St. Pierre et Miquelon

When I said France you guessed Cannes? No.  A business partner of mine is suffering that indignity and paying 20 euros per G & T for the privilege.  I was, instead, in the French Department of St. Pierre and Miquelon.

pilota court St. Pierre

My long time good friend Gerry Porter (he designed this site) gave me, for my birthday in 1989, a card, that he had illuminated, of Walter Benjamin’s “The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses”.  I keep it in my office. Number XI commands : “Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there”.  Heeding Mr. Benjamin, I sat at a desk in a hotel room in St. Pierre, the scent of Gauloises brunes and French palaver and fog coming in the open window, and finished the play.

Final Problems Never Are

Flurry of gigs and competing deadlines. Stories are bleeding into each other.  Characters in the play are catcalling those in the screenplays.  It’s a narrative fugue state.   I don’t think that’s necessarily bad for the projects, but it’s intellectually exhausting and, as meetings related to the projects have been held across the continent, a physical trial as well.  It’s always thus, periods slow enough that you contemplate actually finishing the novel and starting another then pandemonium.  I’ve never gotten used to it.  Mark Tansey’s brilliant “Derrida Queries de Man” illustrates how I feel.  Things get better next week, after a short trip to France.

The Thing

In Edmonton for table reads of the new play, “Hail” as part of The Working Title Play Reading Series of The Canadian Centre for Theatre Creation. A most valuable exercise.  With actors as talented as those assembled you get to hear which of your words are giving them flight and which are tripping them up.  It is a test to which you cannot put your work back in the cave. Actors, sometimes even more than the author, demand to understand the characters they are playing in profound ways.  Their search for this knowledge forces a writer to put, and eventually answer, tough questions.  Good actors never accept that their character is doing something other than that which the character would do.  If the actions or words are there only for mechanical reasons, to merely advance plot or for authorial wankery, if they don’t come organically from character, those actors who honour/obsess over their craft bristle.  

Kim McCaw, the Dramaturge and Charles Tomlinson, the Director, also indulged my request to see the ending of the play “on its feet”,  so I could better judge the rhythm of the final exits.  This was more than promised and proved invaluable.

The three days concluded with a small public reading which illuminated how the audience might respond, how well the piece was getting through. 

The big changes?  The laughs are too many and too big in the first act,  the piece is, ultimately, a darker one.  And there’s too much of the playwright, in particular his deranged social theories, in the second act.  There was an audible gasp from the house at one moment in the second act that I never would have thought was there.  It was as welcome as it was surprising. 

windowless worlds

This was the second, and I think final, series of table reads of “Hail”.  Each made the play better.  Why we do this so little in the crafting of film and television scripts, where there can be very much more dough at stake, I have never been able to fathom. 

I’ve got another couple of drafts coming out of this. Anything after that will be changes made during the rehearsal process of the first production.

In the photograph, taken at a studio at The University of Alberta’s Drama Department, are, clockwise from my empty chair, David Ley, Steve Pirot, Kim McCaw, Kevin Sutley, Charles Tomlinson and Brian Dooley.  These guys were great.