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Tuesday
Dec052006

Belfast Baby Grand Studio - Intimate Theatre or What?

Forget in-yer-face theatre, last night's opening of our play Out of the Box at the Belfast Opera House's Baby Grand was just very-very-very-very intimate theatre.  Talk about knowing your audience. We could tell what they had for dinner.  We could see if any of it had dropped on their shirt fronts.  We could reach out and polish their spectacles.  Any closer to the audience and Nuala would have been able to give them beauty advice on the state of their pores.

The inside of the new Opera House is great, the staff are adorable, and having all that space after fighting one's way through the old lobby is wonderful.  I loved the combination of rich colours and the simple almost utilitarian materials.  The Studio walls are dark aubergine, for heaven's sake!  And the doors are Moroccan red.  It's gorgeous. As soon as we arrived in the Baby Grand I was dying to take my boots off so that I could run around in just my socks on the silky 4 inch wide planks of the studio floor, but there is no denying that your audience are CLOSE.  Wooo-ee.  It certainly puts the dilemma of sweet-eating into perspective.  Forget the noise of unwrapping wrappers, we could see the state of their teeth!

We're going to have to focus during this week at the Baby Grand.  For one thing, when the audience are that close, it feels harder for them to get permission to laugh when someone is talking right in front of them, about fairly intimate material.  Over-18 rated, in the big city, and in your lap.  I think there's a word for that kind of work?  But I digress!  Because this show walks a tightrope between humour and darkness, the laugh-per-evening count can't veer too far off target. But then we have to accept the newness of this experience. Nuala is having to sit back, relax, and find a way to make the audience come to her - like the little chipmunks of art that they are.  The mop and oven mitts are having to work on their motivation.  On the other hand, normally the struggle is to connect to people who are far away, in the darkness, so this is refreshingly different. And at the end of this week, I get my domestic accoutrements back for the first time in 14 months!


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