The first time I played a careers “game” in year eleven, I got policeman. Last week the Careers Service asked whether I’d considered something in human resources or financial management. I reckon producing is somewhere between the two: a constant struggle to keep everyone happy (or at least, to keep everyone talking), to quieten down directors with over-zealous ideas for Shakespeare festivals or re-writing Pirandello, to con the techies into thinking we really could not survive without them, to convince cast that putting up a poster in the bar really will make the show sell out.
It’s a curious old muddle of jobs that comes our way, and often the most crucial are in the mix somewhere: Will Young will have already witnessed the strings attached to staging anything at the Union (and appears to be succeeding where Matt Trueman failed), and already Ben Monks and Chris Wooton appear to have been screwed over by the North Wall (what an idea for a student venue that was). Finally Hilary’s Playhouse producers are rumoured to have talked the management out of the patently preposterous idea of a student show at the Playhouse in 1st week.
That said, we have surprisingly little to moan about at times. The job alleged to be the loneliest and most stressful in the whole of this thespy world is as undersubscribed as ever, but that’s not to say that new blood isn’t coming through – Luke Who co-producing the Alice project? A Matt, a Dan and a David also feature on this term’s Producers list it seems…
Perhaps it has something to do with the (self-awarded?) perks of the job. There’s no thrill quite like seeing it all come together under your watch, with a wry smile in the knowledge of what’s really happened backstage: the cast going to bed or coming to blows, the techie tendencies to constant binging and black-out, and everybody to facebooking their way into future shows (Oh! the number of people who want to be Alice…) And all that’s aside from when you get a trip to Edinburgh or even New York to boot — was Razzmataz anything but Will Young’s swipe-card to C Venues? Is an Oxford Revue tour to the US any more than a holiday? Probably not, in both cases — but we’ve got to make our grip on the purse strings count for something.
Stage Whispers: The Exec
