By the Bog of Cats documentary

Tegid Cartwright, whose E.P. I reviewed on the first day of this blog, has produced a lovely little documentary about By the Bog of Cats..., a play that a group of Warwick students took to the National Student Drama Festival in Scarborough. I was in the play, and was director of music: I composed a load of themes and then got some awesome musicians (Jenni Mellor, Will Kerr, Tegid himself [though he wasn't playing with us in Scarborough], Oliver Steadman [you might know him better as the bassist from Stornoway], and Rosie Bristow) to rework them, add their own ideas, change things, etc. It did very well there; universally good reviews and a string of awards including the Festgoers Award (voted for by the attendees of the festival as their favourite performance, which it won 'by a landslide') and the Cameron Mackintosh Award for Music in Theatre.

http://tegidcartwright.wordpress.com/2010/11/04/ah-go-on/

The documentary is not completely finished yet, but Teg's put it up on his blog as he wants comments and feedback to help him tweak it.

It's a nice bit of nostalgia for me, but I think it is also quite a nice insight into how music and theatre can be made to work together. It is also extremely embarrassing, and I would like to find a way to avoid filmed interviews in future.

Various theatre projects are in the pipeline, and I'll be posting more about them soon.

The Biplane

Dr. Stephen Shapiro: When you're writing, it helps to know what or who you're writing against; what is it that you're trying to displace in literature, what you are opposing.

China Mieville: Yes, that's a good question. So, in The Biplane, what are you writing against?

Me: I'm writing against China Mieville. And all apocalyptic literature.
- China Mieville's Weird Fiction seminar, 2008

Now, The Biplane was always a good enough idea. I mean, as it stands at the moment, it's a bit too weird and pseudo-existential and, I'm constantly being told, has plotlines which resemble that of the TV series Lost (which I haven't seen, so can't judge). But it's got a good title, which is something, and China Mieville - who wrote The City and the City, which is undoubtedly one of the most exciting novels of the past few years - was very positive about it.

So, as a way to force myself to write it, I'm doing it as a NaNoWriMo. That means I'm writing a novel the length of November. No, it means I'm writing an entire novel in the month of November. Quentin S. Crisp is doing it, so it must be a good idea.

We'll see.