The Great Tape Bake Off

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Sticky tapes

One of the many challenges we face when digitising audiovisual material from magnetic tape is “sticky-shed syndrome”. Certain types or formulations of tape suffer from this problem that, as the name implies, causes them to literally stick to the components of the playback machine creating a phenomenon known as “stiction”. The friction of the sticky tape against the metal parts causes screeching/squealing noises and slowed/ uneven speed of tape playback. Sometimes the machine will slow down and grind to a halt. If you haven’t encountered this phenomenon before you could be forgiven for thinking it’s a fault on the player. Playback of sticky tapes can result in damage to the tape and in some cases, the playback equipment. The magnetic oxide material sheds from the tape resulting in a distorted signal and dropouts which compromise the quality of the digital transfer. Extreme sticky-shed can cause catastrophic damage to a tape and result in partial or complete loss of the often unique audiovisual material contained on that tape.

A magnetic tape which has been so affected by shedding that the oxide which holds the magnetic information (brown), has completely come away from the polyester base (clear) rendering the information unrecoverable. Picture by Anothermelbournite, Wikipedia

Ingredients

Magnetic tape consists of a plastic base layer (substrate), a layer of magnetic oxide or metal particle material (the brown stuff that contains the audiovisual signal) with lubricants and a binder which glues the oxide/metal particles to the base. Some tapes contain an additional back-coat on the base designed to lubricate the motion of the tape through the player and reduce friction.

Structure of magnetic tape, picture from https://publish.uwo.ca/~dspanner/LIS9670/lect11.htm

The problem of sticky-shed results from a breakdown in the binder resulting in hydrolysis i.e. absorption of water. The urethane molecules in the polyurethane binder react with the water, making them migrate to the surface of the tape where they cause the stickiness.

The issue is difficult to identify by visual inspection but suspect tapes should be tested before attempting playback by slowly turning the reel and observing whether the tape unspools naturally or sticks/lingers on the pack. Sometimes the tape surface can exhibit a soft/gummy quality. The problem of sticky tapes has become more apparent over the last 30 years as tape stock ages and patterns of binder breakdown have been identified. Certain brands manufactured entire batches of tape with a faulty binder formulation which almost invariably suffer from sticky-shed. This makes it easier to identify a tape that will have problematic playback before placing it in/on the machine.

Recipe

Thankfully, for most cases of sticky-shed there is a solution – “Baking” the tapes i.e. heating them gently for a period of a few hours. For this purpose, I use a food dehydrator as it is suitable for lower heating temperatures and maintaining them more consistently than a conventional oven. My ultimate goal is to obtain an incubator which operates at the most consistent temperatures over long periods but for now, the dehydrator does the job well. Any apparatus used should not contain strong magnetic fields which can damage the tape’s content. A digital thermometer allows easy and accurate temperature monitoring.

Food dehydrator used for “baking” tapes with sticky-shed syndrome

Baking at 54.4°C (130°F) is the sweet spot to temporarily reverse sticky-shed syndrome. The duration required varies for each format but should be at least 2-3 hours with tapes flipped once or twice then allowed to cool for at least the same length of time. Once baked, there is a short window of a few days to digitise before hydrolysis makes the tape sticky again. It’s wise to carry out the process during drier weather conditions as humidity in the air will speed up hydrolysis. A tape can however, be re-baked several times and this is often a requirement for some of the more stubborn formats anyway. As there isn’t 100% consistency of tape behaviour, it can be a case of trial and error – bake for the minimum time, manually test unspooling of tape and carefully attempt playback. If not successful, bake again and so on until the tape plays back correctly.

The main tapes to look out for are:

• Reel to reel audio tapes – Ampex/Quantegy (mid 1970s into the early 1990s) and Scotch/3M. Bake for 3-6 hours.

Ampex 1/4″ audio tape reel

• U-matic video tapes (1975-1985) by Ampex, AGFA and Sony – those affected often have a wax crayon type smell. The tape reels should be removed from the cassette shell for baking. Bake for 8-16 hours.

Sony U-matic video cassette

• EIAJ ½” open reel video tape – particularly Sony branded V60H, V62 and V30H Helical Scan. If the tape is back coated, it will require baking. These tapes often require long bake times, I have found that manually winding and cleaning with a lint-free cloth after baking can improve playback results. Bake for 8-16 hours, sometimes multiple bakes are required.

Sony 1/2″ video tape reels

• Quad 2” open reel video tape. We don’t currently have any of these in our archives but due to their large size they require extended baking times – up to 24 hours.

Other formats can occasionally suffer from sticky-shed too e.g. Betacam (oxide formulation), VHS, Hi8, even MiniDV.

If you are in doubt as to whether a given tape has sticky-shed syndrome it is much safer to bake it than play it.

Audio compact cassettes are an exception in that the faulty binder was not used in cassette formulations. However, some cassettes can suffer from stickiness due to fatty acids migrating to the surface of the tape. I have baked some notoriously sticky mid-1980s EMI cassettes for 2-4 hours with excellent results.

Slow cassette:

Baked cassette:

The Raw and the Cooked

Just to confuse things, some tapes can also suffer from a different type of Soft Binder Syndrome which can cause squealing on playback. These are often non back-coated tapes and leave less of a deposit on the playback path. It is not recommended to bake these as it can exacerbate the problem. Some success has been achieved by playing back this kind of tape in a cold environment, even placing a playback machine inside a refrigerator. Other tapes display a problem where the back-coat of the tape is turning to powder leaving a non-sticky accumulation of powder on the playback heads. These also shouldn’t be baked but cleaning will be necessary. Finally, never bake an acetate tape. These can be identified when held up to a bright light and visible light can be seen coming through the tape pack.

Despite these exceptions, the most common type of tape degradation you are ever likely to come across is sticky-shed syndrome.

It’s always worth that extra effort to ensure our AV material is preserved in its optimum form.
Happy Baking!

Nigel Bryant
Audiovisual Digitisation Officer

 

Forkbeard Fantasy – A Life on Tour

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A ticket from a Brittonioni Brothers’ performance in Warsaw.

By Rosie Smith, Project Archivist, Forkbeard Fantasy 

I’m now a year into my three-year long project to catalogue the archives of Forkbeard Fantasy. I have successfully cleaned, repackaged and catalogued the objects, which means it’s time to do the same for the physical documents. Rather than starting with the production material (a gargantuan task that will take many months), I decided to start with the smaller pile of material about Forkbeard’s foreign tours.

Between 1977 and 1997, Forkbeard Fantasy travelled to sixteen different countries to perform. Many of these tours were sponsored by The British Council, who were eager to promote British culture abroad. Usually on these tours, Forkbeard performed as The Brittonioni Brothers, two high-flying film producers who occasionally entered the films themselves. However, foreign tours were also a good opportunity for Forkbeard to perform some of their street theatre pieces, as many of these pieces didn’t require spoken language or a knowledge of English.

Tim Britton preparing to perform in Amsterdam

Many years later, Forkbeard made a book, called The White Book, documenting their early history. While researching this book, they covered the archive with post it notes, noting what they felt should be included in the book. One of these reads “mention the life on tour. Sometimes fun, sometimes terrible.”  According to the notes, their favourite place to visit was the Netherlands. They went at least eight times. In 1977 they travelled to Rotterdam with performance group The Crystal Theatre of the Saint to take part in the Festival of Fools. This festival was organised in part by Melkweg Theatre in Amsterdam, where Forkbeard would go on to perform many times. Why did they return so often? Melkweg was one of the few theatres they encountered who paid their acts in advance, meaning the Forkbeards had ready cash to spend on their trip.

The Forkbeards did not enjoy their tour of Norway!

Not all tours went well. On a tour to Mexico in 1991, their set and props were damaged in transit, forcing Forkbeard to improvise with whatever they could find. As a result, when they travelled to Colombia and Argentina in 1994, the Forkbeards wrote detailed instructions for how to package and transport their materials. In 1990, Forkbeard travelled to Canada to perform at the Vancouver International Comedy Festival. The post it note stuck to this material reads “Canadians have no sense of humour.” As a Canadian myself, I couldn’t help but be a little offended! However, it could be worse. Any time there is reference to their tour of Norway in the archive, there is also a post it note reading “HELL!” I’m guessing their performances in Oslo and Bergen were not well received…

I was most intrigued by Forkbeard’s various trips to Greece. In 1989, they were invited to Athens and Thessaloniki by the British Council to perform various bits of street theatre. Forkbeard created a new work called The Statue in which two museum workers place a statue in the middle of a public square. The statue is unimpressed with their choice of position, so as soon as the museum workers aren’t looking, he moves. The piece descends into chaos as the statute repeatedly runs away from his assigned spot and is forced back by the staff. During one performance, they combined The Statue with The Great British Square Dance, allowing the statue (who has a plinth instead of legs) to dance one of the parts in the square dance. I am really hoping to uncover a recording of this performance in the archive!

The Statue dutifully attempts to join in with The Great British Square Dance, despite his lack of legs.

The plan in Greece was that the British Council would invite their students to Forkbeard’s performances, giving them a ready-made audience. This did not work as very few of the students showed up. Instead, the audience was made up of people who happened to be outside anyway and stumbled across the show. Many found it hilarious, and Forkbeard felt they had been a success. This was a great surprise to the British Council in Greece. In a letter to Forkbeard a few weeks later, one of the ambassadors wrote that there was no culture of street theatre in Greece. Forkbeard were invited back in 1994 to see if their popularity was a fluke. It was not!

A group of Greek women enjoying the show, while the Statue runs away behind them

 

If you would like to find out more about Forkbeard’s foreign tours, why not come a look through the archive for yourself? I’ve heard it’s all been recently catalogued and repackaged and is ready for researchers 😉

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Episode 7 of Polly Tisdall’s audio diary, ‘Kevin Elyot, Crop Circles & Me’

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Polly Tisdall, the 2024-2025 recipient of the Kevin Elyot Award, is publishing an audio diary, ‘Kevin Elyot, Crop Circles & Me’ as part of her residency at the Theatre Collection as she explores the Kevin Elyot archive and her own writing practice.  The annual award established in 2016, generously funded by an endowment from members of Kevin’s family, supports a writer-in-residence at the Theatre Collection to inspire a new dramatic work or other creative or academic outcome.  It is given in memory of Kevin Elyot (1951-2014) – an alumnus of the University of Bristol Drama Department – and the influence he has had on writing and the Arts.

Episode 7 is available to listen to below along with a transcript.  If you haven’t listened to earlier episodes, please head to the previous Kevin Elyot Award blog posts.  Polly’s audio diary is also available to listen to via Polly’s website with new episodes being published throughout her residency.

It’s the May Bank holiday weekend, the early one. What are we today? 4th of May. May the fourth be with you! And I am on my research trip that I booked. Just one night away in Wiltshire, near Cherhill and the Cherhill White Horse. I’m actually staying in Calne – Calne – still learning how to say that correctly and I never knew, even growing up!  But anyway, somebody in the Morrisons Local just called it Calne, I think.

Just wait for this car to pass. I’m just walking down a, sort of a lane, but quite a wide and busy fast driving country lane. Coming into, I think, Lower Compton and then that will bring me out onto the A4, the Old London Road and onto the stretch of road called Labour-in-Vain Hill, which is where, when I was growing up, there was this lay-by and in the lay-by was a cafe called the Crop Circle Cafe, which isn’t there anymore. But there is, I think, another cafe there now. I don’t even know if it’s in the same building. Just wait for this other car speeding along. This is the sort of sound I imagine in the background to some of the scenes in the play, because the cafe is on this A road. So. Yeah, it’s just a fascinating area to me.

Just walking from Calne to Cherhill this morning. Just the way the land shifts and changes, the land-use shifts and changes. I’ve come through housing estates, new built housing estates on the edge of Calne and then into a sort of old lane called Lower Lane, which then took me through landscape that was by turns beautiful and green and lush. I could see loads of solar panels on the hillside opposite where land is being used for energy, and then I came through what looks like a very old, and I assume now disused, quarry workings, but still loads of barriers up and old machinery and huge quarries that are filled in with water. Lots of danger signs, bits of barbed wire and electric fence to keep you out. And then I came across this beautiful little lake, much further down with swans, as well as what I’m pretty sure was a landfill, like massive hill of landfill. Yes, it’s a really interesting landscape that shifts between the very sort of beautiful countryside, comfortable rich feeling landscape, into the quite industrial, and then the sort of rubbish tip of stuff we don’t want to look at. And I’m aware that there’s also military land. There’s an old RAF base in this area as well. Seeing lots of signs on the edge of the lane, saying CCTV in constant use, no trespassing.

Anyway, so, a whole mix and I’m really excited that after the first stage of the walk, I’m going to finish at the current cafe in that lay-by, hopefully only about 20 minutes, half an hour from now. I’m getting hungry and and I’m really interested to see if it…If it does ring bells with me as the same building, if it’s even in quite the same place and and what the cafe is like, and I’m hoping it will help transport me back to the Crop Circle Cafe. And what I remember of it. Certainly just being back here in this part of Wiltshire, just even some of the smells like the smell of the the Morrisons Local, what was it called the Morrisons Daily? I think they are. I mean it’s Morrisons now, but it had the same smell of, like, the little news agents I remember when I was a kid. I can’t really describe it, but it’s a very particular smell I just haven’t smelled in years! So that’s already sort of springing up memories and thoughts, and while I was in there, I was chatting to a local lady who’s telling me about the local events coming up, which includes I think, one in 2 weekend’s time. I don’t think that I’m going to be able to go. It’s really annoying, because they’ve got the duck racing. I’m so gutted. I’d love to come to the Calne duck racing! I’m going to look it up.

Day 2 of my field trip and and I’ve got a couple of hours left before I hop on the bus back to Chippenham train station and today I’ve come out along the River Marden, which is, like, a little branch of what used to be called, like, the small Avon and I’m just walking from an area called Castle Fields. Yesterday I made it to The Dandy Highwayman and it does turn out that it is the same building that the Crop Circle Cafe was in! I had a chat with the owner, the current owner. And he said that he thinks it was the Crop Circle Cafe and then it was the Silent Circle Cafe, which I want to find out lots more about, where that name came from, or it might be the other way round. It might have been Silent Circle first and Crop Circle Cafe next. But anyway, and then it became The Divine Cafe. More and more godly! And then that closed and then for a long time it was out of use and they sort of made it into a car wash and then he took over with his cafe. And so it’s the same building, but it looked very different. Had the same feel, that same sense that I remember. But I remember all the walls being kind of wood panels and they are, I guess maybe fake wood panels, but they’re all white painted now and the counter is in a different place. I was checking with him. I think the counter was somewhat different. Anyway, he confirmed all of that, or his memory sort of went alongside mine. And then I did a huge big walk up to Cherhill White Horse and the Lansdowne Monument and all the way round about and the London Road and picked my way through lots of small villages and the Blacklands estate. I think it’s an estate, I need to find out more. Yes. And then today this morning, I went to Calne Heritage Centre, which was fascinating for all sorts of local history and discovered in the bookshop, a book on the history of crop circles. I’ve just enjoyed reading that over a coffee, before taking this walk along the river. But it’s looking like rain, so I think sadly it’s time to wend my way homewards now. Back to Bristol and see what I can do with all of these ideas now bubbling in my mind.

One last thing that was very pleasing to me today: There’s a big VE Day celebration in the community centre in Calne and there’s a Victoria sponge cake that people can guess the weight of. That’s pleasing to me because one of the very few things I know about one of my lead characters in the play I’m writing is that she is the best maker in the county of Victoria Sponge. So I was very pleased to come across one in Calne!

It’s the 18th of May, and I’m back in Wiltshire, close to Warminster, near a little village called Sutton Veny, because my partner spotted on Instagram that a new crop circle had appeared on the 5th of May here and we’re just overlooking it now from the hillside. There’s quite a few people who are obviously exploring it, going into the crop circle, to feel the vibes. So we’re going to try and go down there ourselves in a minute. And it’s quite a simple well simple-ish design that I think we need to see another picture from above to remember exactly. It’s kind of like, yeah, one big central outer circle and then inside a bit like a Celtic knot, but not quite that design. Yeah. So it’s quite intriguing. I was just beginning to think, ‘has the crop circle activity died down since the 90s?’ which is really the the era I remember being so full of crop circles, but it seems it’s still going strong, which is obviously great news for me and my play!

Episode 6 of Polly Tisdall’s audio diary, ‘Kevin Elyot, Crop Circles & Me’

Posted on by theatrecollection

Polly Tisdall, the current recipient of the Kevin Elyot Award, is publishing an audio diary, ‘Kevin Elyot, Crop Circles & Me’ as part of her residency at the Theatre Collection as she explores the Kevin Elyot archive and her own writing practice.  The annual award established in 2016, generously funded by an endowment from members of Kevin’s family, supports a writer-in-residence at the Theatre Collection to inspire a new dramatic work or other creative or academic outcome.  It is given in memory of Kevin Elyot (1951-2014) – an alumnus of the University of Bristol Drama Department – and the influence he has had on writing and the Arts.

Episode 6 is available to listen to below along with a transcript.  If you haven’t listened to earlier episodes, please head to the previous Kevin Elyot Award blog posts.  Polly’s audio diary is also available to listen to via Polly’s website with new episodes being published throughout her residency.

It’s brilliantly sunny outside.

I think we’re entering this April heat wave.

And it’s funny, sometimes I find the sunshine not very cheerful, which is unexpected. For some reason. I suppose it’s when I don’t feel particularly sunny and the world is sunny. It feels a little bit incongruous, and maybe I notice it more than I do in the winter when everything is grey. I suppose today I’m just. I’m not at the archive today. I’m reflecting back on my last few visits and I’m sitting in one of those moments of the creative process of writing, where I’ve just done a big chunk of work.

I’ve submitted the next draft of a play I’ve been working on for a long time to the Women’s Prize for Playwriting last week, so I’m very pleased to have submitted it. So there was this kind of big adrenaline rush and build up to the submission and getting everything to where I wanted it to be to the best it could be for that award submission. And then there’s kind of a drop. And a coming back to other projects and I’m refocusing on Crop Circle, which has been bubbling along in the background and which can now take centre stage for the next 6 months or so at least, which is exciting. And I’ve booked a research trip next weekend to go and spend some time in the very area where the Crop Circle Cafe was when I was growing up, near Cherhill White Horse in Wiltshire. So all of that is really positive. And I’m still feeling very inspired by reading Kevin’s work and Kevin’s drafts at the archives. Just on Friday I was reading through The Day I Stood Still, one of his slightly later plays that was staged at The National in 1998. And really enjoying reading, again, his notes, his process, the reflections from critics, the conversations with directors that he was having in advance of the production. It’s fascinating. And it is so inspiring and exciting. But I also had a conversation with a friend yesterday, who’s also a theatre maker in Bristol. Um, which was a really good connecting conversation. But we also shared our frustrations with the realities of getting work produced and getting work made.

And so, I think there’s something for me today. Questioning. Is it going to happen? You know, is any of this work that I write and I put down and I painstakingly edit and change and shift – Is it ever going to appear in front of an audience? And that is, you know, the question of every playwright, and we all know it’s such a competitive and lottery type of industry, really, when it comes to getting your work made and put on and produced. And it’s such an expensive process. And so not everything that everybody writes is going to go the whole distance. But it’s hard sometimes, I think, to sit in this moment of questioning. Because, I think I felt on this award and this residency with Bristol Theatre Collection, a real closeness to Kevin through reading his work, a closeness to: ohh it can happen, you know, it really can happen! You send things off and you make relationships and you keep at it. And those plays go the distance eventually, and then, you know, he gets these really incredible productions on, which is testament to his writing as well as his persistence, I think. And he’s quoted in an article I was reading on Friday, saying he always knew recognition would come, and he was willing to wait for it. And I think that’s how I felt in my 20s. I kind of felt like if I just keep grafting, the recognition will come. So I recognise that and it’s lovely to hear him sort of trusting that. And and it did pay off. But there are moments of real doubts, I think and and the reality of.

I suppose the present moment, maybe as opposed to when Kevin was writing – I haven’t done an in-depth analysis of the difference between the two and the theatre landscape and funding and appetite than you work and all of those things – but I think…

Today I’m feeling a bit low and a bit unsure and most of that is probably it’s like an after a show feeling. I’m also an actor, and I know – and a director, and I know – that kind of come down after a show and I think it feels a bit like that having finished this draft of one of my plays and sent it off, there’s a bit of a. And now what? And and it’s bringing up lots of questions and a. Bit of a kind of –

So that is honestly where I am. Still feeling inspired by Kevin’s process and journey but questioning my own and questioning what the next steps are for writers. You make something, you write something you’re proud of. And then it feels like there’s only so many avenues to go down for production, and perhaps I’m wrong about that. I’m trying to think creatively at the moment. You know. If we want to get our work staged, if we want to just put it on and test it out and try it out, with an audience. And what are the ways we can do that and what are the ways we can take agency in making that happen and in making those next steps? Not waiting and feeling powerless about it, waiting for someone else to pick it up and say this is great. So those are the questions I’m asking today.

Episode 5 of Polly Tisdall’s audio diary, ‘Kevin Elyot, Crop Circles & Me’

Posted on by theatrecollection

Polly Tisdall, the current recipient of the Kevin Elyot Award, is publishing an audio diary, ‘Kevin Elyot, Crop Circles & Me’ as part of her residency at the Theatre Collection as she explores the Kevin Elyot archive and her own writing practice.  The annual award established in 2016, generously funded by an endowment from members of Kevin’s family, supports a writer-in-residence at the Theatre Collection to inspire a new dramatic work or other creative or academic outcome.  It is given in memory of Kevin Elyot (1951-2014) – an alumnus of the University of Bristol Drama Department – and the influence he has had on writing and the Arts.

Episode 5 is available to listen to below along with a transcript.  If you haven’t listened to earlier episodes, please head to the previous Kevin Elyot Award blog posts.  Polly’s audio diary is also available to listen to via Polly’s website with new episodes being published throughout her residency.

So I’m just at my favourite cafe, across the road from the Theatre Collection, and I just wanted to share, I guess, the workshop that I just ran with the Theatre Collection. We welcomed some playwrights, mostly playwrights, theatre makers and a few people who are also actors and directors, to come and hear some extracts from different drafts of My Night with Reg. As a kind of chance to reflect, really, on Elyot’s writing process and how he drafts and redrafts and the edits he makes. And the title of the workshop was What Is Lost? and, I suppose I set that title thinking about that, that old idea of killing your darlings as a writer and having to, I suppose, just occasionally, get rid of something that you really love, but which doesn’t serve the play anymore, or rearrange things or edit down or totally rewrite until the same theme is actually coming through more clearly or the same character arc or emotion.

So, that’s what we were exploring in the workshop. And then we had an opportunity for people to share different drafts of their own writing, which was really wonderful as well. And I just wanted to share tiny extracts of the three different drafts of My Night With Reg that we looked at just this afternoon. So the first one, they’re all quite late drafts of the play, quite far on in Elyot’s process, overall. But it’s really fascinating to see how much changes across these three drafts. I’ll only give you a few lines from each, because we read about 6 pages from each one, which is obviously quite a lot! But this is the earliest of the three drafts, and it begins.

It’s the very first scene of the play, the opening of the play, and I’ll just share, maybe the first half a page or so.

 

Scene One

Late afternoon, cloudy.  Guy is preparing the room for guests. Last minute dusting and tidying. Eric is in the conservatory painting a window frame. John leans against the doorway to the conservatory, watching him. He is smoking a cigarette. A bowl of nuts sits on the coffee table.

Guy: I refuse to die for the sake of a poke. I’ve caught every disease there is to catch many times over, and several simultaneously. I only have to wink at somebody and I get a discharge down at the clinic. They now have a whole cabinet devoted to my files. The hours I’ve spent in that place trussed up on a table, thumbing through House and Garden. While one doctor after another has gazed in amazement at some exotic fungus or extraordinary polyp. I was even accused of introducing the Super crab to this country. Very large and particularly tenacious. In fact, my doctor said it was the first case of venereal lobster he’d ever come across. He tried everything. Powders, lotions, tweezers. At one point, he even asked them to go. In the end, he suggested I jump into a pan of boiling water and serve myself up Thermador.”

So that’s the opening of the play, in this particular draft, with that monologue from Guy, and then in the next draft, as the play is developing, we get this version instead.

 

Scene One

Every Breath You Take by The Police starts playing as the stage lights come up. The music fades. Late afternoon, cloudy.  Guy is pouring two gin and tonics at the drinks table. Eric is in the conservatory painting a window frame. He’s listening to a Walkman, occasionally moving to the music. John leans against the entrance to the conservatory, watching him. A bowl of nuts sits on the coffee table.

Guy: You’ve got that look about you. Who was it and what did you do? No, I don’t want to know.

John: The film wasn’t up to much. Two hours of French people talking, couldn’t see the point. When’s everyone coming?

Guy: Everyone is two people. Any minute now.

John: Two people for a flat warming?

Guy: Four, including us and that suits me fine. Glancing through the names in my address book, I realised I didn’t like most of them and the rest had either split up or died. Of the ones who’d split up I couldn’t decide which partner to invite. And the dead people were no problem at all.

Handing John the drink.

Cheers.

John: Cheers. To your new flat.

Guy: Thanks.

 

So that’s the next version of the scene and in both of them, I should say, Guy is talking to John and John has just arrived at his flat and that probably wasn’t clear from the monologue opening of the first one I read just then.

And then this is the third – and very close to final – draft of the scene, which, if you know the play, you might be familiar with.

 

Scene One

Every Breath You Take by The Police starts playing as the lights come up. The music fades. Late afternoon. Cloudy. Eric is painting a window frame in the conservatory. He’s listening to a Walkman. John and Guy are standing in the sitting room. Guy is wearing an apron.

John. Am I early?

Guy: No.

John: I couldn’t remember what time you said.

Guy: You’re not, really.

John glances at the apron. Guy suddenly remembers he’s wearing it.

Taking it off.

I was just stiffening some egg whites.

John: You look well.

Guy: Do I?

John: Yes.

Guy: I’ve been to Lanzarote.

John. Oh.

Guy: You look well too.

John: Thanks.

Guy: You don’t look a day older.

John: Well.

Guy: You don’t. Honestly, you’re just the same.

 

OK. And that’s the end of that first page of the opening scene in that final latest draft, and I just wanted to share those with you because in the workshop, obviously we read a lot more, but people found it really fascinating. To read them in sequence from the earlier draft to the later draft, and to note what has changed and what becomes what, I suppose, is either lost or buried within the text, and Elyot has a real reputation for the craft of the unsaid, of saying so much through what is not said on stage.

And I think in reading those three drafts in sequence, you can see the craft of that building. He loses more and more text and more and more of the avert statements. You know, in that very first draft, we have this very clear opening line: ‘ refuse to die for the sake of a poke.’ And we observed in the workshop tonight, it’s almost like that’s just stating one of the key themes of the play: about desire and death and mortality against the backdrop of AIDS and how people are dealing with that reality and the decisions they’re making. That is very upfront in this earlier draft and the relationship between Guy and John, although I didn’t read you sections on that, is much more established. They’re much closer already. They’re much more connected, they’re much more in touch with one another than they are by the time we get to the final draft. And their dialogue in the final draught allows the audience to discover so much more of the themes rather than having them stated upfront.

So it’s a real education for me anyway, in observing and reading through these scenes about how our plays develop or how they can develop and the craft and the finessing that happens, I suppose, when you remove text, let the dialogue lead, but keep all of that ticking underneath what’s said. Yeah, it’s just really exciting.

And I think tonight’s workshop was a really exciting opportunity to share some of that with other people, other creatives in the South West and get their input and observations. I learned a lot more about the piece, about the the drafts, by doing that and hearing from other playwrights and then reflecting on our own work and our own drafts. Sometimes it’s hard to know. I think when you’re redrafting and cutting sections of work, there’s a fear that you are just losing things and that they might – You might not be going in the right direction with the edits you’re making.  And I think sometimes that does happen. But also, I think from what we observed tonight with the playwrights work that was shared, and also what we observe in Kevin’s work, and what I’m learning as I’m doing this with my own writing with a play I’ve been writing for some time, at the moment that I’m submitting to an award next month – and I’m making some big cuts and changes based on some feedback from a mentor – I guess what I’m learning is that, by and large, most of the time, we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. You know, the the iterative rewriting process. It allows us to maybe get those upfront statements and big themes, you know that were right in the middle of the page. It allows us to get them kind of out of our system, and then embed them beneath the text in a later draft. And that seems to happen fairly naturally, often. Which is exciting and gives me some trust in my own process and in my own rewrites.