12 min
How to create a solo theatre show: interview with Colin Watkeys Love Your Creativity » Podcast Feed
-
- Arte
Over the past 30 years, Face to Face Theatre Festival Director Colin Watkeys has specialised in producing and directing solo theatre and writers who perform their own work. He is now part of a world movement that recognises that solo performance possesses a unique quality of vision in theatre. I am performing part of my next solo theatre show The Singing Psychic at the Lost Theatre on July 8th so I took the opportunity to interview Colin
Here are some of the highlights (this is not a full transcript of the podcast interview, to listen to it press the arrow above.)
I asked Colin for one piece of advice to anyone who wants to write and develop a show and he said
‘Character. Character and narrative. Narrative is the character and the character is the narrative. Don’t try to manipulate anything, don’t try to put words into their mouths. Get to know the character and their narrative and it writes itself.
Claire Dowie famously said she does not remember writing any of her work. From her point of view the character does write it. The guy she plays, she taps in that person’s life, she calls it getting away with telling lies’ (her wiki)
Like Picasso ‘The lies we tell to tell the truth’, but if you take on someone else’s history you become a different character, it can affect the way you move. One play that Claire did she played 4 characters in, 2 male, and a middle aged woman and an older woman, all played by herself. Someone asked afterwards, as there was a short blackout ‘I was very surprised when you put lipstick on in the blackout’ but she had not actually done so. Colin did wonder how you can act lipstick but the audience had the impression that for a middle aged, middle class woman she always had lipstick on.
Thats a challenge ‘act lipstick’ but the point is when you really see all the characters in your story yourself, the audience does too. When you imagine the richness of the scenes, how you felt, where you were the audience recreates that directly themselves in a far more kaleidoscopic world than in a film.
He is always fascinated with solo theatre and performers. For a while he ran the Finborough for stand ups as he was interested in their relationships with the audience. He wants theatre to be like jazz so that people get up and it just happens, not with a set, not with a script.
He does like scripts as well but he likes everything to be created in the audience’s imagination and no tacky sets or effects.
It is what he likes, from working with stand up comedians but then it got boring as he then was coaching them for auditions for TV pilots, most of whom have got TV series now. He enjoyed most working up with Claire Dowie who used to do what she called ‘Stand Up Theatre’ and Ken Campbell, director, writer, actor including A Fish Called Wanda imdb link here) and comic who loved creating it there and then, he called it ‘real acting’
Ken Campbell used to say
‘The script’s there for a bad day when the geezer is not there, but when the geezer is actually there you just let go, you just do it’
Ken Campbell’s obituary
That is what Claire, Ken and Colin have in common, he knows it is not for everyone but when he sees a play he just wants to hone down to the one performer who has an interesting relationship with the audience, he thinks they could just do all of it. That’s what he loves.
I asked about retelling Shakespeare from a solo performer perspective and I mention Patrick Stewart’s one man ‘A Christmas Carol’ where he told the whole story himself and Colin mentioned the Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’ with the different perspectives of Hamlet and each other.
I ask what Colin thinks he brings to our work as a performer.
He has no idea what he brings, he just knows that it will not be better with more people, nor with a set, he is interested in the rela
Over the past 30 years, Face to Face Theatre Festival Director Colin Watkeys has specialised in producing and directing solo theatre and writers who perform their own work. He is now part of a world movement that recognises that solo performance possesses a unique quality of vision in theatre. I am performing part of my next solo theatre show The Singing Psychic at the Lost Theatre on July 8th so I took the opportunity to interview Colin
Here are some of the highlights (this is not a full transcript of the podcast interview, to listen to it press the arrow above.)
I asked Colin for one piece of advice to anyone who wants to write and develop a show and he said
‘Character. Character and narrative. Narrative is the character and the character is the narrative. Don’t try to manipulate anything, don’t try to put words into their mouths. Get to know the character and their narrative and it writes itself.
Claire Dowie famously said she does not remember writing any of her work. From her point of view the character does write it. The guy she plays, she taps in that person’s life, she calls it getting away with telling lies’ (her wiki)
Like Picasso ‘The lies we tell to tell the truth’, but if you take on someone else’s history you become a different character, it can affect the way you move. One play that Claire did she played 4 characters in, 2 male, and a middle aged woman and an older woman, all played by herself. Someone asked afterwards, as there was a short blackout ‘I was very surprised when you put lipstick on in the blackout’ but she had not actually done so. Colin did wonder how you can act lipstick but the audience had the impression that for a middle aged, middle class woman she always had lipstick on.
Thats a challenge ‘act lipstick’ but the point is when you really see all the characters in your story yourself, the audience does too. When you imagine the richness of the scenes, how you felt, where you were the audience recreates that directly themselves in a far more kaleidoscopic world than in a film.
He is always fascinated with solo theatre and performers. For a while he ran the Finborough for stand ups as he was interested in their relationships with the audience. He wants theatre to be like jazz so that people get up and it just happens, not with a set, not with a script.
He does like scripts as well but he likes everything to be created in the audience’s imagination and no tacky sets or effects.
It is what he likes, from working with stand up comedians but then it got boring as he then was coaching them for auditions for TV pilots, most of whom have got TV series now. He enjoyed most working up with Claire Dowie who used to do what she called ‘Stand Up Theatre’ and Ken Campbell, director, writer, actor including A Fish Called Wanda imdb link here) and comic who loved creating it there and then, he called it ‘real acting’
Ken Campbell used to say
‘The script’s there for a bad day when the geezer is not there, but when the geezer is actually there you just let go, you just do it’
Ken Campbell’s obituary
That is what Claire, Ken and Colin have in common, he knows it is not for everyone but when he sees a play he just wants to hone down to the one performer who has an interesting relationship with the audience, he thinks they could just do all of it. That’s what he loves.
I asked about retelling Shakespeare from a solo performer perspective and I mention Patrick Stewart’s one man ‘A Christmas Carol’ where he told the whole story himself and Colin mentioned the Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’ with the different perspectives of Hamlet and each other.
I ask what Colin thinks he brings to our work as a performer.
He has no idea what he brings, he just knows that it will not be better with more people, nor with a set, he is interested in the rela
12 min