i'm giving you bangs

fallujah opens on tuesday. despite an enormous list of setbacks it's coming together. i'm constantly amazed by how productions of all shapes and sizes come together in this way:

by jeeves last year grew out of absolutely no budget and was pieced together in between the working hours of everybody's full time jobs. it ended up being the most successful production anyone who worked at the london venue could remember.
faith, hope and gaffertape has, for the last 15-or-so years, faced the impossible task of gathering a bunch of teenagers together and getting them to rehearse and construct a full length musical in a week; finally and without fail culminating in rapturous applause.
fallujah has hit wall after wall. it is an enormously ambitious and enormously important project without enough money or time. it boasts new territory for many of the people involved, but d'you know what?.. it's working. and it's going to be incredible.

these things come together because people believe that they will. it never ceases to amaze me what can be achieved when everyone involved falls in love with the project. and this happens a lot. if just a handful of people love the thing, they really can move mountains. (faith, hope & gaffertape is built on this.) there aren't enough hours in the day for these people to work all they want to. they would do it without eating or sleeping if they could. it is incessant and it is stunning. it is almost religious.
it means that there is a massive military truck in the fallujah venue, bigger than any of the doors it came through.

you get time limits and budget-cuts and the like in business. a group of people gather together and from somewhere, nowhere; a new project is born, a new incentive, a new product. it's not the same. they're born out of fear of losing your job or greed, hunger for more money. it's not the same. and it's not important. and i can't imagine that a moment of it is fun. if you can see the amusement in a pie-chart then please let me in on the secret.

but theatre is fun. last night four of us sat round a computer and constructed a fully three-dimensional and very noisy surround-soundtrack of a battle that will put the audience right in the middle of the action and, to be honest, scare the be-jeezus out of them: sniper shots, machine-gun fire, bullets impacting on trucks around them, mortars flying overhead, grenades beneath, "mediiic!" *
chilling - yes.
fun - oh yeah.