The March new material evening

Tonight was our third new material evening of the year, and as always we filled the show with guests to make it a more worthwhile experience for the audience - after all, they're paying a massive £2 to come to this. It was a fun night, my two new pieces were - like last time - an older piece that I've re-written as I just didn't do it justice originally, and a brand new piece. The material on offer tonight was so dark - especially my dramatic re-write of 'Fake Diamonds', which was once described as being 'disgusting' by a director due to it's subject matter. I've always been fond of this piece though, there's some of my favourite lines in there and the repetition gives it an eerie edge. In rehearsals for it beforehand Izzy didn't seem so keen, but in the performance it went down very well indeed - laughs where they should be, we surprised ourselves a bit. Our second play of the evening was another dose of Oscar Pike - this time a performance of episode five from the forthcoming YouTube series. See, the thing is, I know this works - we've looked at this a lot (even though it's never been performed or produced anywhere yet) but it clearly doesn't work for this medium. It is a film piece of course, and I'm really fond of this one - it's an episode where Oscar is accidentally up for promotion but wants to jeopardise it, it's a situation a lot of us have been in. But it was dying on stage tonight, Izzy noticed I was struggling with it a bit, it just didn't work in front of an audience. Which is a shame, for them, as they had to sit through it. Our guest acts were all outstanding tonight, which gave me (somewhat selfishly) doubts about the quality of my work this evening, but all credit to comedians Andy Higson and Matt Rix plus singer-songwriter Zak Thomas, who made it into a really enjoyable event. I know I can't judge myself on new material evenings - if everything worked then there would be no point in these evenings as everything would just go straight to a full production. It's just the first one of the year was a real cracker - it felt like everything I wrote/said struck a chord (both of the plays from that evening have now been developed - 'Great Achievers' was filmed for the 'Embarrassment Of Richards' show and performed so beautifully by Alan Hay and Amelia Mary, whilst 'The Pretty Girl In The Supermarket' is now part of the forthcoming 'Some Plays By Paul Richards' tour show), the one last month was hit and miss but mostly, it has to be said, hit. This one though - well, it was below par. I really feel that in Izzy and Hind I have two actresses who are not only very talented and switched on to my humour, but also so very loyal - they deserve better material than the mediocre scripts I gave them tonight. But that's cool - because the next new material session comes after the tour (that show is looking great, by the way - but it should be because I've had it for ages now) and by then I would have had time to sleep, and then sit down and actually write something that is truly worthwhile. And a big plus side tonight was the audience - for the third month in a row we've had a really healthy, and very warm, audience, including many strangers (two of them were very nice young ladies who couldn't find the Amnesty International writing meeting so joined us instead and laughed along - I think we'll be seeing them again), and thanks to our guests they were given a decent night's entertainment.