osbt award and many other things!

simple8 News

We at Simple 8 have been hitting the summer hard. We’re now working on not one, not two, but three new pieces. We should soon be able to formally announce the two productions we’ll be putting on in the first half of 2013 but for now we’d like to tell you about some exciting new developments.

Simple 8 have been shortlisted for the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust award (co produced by The Barbican with CREATE and Shoreditch Town Hall) and will be presenting a short assembly of our work thus far for their board. It’s a big thrill for us to be doing something like this and performing alongside such a varied collection of other companies. There’s such a broad assembly of styles and practices on display that it promises to be a really exciting event. If we’re chosen it could mean a performance at the Barbican next year but for the moment we’re just glad of the opportunity.

Aside from working on this we’ve been hard at work on everyone’s favourite part of theatre production: applying for funding. We enjoy this so much we sometimes wish we could just chuck in the performance stuff and spend our entire time searching for money. Alas the cash has to be spent on something so we might as well do some plays or something.

Keep watching the site and our Facebook and Twitter feeds for more news.

experimentalisation

simple8 News, Production Diary

Our week of R&D finished on a high. Working on the second of our two pieces we’re faced with a great deal of physical work and these R&D sessions are invaluable when trying to figure out how to ‘do’ something.

These sessions are among the most exciting and enjoyable in our work. Presented with a problem such as how to make a horse drawn carriage using nothing but actors and chairs we like to just play around with whatever flotsam and jetsam we can find in the rehearsal room and see how best we can put it together. The tricky part is often coming to terms with the fact that 90% of what you do is going to be bad and to jut have faith that somewhere in you is an idea that can actually become a useable part of a show.

On Saturday we spent a good hour trying to devise a way to show a small boat being reeled in towards a stationary object with the people in the boat appearing to glide along the stage. This prompted a furious and often ridiculous hour of mime and various different varieties of heaving, pulling, winding and eventually the decision to ‘come back to it later’.

the difficult second blog post

simple8 News, Production Diary

So here we are a couple of days on. It’s been a rainy week here in Chacombe which has been terrible news for the tennis fans among us. On the other hand it’s probably been quite conducive to our work ethic not being able to dash on down to the court in every five-minute break.

As we’ve said it’s very early days and as such, most of what we’ve been doing has been about creating a big bundle of characters to play with for the rest of the R&D. This has become how we work with the last couple of shows we’ve done and it will probably remain how we work for the foreseeable future. It’s hard to talk about this as a method without feeling like we’re blowing our own trumpets but it serves us very nicely as an ensemble company to create the peripheral characters in a play very early on in the process. It means that by the time we actually end up in a proper rehearsal room they feel like comfortable old shoes that you can slip straight back into. It’s also an invaluable tool for the writers as at the moment we only have maybe 15 pages of script and the exercises we do this week will inform their work for the next few months.

This is a big part of our company ethos, using the ensemble to build the show from the ground up, thus giving them a tremendous sense of ownership over the piece. We’re very happy with it, we hope you like it too.

production diary

simple8 News, Production Diary

Hello there website visitor. First, thanks very much for stopping by on your interweb travels. This year we hope to maintain a bit more of a web presence, beginning with this production diary/blog. On Saturday we began our production process on two new bits of work and we’re going to use this site and old faithfuls Facebook and Twitter to try and document the whole lamentable endeavor. If you have the stomach for it, we’d be overjoyed if you’ll follow along with this and maybe, if your affection for us stretches far enough, come along to see the fruits of our labour in 2013.

As a group we’ve always wanted to try and push ourselves a little further with each new piece of work we attempt, both creatively and in terms of our ambition as a producing theatre company. In this vain we hope to produce two pieces of new writing, back to back in early 2013. At this point we don’t know for sure whether we’ll be successful. There are financial mountains to be climbed and of course, the small matter of writing and rehearsing the plays.

We’ve started, as we always do now, with a week of workshopping (interspersed with furiously competitive bouts of tennis) at the wonderful Sophie’s Barn in Chacombe. This time however we have two new faces in the shape of Nick Ernshaw and Louise Ford. It’s very early days on both projects but we’ll start to discuss the more detailed aspects of our working process once we’ve been at it a few days. This is really just to introduce this production diary and announce that there are NEW THINGS HAPPENING in the Simple8 camp.

new year, new project

simple8 In Production, News

First of all, apologies for not posting more on the website. It’s been a busy few months for the company and exciting things are happening. We’re not quite at the stage where we can announce our next project yet but we had an extremely productive week of R&D at the incomparable Sophie’s Barn, working on two potential new projects. We’re now at the point where we’re speaking to venues and planning exactly where and when our next piece will be performed.

Thanks for still checking the website, we hope we’ll be able to announce something definite in the near future.

scheming

simple8 News

Hello to one and all. Just a quick post to say we have not died and are hard at work and on a new piece. As soon as more information about our next project is available we’ll broadcast it to the world.

four stages survey

simple8 News

For anyone who’s seen the production (or who sees it), we’d love it if you could fill out our Travel and Show Survey, which will help us with our environmental audit and give us some artistic feedback. It should take about 60 seconds and is anonymous. Thanks so much.

book now!

simple8 News

We’re heading into our fourth week of performances now and ticket sales are really starting to spike. We’ve been sold out the last few nights and hope to fill the theatre for the rest of the run so if you haven’t already bought tickets but want to see The Four Stages of Cruelty, click here to get booking.