As most of you will know through our relentless tweeting and Facebook updates, last week was our first run of Snow White as part of the Camden Fringe. After a few days of lie ins and walking around in a zombie-like fashion, we have finally recovered and are feeling ready to reflect. So here are some of our musings on our first ever five show run at a big festival (quite a landmark in Filskit history we think).

PREPARATIONS

One of the most consistent yet stressful lessons we have learnt is that we have to adapt when things don’t go to plan, as in reality, they rarely do. There will always be random mishaps, cruel twists of fate and incidents that are beyond our control. In our case, in the run up to the shows our lovely lighting designer unfortunately had to return to the States due to a family crisis. While it goes without saying that this is unquestionably what anyone of us would’ve done, it really brings to the fore the significant issues that can arise when you least expect them. However prepared you are for a show, there will always be unforeseen hurdles to overcome. So, our lighting lady was due to return to the UK on the Saturday afternoon – the opening night of Snow White. As fate would have it, her flight was subject to massive delays. She missed both the tech rehearsal and the show itself. Panic ensued; or rather a faux air of calm descended amongst us three twitching performers as we reassured each other with cups of tea that “everything would be fine”. But as luck would have it at our tech rehearsal, we bumped into an old drama school colleague who had started on the same course as us but we hadn’t seen since she changed schools. And she was lighting the show after ours on our opening night at The Shaw. In a very peculiar twist of fate (this f-word seems to crop up quite frequently) she ended up lighting our first show – and we hadn’t even seen her for a good 3 years!

 

FIRST NIGHT

The first night is always interesting. You stride out onto the stage, take in the audience in front of you – happily there was an actual audience there each night – and are immediately able to sense how it is going. While some might argue that you should probably be concentrating on the show and not worrying about the reaction of the spectators, I would disagree. True, you shouldn’t obsess over it, but you should be sensitive and responsive to the mood of the crowd.

For Filskit, this was our first show designed specifically with a family audience in mind, and this in itself brings all sorts of challenges. Will the children find it patronising? Will they be bored? But the biggest challenge of all turned out to be, will there actually be children in the audience? It is incredible how much we were influenced by this final factor. As soon as we heard a childish chuckle or an audible comment such as “Mummy, Snow White is scared”, we were spurred on and given a renewed energy to tell the tale. Unfortunately on the final night as that oh so troublesome fate would have it, it was raining cats and dogs. Any sensible person would’ve stayed at home curled up with a good film and a cup of cocoa. It was also a Bank Holiday weekend. So it was little surprise to find ourselves playing to a modest crowd, with perhaps a couple of older children in the audience. This was also the night that we were being live streamed on the internet and filmed for future viewing – so, no pressure at all then! In all honesty, it was hard work. Catching sight of the faces in the audience, it was clear to see that they were attentive and enjoying the performance. Yet they were so silent! We really missed the giggles and excited chatter of our previous energetic younger audience members. This somehow made the show so much harder as we no longer had the guaranteed laughter. The jokes we had so carefully written were most enjoyed by the younger audiences, suggesting that perhaps us Filskit ladies do have the humour level of your average sex-year-old boy.

Over the several nights, we had learnt to enjoy playing to a younger crowd. On one performance, a miniature army of girls even came dressed in Snow White costumes and many would wait at the end of the stage and would only leave after hugging our leading lady or escaping with flowers from the ‘forest’ (needless to say we now need to factor this into our prop budget as we were facing a regular depletion of flowers each night).

 

CRITICISM

Ah the dreaded c-word. It’s quite a scary moment when you take your project, a show that you have treated like a delicate little baby for the past year, and let it out for the whole world to see. It would be naïve of anyone to assume that a product is perfect, but in the realm of family theatre everyone becomes a critic.

Suddenly it is not just the critics and reviewers in the audience you need to worry about, they actually seem quite tame compared to the armies of vocal children ready to point out any mistakes or “boring bits”. But why shouldn’t they comment? The show is for them after all, so really they are number one on the list of people to please, and judging on the running commentary throughout Snow White we seemed to be doing a pretty good job!

Reviewers are a different kettle of fish entirely. This week we received our first bad review in 18 months of theatre making. So in the grand scheme of things that’s not too bad, but never the less, someone tearing apart all your hard work does have a lasting effect. The best thing to do in this situation, and this will sound cheesy, is to look at the positives. Once you get past the annoyed and slightly snide writing style there are some valuable comments in there that are worth taking into account, there’s even a little compliment…

We also had an abundance of other critics in the audience, this time in the form of family, friends and boyfriends, all of whom have seem the piece grow from 20 minutes of ideas to a full show, so of course they were itching to let us know what they thought. Of course it was 99% positive (you can always rely on family and friends to be biased).

The key point to make about criticism it that it comes in thick and fast and if you took all of it into account you could create an entirely different show, so it’s best to be selective and know that it’s ok to disagree.

So there you have our initial thoughts on our Camden Fringe experience. Now, for us, it’s back to real life – work, cleaning, commuting (very dull in comparison).