Ages ago I promised to promote It Came From Pilot on the site and now the event is tomorrow. So here we go, promise fulfilled in the letter if not the spirit of the promise.

Both pieces got the first outing of their first incarnations @ A E Harris earlier in the year and I enjoyed them both and would be intrigued to see how they develop. Don’t Look Back was well written and beautifully performed. It felt so assured and complete as a comic/poignant sketch I found it difficult to imagine what a longer version would be like, now is the chance to see. Doris Day Can F*ck Off was more obviously a work in progress, a bunch of themed ideas stitched together, some stronger than others. Here my interest would be to see what has been kept, what dumped, what expanded, what’s new.

I’m obviously keen to support these pieces and the initiatives that support them but ultimately I’m not a great fan of this progressive approach to making a full show via a series of ever longer ‘works in progress’. I’m not that keen on ‘works in progress’ at all. For me a ‘work in progress’ is a piece in a rehearsal room that you keep quiet about until there is The Show ready to go into a theatre. Here Pilot Night gives you 15-20 minutes, it Came from Pilot gives you 40-50 minutes and by the time you get to make a full show you’re on at least your third version of the show. I appreciate the need to make shows ‘by any means possible’ but I’m a bit reactionary for me these are not three stages of development but three different theatrical projects equivalent to The Short Story, The Novella and The Novel. They each have very different requirements. As a consequence the only piece we have ever presented for Pilot, Come Together was complete in its 10′ 22″ long Pilot form and there was never any chance it would get longer (or shorter).