Boycotting

Golly. Everyone in the Beyond The Fence camp is utterly exhausted today! There have been meetings, gruelling singing rehearsals, dance calls... All this time I've been trying to orchestrate an incredibly fast-paced number which is making my eyes bleed. Apparently this tiredness is quite normal for this stage in rehearsals: everyone has suddenly realised quite how much there is to do and, as a result, the brain's capacity shrinks exponentially! 

Slowly but surely everyone else in the company is getting the same cold. Without going into a great deal of detail, it involves a heck of a lot of mucus and quite a number of trips to the loo. Nathan has it as well.

The company is a happy one. Everyone gets on very well and we all have a good sense of what we personally need to do to make the show extraordinary.

I've heard that some former Greenham women have decided to publicly boycott the show. Frankly, I don't give a damn if they don't much want to see it, but I think it's a little harsh for them to speak of actual demonstrations before they have any idea what the show is actually about! I'm afraid I actually get the impression they're boycotting merely for the sake of something to be angry about. The stumbling block for them, I suspect, is that two men have written the show and this is something they'll struggle to see beyond. I say three things to that:

1) It was computers which took us to Greenham, so even if we'd wanted to write about something else, the experimental nature of the project dictated that we shouldn't...

2) As the son of a CND woman, I refuse to apologise for being interested in this particular subject.

3) If a Greenham woman, or any woman for that matter feels THEY ought to have been the one to write a musical about Greenham, then they've had thirty years to get their act together! I'm hardly jumping on a band wagon!

I had a similar issue when I wrote A Symphony For Yorkshire and the Yorkshire supremacists started getting arsey because I was a Midlander, and a work with that title ought to have been written by a man born in Yorkshire. It wasn't as though the BBC had over-looked a load of Yorkshire composers in their rush to commission me. The symphony was my idea! Besides, the irony was that the list of composers and film makers which the supremacists were suggesting do it instead, would have been way way too expensive to book!

Right. Bed time. Well maybe an episode of Ru Paul's Drag Race first!