Metta likes... Touring

At the end of May we completed our first tour. As is so often the way of these things, it was right in the middle of all the exciting action that we had the least time to write about it. So here's my rather belated tour blog. Suffice to say, we don't just like touring, we LOVE touring.

As the piece that we were touring was our site-specific performance of The Man with the Flower in his Mouth, I feel that we got a heightened tour experience. We not only had to recreate our show in 10 different locations, but we had to build new performance spaces in each one too.

Metta likes...Reviews

Well ok, we do have a bit of a love/hate relationship with them of course, they are there to criticise us after all - and we certainly prefer them when they're glowing!

The Guardian Theatre Blog

I guess there are two parts to this discussion. The first part is the simpler one - reviews are a great way to get the word out about a show - people read reviews in places that they wouldn't have seen our advertising, so we can reach a wider group of people to tell them that the show is on. And a review of course gives a lot more detail than an advert would, and it's not biased because it's not been written by us! The second part of the discussion is perhaps more interesting though - reviews are a vital part of the feedback we get about a show.

Metta likes... Horror

In all honesty, I don’t think that we’ll be getting out the rubber gloves and mixing up the vats of blood for any of our shows just yet. However, lately I’ve been working with Theatre of the Damned on their production of Grand Guignol, which opened at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden yesterday, and it's got me properly thinking about horror theatre for the first time.

As a genre it often treads a fine line between the terrifying and the farcical, and I have a real respect for the skill it takes to balance that line – one misjudged decision by an actor or a director and the audience are lost, one laugh from one member of the audience and the atmosphere can be shattered for everyone. I can think of few types of theatre which are quite so fragile - it's not for the faint-hearted in any respect!

Metta likes... Intimacy

Great as it is to see large scale epics, with giant sweeping sets and dozens of actors (Marianne Elliott's Women Beware Women at the National was a brilliant example of this type of theatre), there is something truly magical about an intimate theatre experience. We love theatre that is so close that you can see the dust and smell the sweat.

Last week I saw Saturn Returns at the Finborough. It had a great script and fantastic performances, but one of the things that lent it real power was the close proximity of the audience to the action. The story was a deeply personal one, showing the same man at three different stages in is life at three different crisis points with three different women. Much of the script was the personal reflections of the main character, much of the action was his memories.

Metta likes...Hamlets

Loren O'Dair
Photograph Anna Hmmersley

This week Hamlets. Metta likes Hamlet in general - the play and the character - having done our own all-female version back in 2007, (also I assisted on Tim Carroll's production for The Factory) and in the last two weeks I've seen another two productions - the UK tour mounted by Icarus Theatre Collective, starring Metta regular Loren O'Dair, and the National Theatre production (though not with Mr Kinnear).

Interestingly though I saw both these shows at a point at which they weren't quite ready for public consumption - the Icarus production was a dress rehearsal and the National production was the understudy run.