The latest redesign of notlikecalvin is both an update and a further realignment: portfolio galleries now use the latest and shiniest version of Scott Upton’s resizing, fading slideshow code; the portfolio is now exclusively focused on lighting design and theatre work; my weblog is now consistently styled to the rest of the site.
There are bound to be some broken bits here and there – please let me know if you find any.
It’s my twenty-seventh birthday today. The years of my life have always run parallel with academic years, and so this is as good a point as any to draw a line under the official learning phase of my existance; now I’ve got a degree I should really be doing something useful with it…
I’m currently in Leeds, TSMing the Library Dances project – quite different and a lot of fun. Next week Radio has a short run at the Bedlam before showing at the Soho Theatre on October 12th and 13th. After that I’m relighting Simon Wilkinson‘s design for Frozen in Rapture Theatre’s tour of Scotland for a couple of months. And I’m sure that Aeneas Faversham might make another appearance or two.
So I’ve got some stuff to be going on with. I should mention, in passing, my freshly updated CV is only a click away: feel free to get in touch.
I was involved with four separate productions at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and they all got a decent amount of press coverage.
Aeneas Faversham, the Penny Dreadfuls‘ Victorian sketch comedy show at the Underbelly, was amazingly successful, with an awesome selection of reviews:
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ – Edinburgh Evening News
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ – British Theatre Guide
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ – Broadway Baby
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ – ThreeWeeks
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ – Chortle
★ ★ ★ ★ – The Scotsman
★ ★ ★ ★ – The Skinny
★ ★ ★ ★ – one4review
And a lovely review in The Stage.
Click through for more, or check the highlights at The Penny Dreadfuls.
Radio, Kandinsky‘s production of Al Smith’s latest work, also had a fantastic reception:
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ – ThreeWeeks
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ – British Theatre Guide
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ – The Independent
★ ★ ★ ★ – The Scotsman
★ ★ ★ ★ – The Guardian
★ ★ ★ ★ – The Skinny
Must See – The Stage
There are plans underway for more Radio in London sometime soon, so keep an eye on the Kandinsky blog for updates.
ShamWagon, the Dreadfuls‘ long-form improv show got some decent write-ups:
★ ★ ★ ★ – ThreeWeeks
★ ★ ★ ★ – The Skinny
A nice mention at ITV.com
★ – The List (although it’s hardly a review at all)
Despite being my most, erm, prestigious piece of theatre at this year’s Festival, Nutshell’s Stars at the Traverse wasn’t critically received at all well – I don’t think it met their expectations of Fringe wackyness, but there you go:
★ ★ ★ ★ – The List
★ ★ – The Scotsman
★ ★ – The Guardian
and a decent review in The Stage
This was my ninth Fringe, and the first in which I’ve devoted myself entirely to productions. Both critically and commercially it was a runaway success on several fronts, and Radio and Faversham in particular are guarenteed future appearances. More to come.
I’m quite busy before, during and after this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Here’s what I’m up to:
The Penny Dreadfuls perform Aeneas Faversham at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden on July 8th & 9th, before their Fringe runs of both Aeneas Faversham and their long-form improvisational masterpiece Shamwagon at the Underbelly and the Pleasance.
Kandinsky reprise the multi award-winning Enola along with a preview of Al Smith’s brand new play, Radio, at the Wimbledon Studio from July 18th to the 22nd, before bringing Radio to the Underbelly throughout August.
Nutshell are producing the world premiere of Sarah Colvin’s new adaptation of Stars at the Traverse Theatre during the Fringe, before moving across to the Citizens Theatre in September.
So there’s plenty to choose from – please do pop along and support The Future of British Theatre.
notlikecalvin has been off the grid for most of the weekend – any email sent in my direction over the last few days may have bounced. My apologies.
One year ago, on the dawn of the 2005 General Election, I ranked the UK’s political parties by running their websites through the arbitrary gauntlet that is the W3C HTML Validator. The results were a largely horrendous mixed bag of tragic to awful, with hundreds of errors in total: the surprise of the night was that the Tories got the only thumbs-up.
So, with UK local council elections tomorrow, let’s see if anything’s changed!
A few rules: last year I checked every party with a candidate standing for my constituency, but since there are are only three candidates in my local ward I’m just going to use the same list; again, I’m not including the bee enn pee, whose URI I refuse to type; in general the page checked will be the root of each domain, but I’m ignoring any stupid splash pages and getting to news/listings that have a better potential for decent markup.
The results, in worse to slightly-less-worse order:
- Socialists – not valid, 191 errors, no doctype
- Liberal Democrats – not valid, 112 errors
- UKIP – Not valid, 107 errors, unknown parse mode, no doctype found, tries HTML 3.2(!)
- English Democrats – not valid, 55 errors
- Socialist Labour Party – not valid, 22 errors, no doctype found, unspeakably ugly, nasty frames
- Greens – not valid, 4 errors, unknown parse mode, namespace found in non-XML document
- Conservatives – not valid, 4 errors
- Labour – not valid, 1 error
No valid sites! What’re the chances?
In general, though, there’s not much improvement – just some shuffling around at the back of the class. The Most Hideously Looking (To The Point Of Being Utterly Broken In A Modern Browser) Award goes, for the second year running, to the Socialist Labour Party: it looks as if it hasn’t been touched in the last fifty-two weeks and is still incomprehensibly rubbish. Go on, take a look for yourself.
| Party |
2005 |
2006 |
change? |
| Socialists |
103 |
191 |
88 worse |
| Tories |
0 |
4 |
4 worse |
| Socialist Labour |
20 |
22 |
2 worse |
| Labour |
1 |
1 |
no change |
| Greens |
6 |
4 |
2 better |
| Lib Dems |
134 |
112 |
22 better |
| UKIP |
163 |
107 |
56 better |
| English Democrats |
177 |
55 |
122 better |
The English Democrats get Most Improvement and the Socialists are awarded Must Try Harder.
So what does this tell us about politics? Nothing, really. Which is as it should be when there’s a selection of exciting issues at stake in the real world.
[And yes, it would be foolish of me not to point out that notlikecalvin.com itself doesn't validate, and that valid markup isn't the be-all and end-all of webness. It's just a bit of fun.]
After a five-year absence, I’m back at the National Student Drama Festival in Scarborough. The last time I was here to light Peter Morris’ play A&R: Peter won the Sunday Times Playwriting Award for that and I was granted the NSDF/Stephen Joseph Theatre Technical Residency, so Al Smith’s Enola has a lot to live up to.
This is essentially the second major version of Kandinsky‘s work with the play after its premiere at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2005 (which I reviewed), and in terms of staging the bulk of the difference is in the lighting. I wasn’t involved with the Fringe production at all, so my approach here has been neither a direct re-light of that original show or an entirely new design. The structure of the piece – in terms of timing and cuepoints – is largely intact, but the festival venue that we were allocated here is perhaps three or four times larger than the cramped conditions in the Underbelly Caves: while the playing space remains as small as is feasible the lighting positions are significantly further away from the stage, and a complete reinterpretation was necessary.
We finished our run of four performances late last night, and we’ve been absolutely delighted with the audience response. The bulk of Enola‘s theatrical soul comes directly from Al’s text, but it’s topped-off with superbly pitched performances and a very mature approach to the production. I’ll have photographs and more post-match analysis up once I get home at the weekend, but for now we’re going to take in the rest of the Festival, eagerly awaiting the awards ceremony on Friday night. We’ll see where it goes from here.
[ Update! Enola swept the awards: the Sunday Times Playwriting Award for Al, an Acting Award for Ellie and - best of all - the Fest-Goers Award, voted for by all attendees of the Festival: we're so very happy!
There are all sorts of highly exciting things on the horizon for Enola, but until then I've onlined some photographs in the usual place, with some bits and pieces from NSDF over at flickr. Enjoy. ]
