If you must devise your fare keep it positive and New Age
If you must devise your fare, keep it positive and New Age.DON'T: Cancel on Fireworks Night. The annual detonation of several tons of TNT over Edinburgh Castle adds an unforgettable frisson to shows about Beirut, intense mime performances etc; though not, sadly, to The Seagull I attended, where Konstantin, having exited in despair, appeared to shoot himself several times over, and with increasingly heavy artillery.DON'T: bother to hire a flat large enough for your cast and crew. For one thing, all the big, expensive flats have already been booked by the big, expensive acts from the Assembly Rooms; for another, theatre is not the only nocturnal activity for which people come to Edinburgh: just think of it as a three-week game of sardines.DON'T: Rehearse. Or, if you must, don't bother to talk to the lighting operator before the show. I recall a student production of Lady Audley's Secret, which played like a mid-Seventies Top of the Pops: lights flashing randomly, occasional bursts of music, bemused young people shuffling about.DON'T: Neglect to use the word 'madness' in your publicity hand- outs.
Alliteration is good ('musical madness', 'Mancunian madness', 'Mephistophelean madness' and so on); but best of all is the triple-whammy with exclamation marks, eg: 'Mystery] Mayhem] Madness]' This will clearly signal your meaning to the audience, ie: Our writer has not finished the script.And that's it. Easy, right? So break a leg, but don't let that stop your run of Timon of Athens Goes Tap.Tomorrow: Peter Guttridge talks to the film director Ken Loach. LAST NIGHT, Everyman (BBC 1) offered you a psychologist wielding a placard headed, 'All I need to know about life I learned from Star Trek' - a poster which assembles a number of Trekkie aphorisms, such as 'Tribbles hate Klingons' and 'Don't put all your ranking officers in one shuttlecraft'. Dr Jim Goodwin was taking a patient through the finer points of 'boldly going' when you first saw this therapeutic tool, but he must be fond of the can-do spirit of, 'If it can't be fixed - just ask Scotty'. For Dr Goodwin is an engineer of the human soul, a believer in the cure-all powers of the antidepressant Prozac. Not so much engineer, actually, as Kwik-Fit fitter - all his patients receive the same diagnosis and the same treatment, some within minutes of walking through the door. With a leading character like this, the film-maker doesn't need to do much more than stay in focus, but Paul Sapin had done more anyway, approaching the film's serious concerns with a sly and playful eye.
At the beginning, his camera floated over a high ridge to discover a toytown community nestling in the valley below - a dreamy, Shangri-La shot underscored by the slow schmooze of Sinatra. The David Lynch feel was emphasised by the woozy glide of the tracking shots and the polyester chirpiness of the local DJ's; 'you're listening to Wenatchee's alternative to Prozac', said one, 'So take a dose, the doctor is in]' On a nearby rooftop an animated Red Indian rolled its eyes with synthetic glee. But none of this disrupted the larger issue, the question of whether Dr Goodwin's advocacy of chemical serenity constitutes malpractice or a voice crying in the wilderness. He thinks he's an apostle, confronting a terror that it might, after all, be that easy. Others think he's unethical, peddling a simplistic escape from the very essence of our mundane life. His patients support him with an over-bright zeal, the tremulous radiance of a bulb that is about to blow.Personally, I thought Dr Goodwin had all the attributes of the cast-iron huckster, from the home-grown jargon ('you've been 'musterbating' Sandy', he admonished one of his patients) to the glassy conviction with which he puts his case. For those depressed by his vision of a brave new world, Sapin included an antidote - the simple nous of a farmer in the local barber's shop 'I tried one of those Valiums on ma dog once .', he said.
