We are nearly at the end of the second week of our comedy festival show, Greatness Thrust Upon Them. It is so much fun. So worth all the angst and horror of writing in a tiny office for months on end. Maybe. The cast is brilliant, the show is heaps of fun, and the audiences have been excellent.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is the capacity of each audience to have a personality of its own. It's a fact. Each audience feels different, laughs in different places, understands and favours certain elements (plot, character, jokes, serious bits) and as a result each audience sees a slightly different show each night.

Who leads these audiences? Who is the mood-setter? How does group psychology work in a situation like that?

Of course, a lot of it is circular. The actors are slightly different, the pacing is slightly different, the weather is colder, or hotter, or the traffic was bad, or good, or they've just come from work, or they haven't eaten, or they have.

And there are always the pedants. There are the people who notice the newspaper the guy is reading is outdated, there are people who suggest the main character wouldn't say a certain thing because it conflicts with an earlier statement about bananas/life/chess/umbrellas.

The study of audience. Audienceology. I'm into it.

 After a great first week (excellent audiences and great work from our team including the actors and our lighting tech, Johnboy) we start it all again tonight for tightarse Tuesday and the rest of the week full of shows. 

I had an easter break which consisted of me getting relaxed enough to remember what it was like to sleep and as such my body doesn't understand what all this rushing around being vertical business is all about. I will have to re-educate myself with a glass of wine at Trades Hall tonight before tottering off to bed. 

See you there! (Trades Hall, not bed).

Opening night last night.

Yay.

That's about all I have to say on the subject.

Just, yay.

Two days to go until we open.

Trades Hall is awesome.

And people! People are so lovely.

Having been locked in a room writing for six months, coming across actual human beings is always a shock. Coming across people who are clever or generous or kind or good at cards or funny walks or whistling... well, that's just a reminder of why you write in the first place: because observing things like that is delicious.

Here is a random selection of just some of the mind blowingly useful people who helped with bump-in today:

1. We have a magic fairy called Hannah who turns up and solves all of our problems. I don't know what you guys have got - probably, you know, iPods and stuff. But we've got Hannah. She seriously has a Mary Poppins bag and makes stuff out of thin air when you're not looking.

2. Paul and Johnboy, who made the whole place run for us while we ran about saying things like "Take it from the top guys" and getting downstage and upstage mixed up. Which is prompt, by the way? Which is off-promt? I never know.

3. Stew and Rits, who suddenly take on different roles as soon as we get into the theatre. Like, you know, running the place (same as usual) but differently.

4. These guys:

The cast (Megan, played by Julia Harari, Sam, played by Miriam Glaser, and Robin, played by Chris Buchanan). 

HOW EXCITING!

Our show, Greatness Thrust Upon Them, opens next week at Trades Hall, as part of the Comedy At Trades programme in the comedy festival. There are so many things to be done but the process of staging a theatre show is so much more fun than the process of writing one, for the following reasons:

1. Producing a play involves more than one person sitting alone in a room feeling overcome and wishing she was outside in the sunshine splashing about in a swimming pool.

2. Producing a play does not get thrown completely off course by websites such as lolcats or youtube or google searches such as "budgie sings Justin Timberlake" or "mime of Natalie Imbruglia song". Searching these things while attempting to write is, however, most dangerous and I advise against it.

3. Producing a play, if you know what you're doing, means lovely/hilarious/interesting people get to spend more time together rehearsing and producing and organising and eating jellybeans which are technically supposed to be props. 

4. One doesn't spend most of the time in one's pyjamas. This is normally a good thing, but rehearsals require an upgrade to tracksuit pants (fake velvet with a fake drawstring) which makes the transition to opening night frock less shocking than it would be if the process was PJs to frock. A situation with which I would not cope.

By the way, some of you people are lovely. Thanks for your notes and your generous support and I can't wait to see you next week. Hopefully in my fake velvet trackies. Awesome.  

Sometimes when you're rehearsing, you work over something so much that you find yourself analysing how an actor says the word "the". You find yourself thinking about the possible meanings behind things. You think, wow, maybe this bit connects to that other bit and what's really going on here is a deeper reference to a far more important (yet more subtle) point in relation to the symbolism of this metaphor over here.

You know what's particularly interesting about this process in our rehearsals at the moment?

I wrote the play.

I'm finding double meanings in things I wrote myself. I'm seeing interesting links between things that weren't there when I was writing it.

It makes me think that all the kids in my English class were right when we insisted to our teacher that Sylvia Plath "really was writing about mushrooms". Nothing more to it, we reckoned. Not death, not lost love, not complex relationships. Mushrooms.

Discuss.

They say when you write on a laptop you should look away from the screen at particular intervals.

I never do.

So guess what. Someone invented a computer program that tells you when to take breaks! It's great! You install the program, you write for a bit, and then the computer reminds you every now and then to take a short (fifteen second) break, looking away from the screen. It does this by stopping everything you're doing and displaying a picture of a zen-like yoga dude doing a meditation pose. Then what happens is that you get back into your writing and just as you've entered a deeper level of creative consciousness, up comes the image of the zen dude. So you stop what you were doing and look out the window. You think about something else. You get distracted. You remember what you were doing and you go back to your work. Enter new creative zone... zen guy... window gazing... distraction... back to work.

Then it does it for TEN MINUTES WHEN YOU HAVE A DEADLINE AND IT IS ONE IN THE MORNING AND I TELL YOU WHAT, my friends, there is nothing - NOTHING! - more smug than a zen like yoga dude meditating in the middle of an EXTREMELY focussed moment of concentration.

Then - as if mocking me further - zen dude maintains his inner calm as I swear and get annoyed and grow further from my zen ideal towards a mental, frenzied, uncontrollable writer with no discipline.

But anyway. It was a nice thought.