Lyceum Season 2013/14

The Royal Lyceum announced their productions for the year to come this Tuesday. With new writing from Ian Rankin. David Haig and Tim Barrow, collaborating with Artistic Director Mark Thomson, a varied and exciting season lies ahead

Author Ian Rankin discusses Dark Road

Writer and Director Tim Barrow on his writing of Union

Artistic Director Mark Thomson introduces the season

Writer David Haig discusses his upcoming premiere of Pressure

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Quiz Show

The house lights have come up on the Traverse Theatre's first full production of 2013, which finished a sensational run last weekend.  But I couldn't be happier its over.

Quiz Show is a rare double-edge sword for a photographer. At one end, it is decidedly visually brilliant. It abounds in colour, fun and dynamism that kept me curious and on my toes. A sumptuously gaudy set with screens, monitors and teleprompters of a dated TV studio that provided additional layers of perspective to play with. The show has a careful veneer that conceals a heavy hitting commentary which, as it gradually lifts away, made me readjust my approach. The action is frantic and the images pay it full justice.

But therein is the double edge. The play undergoes such a transformation and such unexpected action emerges, that to even hint at the violence and the darkness contained would ruin the reveal for the audiences over the run. Having seen the very first performance of the show, I wouldn't trade any knowledge of the plot for the shocks in store. So I have sat on these beautiful photos for the last 3 weeks! When you produce something you love, its hard not to shout about it.

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Science NOW

Finally, a post.

From the chaos of March and the illness of April (changing seasons after all), I haven't been able to man the blog and have had to let it rust by the way side. Well  no longer, I have much to talk about.

What better to start with than the most recent and most interesting. Last week, before succumbing totally to a bout of tonsillitis, I attended an event organised by ASCUS, as part of the Edinburgh Science Festival. They hosted an open workshop where members of the public were presented with a collated version of a published scientific paper and had to in turn interpret the academic rhetoric into a poem.

Teamwork! And interestingly, the room was split accidentally into scientists and artists who banded together. The results were curiously different. Myself, Mark and Graham concocted our own method to blindly extract individual words from the prose. Through the legendary power of the post-it, we curated our words into a work that obeyed rules of poetry but also lovingly summarised the paper at hand, and the nature of academic articles in general.

High Five! It was a very fun way to apply our disciplines to something unfamiliar. Our team's word choice was so random and so repetitive that we would have been delighted to contrive anything at all, let alone our interesting two stanzas that are posted below.

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Tara

This is Tara McKevitt. 

Tara is a writer, and as I have learned, many other things. The learning is at the very beginning though, and it is a two way exchange. Tara has been selected by the Traverse Theatre, off the strength of her script Tourists, to be one of their 50 writers for their 50th Year.

This is a great programme, both in scale and in promise. And like all great things, it needs to be properly documented. Enter the foresight of the staff at Writer Pictures, who have cleverly elected 50 photographers with which to partner each writer. A personal chronicler for a time that is pivotal in their career. Tara is my writer and last weekend, we met for the first time.

A difficult balance to strike, when two people first meet. Thankfully for us, we both recognise a blank canvas and the opportunity to create something. And thankfully for us, we met for a meal in The Shore, where no wrong can be done! Talking without a script, about flats, about painting, about forgetting, big changes,sisters and brothers, style, about Ireland, a very rounded image of Tara emerged as a writer, worker, person. Someone unique for a unique project. Creating can be a solitary process, and I am very much looking forward to sharing it with someone not only with a different perspective, but a separate medium to express it.

I will produce a portrait of Tara over the course of this partnership for exhibition in the Traverse during August.

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