'The Rivals' - Camden Fringe 2011 :: SimplyScripts Screenwriting Discussion Board

Hey all!

I thought I'd tell you a bit about the project I've been working on for close to three months now. It's not strictly screenwriting (so feel free to stop reading now!), but it is creative and has involved script work, as you'll see. Anyway, I thought it'd be cool to share with the community I hang out in, especially since so many people are off shooting their own films. Here it is, in a nutshell: I'm co-directing a production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's classic comedy The Rivals as part of Camden Fringe, a festival that runs here in London throughout August. It's the end of year production for our university's theatre society, and so the cast is 12 students, primarily people I've worked with before. They're really very good, though - a couple have agents, and lots of them are looking to get into it full-time. My co-director and producer are friends and students, too. It's a great mix of professionalism and ambition, but also working with people that know and respect each other, which makes the process a lot easier.

As I say, I'm co-directing. This isn't the first time I've directed for the stage, but it's the longest run I've done (we're doing 7 performances - 5 evening shows and two matinees across six days), it's in a proper, award-winning theatre, and it's got a pretty decent sized budget considering we're a bunch of students. Working with the actors is great, having an input on the set (which my co-director and our set designer are taking the lead on), writing and dealing with all the publicity, working with our costume person on costumes and props to help us nail the feel...it's not directing a film, and I'd imagine that'd be a lot harder, but it does involve a massive amount of organisation, work and patience. BUT here's the cool bit from my POV as a writer: I got to re-write the script. Now, some of you might know The Rivals. It dates from 1775, and so is set in Georgian Bath, but we're trying to do something a little different with it. I'm going to whack in our press release just to give you a taste of what it's about:

The King's Players presents a hilarious new version of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's beloved comic masterpiece.

Monte Carlo, 1928. The cream of English society has descended on the French Riviera for the summer season. Among them is Jack Absolute, who has fallen for the beautiful, romance-obsessed Lydia Languish, but his plan to win her hand grows steadily more complicated as a host of madcap characters - including "queen of the dictionary" Mrs. Malaprop, blustering Sir Anthony, jovial country gentleman Bob Acres, and down-on-his-luck, duel-loving Irishman Sir Lucius O'Trigger - become involved. In one frantic afternoon Jack must find his way through a web of intrigue and try not to lose the girl, his life, or both.

The production fuses the sparkling wit of Sheridan's original with the sumptuous style of the Roaring Twenties. 'The Rivals' has a rich tradition of evolution and adaptation - our script draws from the rarely-performed first version of the play - and the production builds on this heritage. 1920s Monte Carlo, with its heady mixture of jazz, fashion and gambling, is not merely a fitting substitute for 18th century Bath, it adds a whole new dimension to the action, providing fresh perspectives on the comedy's much-loved quips and situations. Despite being written three centuries ago, 'The Rivals' feels very modern in its insightful exploration of the complicated nature of romance. The production is both entirely faithful and refreshingly new; this is 'The Rivals' as you've never seen it before.

The King's Players is the student company of King's College London, the Sunday Times University of the Year 2010-2011.

So, as you see, we've taken the show out of its original setting and transposed it to a new time and place: from 1775 Bath to 1928 Monte Carlo. The location we decided on was actually something I suggested off-hand at a pub when we were knocking the idea around back in April; it was one of those 'explosion in your brain' moments where you suddenly realise you've stumbled across something quite good. The change of setting was to offer a new angle on the original, but what was exciting to me was that it would involve taking the play, de-constructing it, and then re-building it almost entirely to create what we wanted.

So I rewrote a beloved English 18th century play. In Celtx.

There are two versions of The Rivals, see. The first, known as the 'Larpent version' (after the owner of the pile of manuscripts in which the copy was found), was staged only once, and got such a bad reaction that the show was shut down for two weeks so Sheridan could rewrite the script. The second version was better received and is the one that's usually staged today. That was another thing that drew me to the play, in fact: Sheridan was 24, only just a couple of years older than me, when the play premiered, and it was torn to shreds by the critics and the public. I don't know how I'd have reacted to that. And yet he went away, rewrote it, and came back with a version that's still performed almost 250 years later. What I did was go back through the Larpent script and pick out as much of the good stuff as I could find, and work that into our version. There are some real gems in it which nobody gets to enjoy any more, so I think it's really good that we've managed to re-introduce them.

But I went a step further than that: I wrote in some entirely new stuff that I came up with. The original is 5 acts; we wanted to get the show in at 2 hours including interval, so I condensed it down to 3 acts. That meant cutting a lot, but it also meant writing in new dialogue to stitch together scenes that were originally separate. I also changed the ending, too - one of the subplots, in which a guy treats his fiance pretty badly by essentially constantly accusing her of not loving him, originally ends with the girl's guardian (a 60-year old bloke) stepping in and basically telling her to get a grip and marry him. I didn't like that, so I chucked it out and replaced it with something new. I also wrote an entirely new resolution to one plot strand, pairing off the mischevious servant-girl with the broke Irish baronet...but was convinced to take it out. A shame really, because I like it.

Even with that, I'd say a good 5% of the script is original stuff that I've written to either make it run more smoothly or better fit our period. Now, this is actually more complicated than it sounds. The script is from 1775, remember. This isn't English in the way we use it today. So it meant sort of doing an 'impression' of Sheridan, reading the original that I was adapting or changing and trying to get into a groove of writing like that. What's been great is that nobody in the cast has actually picked up on what's new and what isn't, even though they know this is a brand new version of the script. So I get to hear my dialogue performed, and direct the delivery of lines I myself have written; it's really cool. Here's the link to the script, a PDF file in Courier New font made on Celtx. It's like our press release says: this is The Rivals as you've never seen it before. And I got to write it. Ain't that neat?

The theatre's awesome, too - it's called Upstairs at the Gatehouse (see http://www.upstairsatthegatehouse.com), and does win awards for its shows. It's also located directly above a pub, which should come in handy! It's an awesome space, and it's going to pretty daunting when it comes to actually setting up there, but we're really looking forward to it. It's all a great opportunity, and one I hope to take full advantage of. So far it's going really well; we were mentioned in Londonist's (who, for instance, have 35,000 Twitter followers) preview of the festival - see the article here - and today I learnt our uni has chosen to back our application for ï¿½2,000 to put towards the show. Hopefully we'll sell lots of tickets and get good reviews - I'll post them up here if any materialise, if that's okay.

Anyway, if you've got this far - thanks for reading. It's all been hard work, but great fun and fantastic, hands-on experience (I'm really learning as I go). And as I say, this is very much MY adaptation of the original, so really I'm directing my own script, which makes it even more fun. If you're around in London next month, do come along - the run is August 16th-21st (more info on the Camden Fringe website here), and I promise I'll buy you a drink afterwards. If not, then please feel free to support us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/therivalsupstairs), or follow us on Twitter - we're @RivalsUpstairs (and I'm personally @jjmbarton, if anyone on here tweets).

I'll finish with our brochure image. It's a comedy, but obviously our actor took the "you're in a duel with yourself" direction from the photographer a bit too seriously! Thanks again for reading.