So whilst sorting through the vast LibraryGirl archive yesterday we came across the program for my college Final Major Project of my National Diploma course. My final major project would end up being the devising portion of my diploma, we were working towards a piece of decent theatre with something we all wanted to say. We started out under the tutelage of Keryie Vickers a drama and dance teacher at Northbrook who sat us all down and discussed with us how the whole thing was going to work and who we should think about basing the majority of the action around. Now there were only four boys within our year group and I was the only member to not have played a lead. Now when you look at me I can't play the romantic lead because I look completely wrong for that type of role, I couldn't get a lead in either of the two musicals because I never stay in key and during the Shakespeare I was looked over for a more experienced actor. I have never complained about this because I actually quite like playing secondary characters because I know it is them who drive the story forward with their actions and words. I also like trying to make the best of a really deep character researching and exploring them so not getting a lead role ever really bothered me. So when Keryie laid it all out and said we should put our best serious actor forward in a decent role I thought of Robin but she nominated me, which was an honor, so I was going to play the central character. Even now I look back and shake my head at the chaos that ensued because of me being the lead and having the ability to write whatever I wanted. We were also placed under the watchful eye of a final year PGCE student named Keith Wallace, now Keith was such a nice guy and a very good actor. He was a mature student who when I had begun my National Diploma the year before had been in the BA Acting year group so I had watched him perform many times and he was a really good actor, great breathe control and vocal quality with a real talent for putting together complex and disturbing characters. I went into the project with great respect for Keith and he gave it back to us, it was fun devising a show but it wasn't what I would call a clever show or even a good show. The play was called 'Motel Styx' it was about this guy who had gone out drinking with his friends, great premise for a play and it was all my writing (this part at least), gotten so drunk that he became seperated from his pals and ends up stumbling into this creepy looking hotel. Now in retrospective I can see where certain films, programmes and themes permeated my work at 17, yes I was only 17 so please... cut me some slack, films such as the Rocky Horror Picture Show which I must have seen nearly 500 times and the theme of going out and partying came from my own insecurities about the fact that I didn't do those things and thought I should. So we had the typical generic scary old building entered by unsuspecting person, me, we even had a stereotypical creepy Hotel Manager played by our ASM Rick Ayres. Then the show got weirder and more complicated, convoluted and inherently unfunny. I had somehow thought I was writing a wonderful array of sharp and biting comedy when I started writing lines for the hippy character when in actual fact it was worse than any steretypical improvised off the top of the head impression of a concept of a hippy. The plot was a mess and I decided to send up a pop star during the show by referencing Justin Timberlake but I didn't just reference him I did a spin and sang in a high voice a line from 'Rock your body' which fell flat on its face, it wasn't funny. I looked like a prat, I felt like a prat and it wasn't fun LibraryGirl remembers it as being 'just awful' and it was. The show meandered on until mercifully it ended. The only good thing about the whole show was our set which was designed by a lovely designer named Amy Lin Braby and put together, organised by our set builder and foreman Nick Hollingdale, who now works on the Joseph national tours, it was a magnificent moving truck which allowed us to have doors and rooms move during the show. It was the most ambitious set I was involved with at Northbrook. Motel Styx was the final show of the ND that had helped show me what I wanted to do with my life, it also taught me a lot of lessons on how not to do those things. Thankfully I believe the script to this abomination was destroyed many moons ago and is not going to just pop up out of nowhere, however I do have the flyer still which I have photgraphed. If you go to the following link you will be able to read a little more about the production in the words of Rick Ayres.
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Xtofer
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