And so it ends.....for now.

Hello everyone. Sorry its taken me a little longer than usual to wrap things up over here. Been having a bitch of a time trying to finalize the cast for 'Frankenstein In Love', which is the next play I'm directing. More on that later but now, back to Endgame. Its been interesting to take a little time to think about the run and the various responses people had towards it. We knew from the beginning that the play was bound to divide some people simply because of its very nature, the fact that it didn't conform to the more conventional structure and logic that audiences have grown accustomed to over the years. But I think we all took some weird sadistic (or masochistic, depending on how you look at it) pride in that. I remember one night during a smoke break, U-En, Alvin and I were talking about it and we really had no clue how people were gonna react to it. But then again, we had the same fears and insecurities about The Homecoming.

As for the performance.....okay, when I've got a play opening, I'm a fuckin' wreck. There's always this little voice in the back of my mind saying "Anything could happen, its live man! Fucking live! What are you gonna do if they fuck up? Nothing and you know why? Cos there really is NOTHING you can do." And the thought stays with me from the time the play opens till the day it closes, cos even if we have a kick ass opening, its not like a film. When you watch a film for a second time, its still the same film. Your perception of the film may change but the film itself, is still exactly the same film you watched before. Unfortunately, this isn't the case with live theatre. Anything can happen from night to night and its up to the actors to take everything in thier stride and just fucking do it. There are so many things that could potentially hurt a performance. The actors could be tired or sick or maybe they're just not feeling it or there's a technical fuck up or they got a difficult audience or the energy's not there or the pacing is off or the rhythms are off or the fucking weather or traffic causes us to start later than we would like and the focus is affected.......the list goes on. And being an actor myself, it causes me to be all the more aware of each of these potential problems. So yeah, I'm a stressed little bunny come opening night.

To be honest, I was completely blown away by the response we got. I thought we would probably average out at around 60-70 people a night, and even then I thought that was pushing it. Our publicity was very low key, it wasn't a easy play to describe to first time theatre go-ers and Beckett's name has a tendency to scare some people. Can't for the life of me imagine why.:) In the end, there was only one performance in which we played to less than a hundred people, and for a Beckett play, that's fucking awesome. But what was really fascinating about the run for me, was that each night, the audience's reaction would be totally different from the previous night. One night, we get a laughing audience, the next night a listening audience, and so on. It really kept the actors on their toes. There was no safe place where they could relax and go "Oh, the audience loves this bit!" because there was no such bit. Every night different audiences picked up on different things and it was amazing to see and hear how different people interpreted it. Whether they liked it or not was another matter altogether, but regardless of how they felt about it, they kept talking about it. They wanted to figure it out, they wanted to make sense of what they just saw. And as I stood there, listening to people argue about it, I couldn't help but smile. Fuckin' Beckett, man......what a trip.

A huge thank you to everyone who checked out the blog and the show. Its not entirely over yet as we'll be taking it to Penang in November after Frankenstein closes. So it looks like we'll get to fuck with a few other people's heads before hammering down the final nail in the coffin. Hehehe....should be fun. In the meantime, keep a look out for the Frankenstein In Love production blog which should be up and running once we start rehearsals at the end of August. Its a horror play by Clive Barker, the guy responsible for Hellraiser, Candyman, Nightbreed and other lovely, gory tales. There will be blood.....lots of it. Bring on Halloween.

Thanks once again.

Peace.