Gorgeous Avatar by Jules Horne

Avatar on Tour - Carlops

On Thursday, it's northwest to Carlops near Penicuik, and the small but perfectly formed village hall.

Stuart Delves was there...

'Carlops is a bit of an artists' colony on the fringes of the Borders. So, the audiences may not always be big but they're good quality. And since the opening of our new Village Centre in 2004 we've become an established venue for touring theatre and even mounted our own community play at new year, which got rave reviews. We have high expectations! Having the Traverse visit us was exciting in itself and attracted unkent faces. And even though the stage crew spent the best part of the day making the set of Gorgeous Avatar fit into the hall, it looked superb and was a great backdrop for a remarkable first play. Remarkable primarily for its finely crafted language, that was both very funny at points and beautifully pitched at others, so that it was almost like poetry. A lovely piece and very well received by the highbrow locals. John Kazek, in particular, turned in a superb performance as three'imagined' and one real American paramour from the ether.'

Meanwhile Suzanne Grahame (Traverse literary development officer) and I run a playwriting workshop at St Andrew's Arts Centre in Galashiels. It's one of five being held around the country as part of the Gorgeous Avatar tour, to give people a chance to put their toes in the playwriting water and talk about opportunities. It's a great time for new playwrights in Scotland right now - plenty of feedback, training and workshops on offer from the Playwrights' Studio, the National Theatre of Scotland and the Traverse. Two hours isn't much time to cover more than a very basic taster, but we manage to create some characters from newspaper pictures, and put them into a situation where the sparks will fly. Each writer takes on a different character and passes the script on - a good way to keep things unpredictable!

posted by Jules Horne @ 5/27/2006 01:20:00 PM