Scenes from Communal Living: wrap-up

As it's highly unlikely that Scenes from Communal Living will reappear in 2010, what follows is an assessment of the experiences of last year.

The year broke broadly into four interrelated projects: -

1. The initial Camden run (18 shows over three weeks)
2. Edinburgh (25 shows back-to-back)
3. Sydney (10 shows over a fortnight)
4. The return to Camden (16 shows on consecutive Sundays)

Initial Camden Run

An almost unqualified success. The cast were focused and committed to the rehearsal and performance schedule. The investment in PR ensured a decent level of press coverage. Friends and family made the effort to support the show, some on multiple occasions. The shows themselves were high energy and great fun and by the end of the run we were turning away punters.

This straight-shot multinight run approach may be the best chance that a show like Scenes has in terms of both creative quality and promotability.

Edinburgh

Hard but a 25-show run was always going to be. It was essentially the same cast as the Camden run, many of whom were distracted by other projects. This in turn ate into the rehearsal schedule and also left me with little or no post-show time to correct bad habits once we got started. As fatigue set in things got genuinely unpleasant off stage so it became harder and harder for anything good to emerge on stage. Houses were at the bottom of expectations. It was always going to be hard to achieve decent share-of-mind in the ultimate crowded marketplace, especially as I arrived with no real appreciation of how little love the Festival has for improv.

I don't regret taking the show to Edinburgh but in retrospect there's much I'd do differently: demand more commitment from the cast, perhaps even recast the show entirely and definitely do less than the full month. Also I was guilty of schoolboy howlers like not giving the best quotes from London critics sufficient prominence on the flier.

Sydney

This was really Marko's baby and everything I know is via second-hand reports (including an absolutely stunning review). Marko took a different approach to casting in that he chased a couple of 'alpha performers' then allowed them a lot of input in terms of casting and rehearsal scheduling. This seemed to disrupt his production timeline but the show's overall creative quality was seemingly unaffected. We made the decision to paper the house for the Opening Night in the expectation that this would create 'buzz' and we'd recoup the lost sales in word-of-mouth. This didn't really happen and we left money on the table by giving tickets to punters who would otherwise have paid.

My advice to Scenes from Communal Living's next 3rd-party director is to have faith in your ability to extract great performances from run-of-the-mill performers rather than chase reputations, especially as the Sydney 'alphas' ultimately didn't outshine the rest of the cast. The success of the straight-shot multinight approach was certainly vindicated.

Return to Camden

We expanded the cast and creative quality returned to pre-Edinburgh heights. I had taken a regular weekly slot because I was intrigued by the challenge of carving out an ongoing space in the London comedy landscape. My hubris was aptly punished, especially as I relied on some low-level media contacts, Facebook and fliering as my sole promotional tools. We were old news to both the London print media and those punters who had supported it earlier in the year. Tickets were unnecessarily expensive for a Sunday night show.

In London a 50-or so seat theatre is a promoter's black hole: there's no way that anything less than a consistent run of 90% houses will break even after PR costs have been factored in. The theatre was unwilling to offer much of a discount and I glibly refused to see that as I was going to lose money anyway I might as well have set a loss-making ticket price from the outset and got bigger houses. I also wonder whether the specific nature of the show (scenes always set flat-share arrangements) was a negative for improv fans who will happily turn up every week to watch the same actors work in a more demonstrably open format.

2009 taught me a lot. I'm a little sad about the 2010 hiatus but needs must.