After Tuesday's preview I thought that I was in pretty good shape, with the audience laughing heartily and me seemingly knowing where I was going 80% of the time. But tonight felt like a step backwards. And a scary one with less than a week to go and only two more previews to sort out the kinks. Though really I should spend my time working on the problems with the script, rather than fighting Ray Davies and his band. That's a joke for the Die Hard fans.
The audience was much smaller than Tuesday and the room was like a sauna and I was going on second so they were already rather wilted and weary, but the bits that usually get laughs just got puzzled stares and smiles. Maybe the whole thing is terrible and there had been a leak of nitrous oxide in the venue on Tuesday. Whatever the case, it felt like a struggle for us all and the demons of doubt started pecking at my brain. And it's still ten minutes too long and however much I just hope that it will magically get shorter I have to cut something. Is it too much having a deconstruction of both The Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly and To Be Or Not To Be? On nights like tonight where neither were getting many laughs they both felt very long, but on Tuesday it felt like the unstinting progression of ideas was hat made them work. On the way home I considered switching the order of the routines (Hamlet comes second at the moment, something he'd never do in real life, I'd guess) and linking them by claiming the former was actually the greatest existentual monologue in the world. It might work if they almost become one routine rather than two. And they're both good, I think. I am thinking that I might cut the stuff about the photo of my grandma. It's interesting, but it's not funny (it's not meant to be) and maybe I coverered the more poignant side of my relationship with Doris in What Is Love, Anyway? And with that routine I managed to get belly laughs as well as tears. That cut will give me a couple of minutes and I think I can still lose some stuff from the first ten minutes. But there may still be a more brutal cut that needs to be made. There is still time. And if this is like any other Fringe the show will be a little longer than it's allowed to be. I can probably get away with a 65 minute show. But it would be nice, one year, to have the time to relax and ad-lib rather than be pushing my way to the end.
And whilst I tried to learn the script for the Hamlet bit (I pretty much know his words now, though am not sure of my own - I should know the speech, as a precocious 12 year old I learned it off my own bat, so that I could show off to people by reciting it. That would impress them, right? Everyone loves a 12 year old reciting Hamlet in the school-yard). As I was working on it this evening I had an idea for a play or a film called, "A Conneticut Yankee in Prince Hamlet's Court". I like the idea (that is basically the routine I am doing in the show) of someone with a more positive outlook trying to talk Hamlet out of what he's doing and a quick google seems to suggest it's not an idea anyone else has had. It would be fun for an upbeat American to give the play the happy ending that it surely deserves. Shall I knock it together for next Edinburgh?
I did think that Danny Kaye was in the film (the King Arthur one) and did the vessel with the pestle in it, but that's "The Court Jester". Which is a shame, because it would be fun to mix that into the denouement of Hamlet. And I liked the idea of someone as upbeat as Kaye having to deal with Hamlet. This project might have to wait until my other time travelling adventure based on Goodnight Sweetheart is completed. But hopefully I can become the guy who reinterprets classic time-travel dramas. There's a market for that, right?
My brain keeps churning out more ideas than I can ever use, most of which are uncommmercial and impractical and will never see the light of day. But it's good that I am 46 and still finding myself in the position of having too many ideas, rather than too few. I think this stuff is good, but what if all the audiences in Edinburgh are like tonight's?
It would be no fun if success was guaranteed... but I am 46 and no longer require fun. Success would be very nice. I'll keep churning out the ideas, practical and impractical, either way.
