Notes for work-in-progress showing of Ko

These are the notes we'll be giving out as a handout for the scratch of Ko tomorrow, which explains a bit what our process and thinking has been so far:

For this play, we set out to write something that grappled with the ideas of legacy, posterity and memory: ‘what’, we wanted to ask ‘would survive of our grandparents- or our memories of them- a thousand years in the future?’

From the outset we have seen this play as a science fiction. There’s something about the space you find in… space that we hoped would allow us to get a real distance from things that are very close to us in order to perhaps see them with fresh, or impartial eyes.

Beyond that, we love the naivety and bravery of classic science fiction astronauts and wanted to tell a story of two of these characters coming up against an enemy even more dangerous than a mutant spider or an atomic blob… memory. Those Sci-Fi films, we think, have always been about beautifully simplifying our most profound fears, in order to overcome them (or at least pretend for a while that you can) - so why not place our anxiety of forgetting into a malevolent planet that our intrepid explorers can overcome too?

What you are going to see today is the end of our very first explorations of these ideas (and a few more besides), and what will, we hope, form the basis of the rest of the development of the play.

Captain Ko

Deep in rehearsals for (what's currently being called) 'Captain Ko and the Planet of Rice' at the Tobacco Factory in Bristol, as part of the SITE residency. SITE has been a fantastic way of getting started on the show, as we've been able to work with a dramaturge (Lu Kemp) and a designer (Katie Sykes) right from the beginning. We're doing a showing on friday at the brewery (not public though unfortunately) and hoping to pull together about 20 mins worth of ideas around the subjects of memory, amnesia, and deep space.

Vantastic

Over the last six months we spent over a grand on van hire. A grand! That's basically more than we each got paid. So, in preparation for the autumn tour we've taken the plunge and bought a lovely little three-seat citroen dispatch. And spent basically a grand (a grand!) on insuring it.

Incidentally, if you are ever insuring a van, be advised that the word 'theatre' anywhere near the word 'profession' causes the insurance broker to hang up pretty much instantly.