As part of my relatively frequent checking to see if anything interesting is on at the Hippodrome (often the case! To be fair to it!), I noticed this, a two hour workshop in theatre directing. This is something, from a stand-up point of view, I’ve always been very interested in, so I figured well, why not
Admittedly, first, I did email the organiser to make sure this wasn’t some thing aimed at school kids. It was not! Of the maybe 10 of us, I was one of the youngest. There were two precocious theatre kids from college, god love ‘em, and a retired drama teacher propping up the two ends of the spectrum.
It was a genuinely very useful (and, at 25 quid, a massively undepriced) workshop. A lot of stuff that may not be particularly relevant to e.g. stand-up directing, but even that was fun, warm up exercises like Seven Up and The Impossible Game, and thinking about pre-conceptions of the job.
Some of it, though, very relevant to me on two levels. One was stand up, the exercise of being given the briefest excerpt of dialogue and discussing all the different ways that could be staged or interpreted, and especially working with a co-director on that and realising how much I enjoyed that - that maybe does replicate the experience of directing a comedian, where it is more a joint exercise.
The other level was honestly in people management,the thing of how to get people moving in the same direction, that it was their idea, establishing the destination and letting them guide themselves. A lot of fun things to think about.