What with making The Cleansing Of Constance Brown, bedding it in, then taking it to Edinburgh we’ve spent much of the year burning through our cash reserves. We’d built these up knowing this year was going to be an expensive one, but with a few tasty gigs either falling through or being postponed until next year finances are getting a bit tight.
Fortunately our financial projections were canny enough to predict this pinch and we’ve been able to make some savings and take on some fun education projects to see us through. As a result I’m feel more like a teacher than a theatre director.
In Stoke-On-Trent I’m working with a fantastic team of science teachers from St.Peter’s school and a large swath of Year 10 pupils on debates around Nuclear Power. In Stone I’m working with one fantastic science teacher and a small band of Year 10 pupils making a video/animation about Hydrocarbons: how they’re formed, how they’re separated out, cracked and turned into plastics.
Sharing your life with a teacher you think you fully appreciate what a demanding job it is, but then you go and dabble in it a bit yourself and you realise you only know the half of it.
At this point trip to Stan’s Cafe in Wilkes Barre seems very attractive, a nice martini to cut through the chalk dust. We’ve set up a Google Alert which with luck could help us track down the true home of Stan’s Cafe. Not this one we sense – too glitzy.
James
Yes, Talking Birds was feeling the pinch recently until a fortuitous email from an immensely generous (yet movingly tragedy-stricken) Nigerian gentleman arrived, which solved our cash-flow issues in one fell swoop. There’s been a small delay in the funds actually arriving, but I’m hoping that our recent wiring of this months ACE payment should, as they say, ‘trigger’ the much larger prize. We couldn’t help but respond to the trust he showed in us, and it seems there are more like him out there, so, you know, watch your in-tray like a hawk. Suddenly the lottery drain to the Olympics seems like merely a bad dream.