Camberley International Festival – The Fire Stack

So, the Saturday just gone was our first performance of The Fire Stack since Woking Drama Festival in October 2018. It’s a one act play, with a duration of about 50 minutes (if all goes well), and there are three cast members. 50 minutes sounds like nothing, but when there’s only three of you, it’s a big task.

We were all a little nervous about this performance, as we hadn’t had a lot of time to rehearse for it. Although we were only refreshing the lines, not learning them for the first time, we still struggled in the lead up to the actual performance. If we hadn’t done a couple of line runs at the pub beforehand, the performance would have been terrible.

We weren’t expecting a big audience at all. We were expecting a handful of members from our group and that’s it, but we had an audience of 10 in the end, which wasn’t too bad. Some of them had come from the play reading beforehand and a few others turned up specifically for our performance. My mum and sister included.

It wasn’t a very big performance space, so our staging was a little cramped. We also had no lighting, which is what we won an award for at Woking, so the performance was never going to be up to our usual standard. The audience seemed to enjoy it though. There were only a few criticisms and they weren’t related to the mistakes that we made at all. Just a few things for us to work on for the next performance at Guildford Fringe Festival.

We definitely need to continue working on our lines. All of us got something wrong at some point. Both of my co-stars fed me the wrong line early on in the play, but we managed to get it back on track. There was definitely a moment where I was staring at JP, knowing I had a line, but not having a clue what it was. He just carried on as normal.

JP also forgot to bring his phone on to the stage with him. His phone is quite an integral part of the play, so it could have been a terrible mistake to make. I’m off-stage at the beginning of the play, so JP mimed to me that he needed his phone and I dashed past the audience to get it. I then had a panic about how the hell I was going to give it to him. I couldn’t walk on before I was meant to, and I couldn’t give it to him when I walked on because that would confuse anyone in the audience that wasn’t familiar with the play. Instead, I slid it across the stage to him when Sean was saying his first monologue.

This sort of thing wouldn’t happen at Guildford, as we’d all be prepared before going on stage. At Camberley, we had to set up our staging whilst the audience was sat there watching us. We all got a bit flustered, I think. We did manage to get through the performance though, and I’m extremely proud of all of us.

Next up is our Brightlight 5-Year Charity Spectacular on the 7th July (more info here). The Fire Stack isn’t included, but we’ve got Guildford a few weeks later to really show off how great this play can be. If you’re around on the 29th July, we’d love to see you there! Info here.

Until the next time,
Lauren x

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