Festivals and Soaps.

The Bill is being filmed in Ham at the minute. There's a specially built vandalised bus stop and several police cars with their windscreens smashed lying about outside Tesco. It's made our peaceful little estate look like Beirut at the worst of times. The first morning I cycled through I thought something dreadful had happened. I locked the bike up and went over to see if I could find out what was going on. It was only when I overheard two policemen eating bacon sandwiches and talking about a disastrous casting for Eastenders that I realised what was going on.

Poor Patsy and Ben, who've only just moved in to their new flat above the shops have been woken every morning at 4am by searching arc lights and the noisy sounds of the location caterers whirring their generators into life. They hadn't even had time to put their curtains up! The big worry is of course that as they unpack and arrange their furniture in the front room any sense of continuity will be broken. The temptation to lean out the window and shout must be huge!

It's as busy as ever. Yelina, the director for the Kingston International Youth Festival came in to talk to the students about taking part in next summer's programme - either as participants or organisers. It's taking these kind of opportunities that really count. As a department we've only got the time and resources to offer a basic training and it's so important for students to pitch their work up to the public. It may succeed, it may fail gloriously... either way you learn so much more about yourself as a artist.

Late on Monsay, who graduated last summer, sent a text to remind me that she's on Holby City tomorrow night. She was called for casting by a producer who saw her in Yard Gal which started as a Uni show two years ago and went on to win Best London fringe performance last year when it transferred to The Oval. It's the first of two parts she's been given by the BBC. She's got another chunky roll in a one off drama AWOL, which will screen in the new year.

She's living proof that a bit of talent and a lot of determination can take you pretty far, pretty quickly

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Stand Up Camden Town

Our friends at The Comedy School ran their wonderful annual funny festival today and nine of our students came along for the ride. It was a full on, but pretty stimulating day starting with Roland Muldoon (who ran the Hackney Empire for twenty years)'s provocative, but highly entertaining rant on the anodyne state of British comedy. His thesis that there are only twelve jokes in play, all of them observational, held water to me - he reserved quite a bit of bile for the high flying Michael McIntyre, who has huge exposure and never says a dangerous thing. Roland lamented the bravery of previous comics, inspired by Lenny Bruce and in this country, fuelled by the cruelty of the Thatcher era, who tackled things head on.

Has Stand Up become a pale reflection of the mediated world? Does it suffer from the same kind of callous disinterest that allows a newspaper to devote a column of type to a genocidal conflict and eight pages to Katie Price? The real deal is that observational stuff is introverted. Sure it pulls an audience into the absurd gap between appearance and reality and catches them off balance, but at best is simply knowing. The braver stuff might tell a deeper truth and not mind too much who is offended by it. A lack of respect for hierarchy, tradition or power doesn't half liberate and offer the potential for a more humane reordering of attitudes and resources.

Set up for the day the ten of us ranged around. I dropped in on Ivor Debima's stand up workshop and Neil Mullarkey's Impro class. The day ended with a question and answer session with Hugh Dennis, pretty much dominated by St. Mary's students. We fell out of the building an into the Dublin Castle at 7pm to talk about whether Stand Up Comedy might have a role to play within the department. There seems so much to say, if you can fly the fear of saying it.

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Our Class.

To the National to finally catch up with Our Class in the Cottesloe. Tadeusz Slobodzianek has written an incredibly important and powerful play.

Essentially it's a history of Poland in the twentieth century told by ten classmates - five Jewish and five Catholic - all born in 1918. At the heart of this collective memory is the 1941 massacre of 1,600 Jews at Jedwabne and the disputed blame for the atrocity. Was it Nazi forces or anti-communist Polish nationalists taking revenge for Jewish collaboration with the Bolsheviks? Using childhood songs, playground games, first person recollection and snatches of dialogue, fleeting and exquisitely handled so as never to to live in any more concrete a form than a memory, the ten children piece together a collage of pain, anger, recrimination and hard fought forgiveness. Their lives, loves and beliefs fatally intertwining with the grand narratives of history itself. The first half watches the classmates take sides, the second sees them look for reconciliation after the massacre - a search that carries the action through right into the twenty first century.

Played out on a bare wooden stage and ten school chairs the excellent ensemble playing and fast paced direction - crafted wonderfully by Bijan Sheibani - give little room for question or reflection and it's this sense of being caught up in the broad sweep of events that exhumes all sense of sentimentalism from a brilliant, but harrowing story.

One by one the classmates are murdered, converted, killed, commit suicide or die of illness and age, in Poland, Israel and America, profoundly affected, poisoned or liberated by the moments of cruelty or kindness inflicted on them by their peers. This is a heartbreaking and humane elegy for the most brutal loss of innocence. When it was over I wasn't the only member of the audience to leave quickly and in tears.
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Seize the Day

On Friday night I cycled into Richmond to see A Serious Man, the new Coen brother's movie. They are brilliant storytellers in the Grimm brothers tradition and this dark, brooding morality tale is a mini wonder. Their sharp plot twists, lack of sentimentalism in their driving narratives and beautiful staging make them the most theatrical of film makers.

Larry Gopnik, a diligent, hard working and altruistic Physics professor in a small mid- west town is shafted on all sides from colleagues, family, students and the fickleness of fate. Nobody means him direct harm, but each person in his life makes a demand that chips away at his own sense of self. Appearances are held together long enough for him to see , his distracted son through bar mitzvah, before the ultimate stroke of fatal luck leaves the audience hanging on the question of what's it all for? Without occasional rage how do we keep afloat? It's a brilliant movie.

On Saturday I went up to the Tricycle in Kilburn to see Seize the Day (see pic) by Kwame Kwei-Armah, part of the theatre's Not Black and White season.

Nick Kent, the theatre's artistic director has commissioned three black writers, Roy Williams and Bola Agbaje are the companion authors, to write plays about black experience in contemporary London. Roy's piece Category B looks at the prison system and Bola's work Detaining Justice, tackles issues around immigration.

Seize the Day looks at politics and in particular the Mayoralty. Can Jeremy Charles, a reality TV presenter carry enough 'white' votes to become London's first black mayor? And whose agenda can he represent? Have Mandela and Obama provided the only blueprints for acceptable black leadership - what are the next steps? In many ways it's a companion piece to David Hare's An Abscence of War, which, written in the early nineties portrayed the machinations in a semi-fictious Labour Party battening down the hatches in preparation for power. Both plays demonstrate how ruthlessly dehumanising the aquistion of political power has become. Image over conviction.

It's great to see a really well made play about something - a provocation for debate, accessible and crafted.

The Tricycle is a perfect theatre for politics. Intimate and resonant, the audience shake their heads, intake breath, murmur both approval and disapproval against the action in front of them. A community venue preparing its audience for national debate. It's vital stuff.

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Speak What We Feel. Not What We Ought to Say.

Where does the time go? Another week down and Christmas speeding towards us.

Actor Ian Redford came in on Monday and gave an excellent, gregarious session on 'actioning text,' which seemed to go down really well. Ian's been in a few times before and always gives us great value. He's got so much experience working at The Globe, The National, with Out of Joint as well as loads of TV, but talks softly and with great humility about the process of acting. He's just finished playing Joe Keller in a highly acclaimed production All My Sons at the Belgrade in Coventry and is writing a one man show based on Samuel Johnson, to perform at the Johnson Museum off Fleet Street in December, a role decked in benign generosity and hooting laughter. He was born for it.

At lunchtime Patsy gave a brilliantly accessible presentation on her Vocal Points project, which unashamedly advocates finding as many opportunities as possible to banish reticence and release voice throughout childhood and into adulthood. We could all do with being a bit louder and a lot prouder seemed to be the welcome key message. There's no patience in this thinking for a University of repressed reflection.

On Tuesday the second year 'scratched' an idea for a forum theatre play aimed at Primary School children. The social realism of most interactive pieces replaced with a composite fairy story - can Little Red Riding Hood, cope with the peer group pressure of the seven dwarfs, the foolish behaviour of Hansel and Gretel, the bullying of the Troll guarding the bridge and the thieving tendencies of light fingered Goldilocks... and still out manoeuvre the wolf? The work was flawed in not quite being ready for intervention, but the idea had great potential. We accept that children will be vocal participants in theatre events, why not give them the chance to influence the action as well.

Wednesday was full of meetings - firstly with Richmond Community Safety team at Twickenham Stadium to go through the programme for the community day we're going to help facilitate next February working with the local police. The session focused on trying to pull out some key messages, particularly around alcohol abuse and stop and search, the two areas which seem to course the most aggravation between teenagers and police officers in the borough.

Then onto Ham House for a planning session with Gary and Jorge looking ahead to the 400th birthday party next May.

Ambitiously we're going to try and get 3,000 people in for the day listening to local bands and choirs, having fun and culminating in a community sing song... Happy Birthday, Our House by Madness, Country House by Blur... you get the picture! On Rugby days a DJ at the Barmy Arms plays a cracking three hour set of anthems, the pub rocks and the songs are carried across the town and down the river. Gary wants something of the same uninhibited and anarchic nature for the party.

Our students will lightly host the event, playing many of the famous and infamous visitors and owners of the house over the past four centuries. It's a bit of a relief to see a shape emerging for this event, however vague it may be at this stage.

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Applied Theatre Centre?

Had a meeting with Trevor to try and consolidate some of our work and also begin to work towards a strategy. It feels wonderful to work here at present, but there are so many projects, initiatives and partnerships that we risk missing the tricks if we don't begin to lay out our objectives and possibilities.

Tfac is obviously a major focus and I'm keen to push on with shaping the way St Mary's students can have a positive impact on the development of the Community Theatre Centre in Lilongwe. We're also looking at delivering other key component parts of the course with outside agencies. I hope The Comedy School will deliver the Prison Drama module for us next year at Level 3 and that the National Trust will develop a module in Drama and Heritage with us during the spring and I'd love to keep the relationship with the Creative Learning department at Richmond Theatre going through the Schools Based Project.

We also want to keep the ever wonderful Spiral close to us and I'm going to take ten or so students out in December to do a short week's work in Cantabria on arguments surrounding the new legislation allowing for the exhumation of the old civil war graves, with Carol and Chris, perhaps as a taster for bigger things in the future. Meanwhile Matt's work on the Robben Island project and Trevor's Cancer Tales continue to develop.

There are local projects too, both Richmond Council and the Kingston International Youth Arts Festival have approached us in recent weeks asking if we'd be interested in developing work for them.

Trevor thinks we need to become an Applied Theatre centre. A place both for consultancy and research. Once all the various strands of our work are tied together we make quite an impressive bundle. Can we turn this into something sustainable, a place where we explore community cohesion through theatre making and perhaps begin to embed the notion of storytelling into local cultural practice?

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Mixed Up North.

Back at University and it's been a bit of a Verbatim fest. On Tuesday night we hosted an inset with Richmond Theatre for local secondary school teachers on approaches to the form and tonight I headed off to Wilton's Music Hall to see the latest Max Stafford-Clark, Robin Soans collaboration Mixed Up North, a piece exploring inter faith relationships amongst a youth drama group in Burnley. The conceit is that the audience are a group of liberal minded visitors invited up from London by group community worker Trish, played by Celia Imrie, who've popped in to see the dress rehearsal for a play performed by the group. The process is slow as each character has to negotiate their inhibitions and the often spiky group dynamic, but these lulls in the stage action offer ample opportunity for cups of tea to be made, stories to be told and a sense of community to be created.

The show never happens as the leading man is persuaded by his girlfriend, who thinks 'drama is gay', to walk out. A hastily arranged question and answer session is organised, which allows for some prolonged talking heads. At this point the editing becomes clunky as each character uses their spotlight to tell a story of neglect or abuse, before the return of the leading man and a hastily arranged final run through.

Verbatim as a form is developing, we're beginning to hear new music, but I still think it's at its best when it produces a cacophony of voices merging and inter cutting rather than a series of blanket monologues. It's as much a study of how place, time and other people affect our words as it is a platform from which to voice our own stories.

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