets are on sale on the Fringe website, and that healthy presales allow my blood pressure to remain at a semi-reasonable level. 

(I have used the word Fringe 16 times. Just FYI) 

Sweeney x

Prague Fringe 2017

Although I'm here without the TwentySomething crew Prague Fringe is ALWAYS worth talking about. So on Fringe Sunday (the holiest of holy days) I thought I'd give a little round up of everything Prague Fringe 2017.

First of all meet Fringeon - which I cannot for the life of me pronounce- our new mascot. He's so cute I think he deserves his own kids show next year. He's all over our new branding which is equally attractive. Now, although we all know a TwentySomething tote bag is the ONLY tote bag worth owning, you have to admit these ones are pretty spectacular too. And this year in colour!


It's boiling in Prague. The boiling point of the average Fringe goer was bypassed around yesterday afternoon. Luckily there are many awesome shows to enjoy in dark, (but equally boiling) rooms.


I've seen a whole 3 shows thus far, not a great record but it's early days. My list of shows I want to see is getting longer and longer and longer, hopefully I get enough time to do it.



All in all, a brilliant Fringe thus far.

Just hope I don't melt!

#prahaismydestiny

Sweeney

x

Quizzical

It's been a busy few weeks for us at TwentySomething. Our beautiful tote bags arrived last week and we've started getting them out to our KickStarter backers. We will also have some available to buy for £10 if you missed out on getting one already! They're pretty great if you ask me. Our TS logo designed by the wonderful Katie Wilkinson was made to be printed on canvas!

Yours for only £10!! 

Sunday was QUIZ DAY! We had a brilliant night at Summerhall and raised over £100 for our Fringe Fund, which will go a long way in helping us.

You've got to love quiz team names, they might be my favourite part of any pub quiz, which is why I found it hilarious that we ended up with not one but two teams named Universally Challenged. (One renamed to Really Universally Challenged after the first three rounds)




The winners of the quiz were Yaasss Qweens (which despite being the team that included Ms Rowan, was not a fix!) They went home with a TwentySomething badge each and a bottle of Edinburgh Gin!

Now while I think all the questions were more than fair, we had quite a few complaints about Low's Only Connect bonus round in the second half. So I thought I'd pop a few on here so you can have a go if you didn't make it along.

Give us a tweet if you get any of them!


1. Rear Window            The Royal Tenanbaums            The Lobster                    Weiner Dog


2. Wombats                    Shins                                         Beloved                          Cars


3. Carmen Sandiago       Paddington                               Tommy Cooper              Captain Morgan



It's Fringe-prep madness now. There will be lots getting shared on our social media as we get ready for the Festival so keep an eye on Twitter, Insta and Facebook to keep up to date.

Now I'm off to read Low's press release which I'm sure will be much more eloquent and succinct than the rambling above!

Sweeney x

We did it.

Over the past month TwentySomething have had a lot to celebrate. Not only have we successfully launched a KickStarter campaign which was funded by many, many incredible people but...

We're officially part of the Edinburgh Fringe 2017.

Let me say that again -

WE'RE GOING TO THE FRINGE!!

I really wish I'd recorded the moment that Low and I sent off our registration. There were definitely squeals unbecoming of young ladies like ourselves. One click of a button and it was done. We've joined the Fringe society. We're taking a show to the biggest arts festival in the world. NBD. Whatevs.

Hell Has No Fury will be performed at the Space Triplex from 21st - 26th August 2017.


I mentioned the KickStarter earlier. We had an unbelievable response to our fundraising and made our target with over a week to go! Overall we raised £540 towards our Fringe trip. Everyone who backed us will be mentioned in our show programme and some people chose to pledge a little extra and get TwentySomething badges, magnets and even.... tote bags. (the bags look amazing. I'm so excited about them).

We still have some fundraising coming up. On April 23rd we're hosting a pub quiz at Summerhall - there's an event page on our Facebook with more information about that.

Basically, it's all go.

Sweeney x

Excel will be the death of me.

My eyes have gone square. I've been crunching numbers for the past few hours and unlike last time I have had neither Low nor her dairy-free cake to help me through it, I had to settle for a pot of tea and the Book of Mormon soundtrack - bizarrely invigorating to listen to!

It's occurred to me several times before, but more so today, that it would have been hugely helpful to have taken a class on fundraising applications at some point, as it seems to be a crucial part of any creatives existence. They're horrible. They go on for pages and pages and come with PDF's of guidelines and FAQ's and "Advice on How to Complete..." none of which is any use when you're actually writing them.
If you can imagine writing a cover letter for a job and thinking of all the reasons you're perfect for it and putting them into succinct sentences without too much repetition of "responsible" and "hard-working," and managing to finish it off with the correct variation of "yours whatever," but then, realising there's a second application in which you have to document how you'll spend every penny of the wage they probably aren't going to give you anyway, and explain what each expenditure brings you and justify it's cost. If you can imagine, that's what I've been doing today.
Fairly unsuccessfully.

Anyway, hopefully something comes of all this. Something more than my improved Excel sheets and ability to guestimate the cost of everything from printing to performances. We should be, and I certainly am, grateful that any kind of funding for new creative ventures exists at all!

TwentySomething will be sharing our plans for 2017 soon, (once we finalise them!) so keep an eye on Facebook and Twitter for what's coming next!

#KeepTheSecrets

First and foremost I should apologise because I’m about to deviate from the normal theme of this blog. Although when we first decided to start blogging our adventures we thought about blogging stuff we’d seen, not just stuff we’d made, but I haven’t really felt the need to write anything about something I’d seen, until now. On Saturday I saw Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

Now, whatever your thoughts on the global, corporate, seemingly never-ending world of Harry Potter, I have to tell you that it was one of the best things I’ve ever seen. In all fairness I am a self-confessed Harry Potter obsessive, born at just the right time to climb on board the Hogwarts Express with him, live through high school, live through being a teenager (the fifth book where he basically only communicated in capital letters? That’s exactly what my brain felt like too.) all at the same time. So I am a sympathetic audience member to say the least.

It’s been just over forty-eight hours since I saw it and I have tried to stop thinking about it but it keeps coming back, constantly, because all I can think about is that I want to talk to someone about it. I want to talk about every bit of it, I want to go back over it again and again in minute detail. I want to talk to somebody about every movement, every look, every cadence in speech, I want to talk to somebody about everything I thought was wrong with it, every opportunity I thought they missed, every character who didn’t quite work, everything that didn’t quite make sense. And I want to talk to somebody about everything that was brilliant about it, everything that was perfect and sensational and purely, beautifully magical about it. I want to talk to somebody about every moment that made me jump out of my seat – I think I should have apologised to the people sitting behind me because I was the worst kind of audience member.

I should be so lucky to see theatre like that.

I should be so lucky to make theatre like that.

Because that’s what theatre is. Theatre is magical and transformative and transporting and it makes you gasp, and scream out and shout at these people on stage who are pretending to be something they aren’t. That’s what theatre is and I should be so lucky to make it.

In between the two shows I said I would have given my right arm to have been in the technical rehearsals, which I can only imagine went on for several weeks. There must have been something pretty amazing about being in the room when the magic worked for the first time. Because there was magic in that theatre and I believed in it. It’s magic that I’d seen hinted at before in a John Tiffany play. Peter Pan at the Festival Theatre, years ago, I had the same feeling then. The same feeling when I watched Peter crawl out of the top right-hand corner of the proscenium arch and walk, horizontal down to the stage. I felt that magic, magic that only happens in the theatre and while I can’t go in to detail about what happened this time round because #KeepTheSecrets I can say that it was even better. We all, everyone who makes theatre, be that as a writer or a director or an actor, we all wait for that moment when it works. It might be a line that wasn't landing but then suddenly it does and the whole play makes sense, or a prop that was clumsy until it became essential. The people who made Cursed Child got to experience that on a mammoth scale. They saw the characters click into place, the dialogue flow and they saw the magic work, they saw magic come to life. I would've given anything to be in the room when it happened. 

The story of Cursed Child was like finding a hidden chapter at the end of the seventh book – a hidden chapter that went on for several hours – and the best bit about it was I got to experience it with an entire theatre full of people. I got to learn more about that world at the exact same time as the people around me, which isn’t something I’ve been able to do with Harry Potter since I decided I couldn’t wait for my Dad to read them to me and started the third book in secret without him. I heard people gasp from the stalls and stood up with everyone in the circle to peer down below us and it was that collective experience that made it all the better. 

I’m so relieved that I loved it because I was terrified when I sat down. “Don’t touch your idols, the gold comes off on your hands.” That’s what I was scared of, I was so scared that this would ruin the perfect and sacred world, but it didn’t. I can’t shake the feeling that the world’s biggest Harry Potter fans were responsible for the production, because it could only have been made by people who really, really loved and respected the story. And (I say again!) that's what theatre is about. The best kind of theatre is made with love and respect and inspiration. So thanks to J.K., John Tiffany, Jack Thorne and the cast and the crew and whoever it was who made the end of the first play work because OH MY GOD. 

I count myself lucky to have seen theatre like that. 

I'd be even luckier if I could make it. 

Sweeney x

Coming out of Hibernation

I'm currently sitting at my dining room table surrounded by empty coffee cups, a tea pot, a half-finished slice of a delicious dairy-free chocolate cake and what seems like several thousand post-it notes. Oh yes, it's that time of year again - APPLICATIONS. Low and I have just trundled through the first batch of Fringe and funding applications for the year, accompanied by the relaxing sound of BBC Radio 4. Whilst we are nowhere near finished, thanks to the mammoth size of most funding application forms, we've definitely made a decent headway - decent enough that I will probably allow myself to finish off that half eaten slice of dairy-free cake that Low clearly didn't want or she would have taken it with her... It's a bit strange to already be thinking about Edinburgh Fringe when outside it is very clearly still the bleak midwinter, but terrifyingly most Fringe programmes will be confirmed within the next three months. Eek.

2016 was a great year for TwentySomething with Hell Has No Fury and For Our Tomorrow and we're hoping to build on their success in 2017. This year should see the emergence of some new work, although that is dependent on my ability to actually write anything new - so fingers crossed! We're also hoping to revive Hell Has No Fury and bring it to some new audiences.

Watch this space!

Sweeney x

(I ate the cake.)