Ilkley Literature Festival Review: What Lies Beneath
Is it cheeky to review your own event? Naturally I'm going to say that the eight members of Ilkley Writers (there are more of us, but only eight on stage last night) gave a wonderful performance at the festival fringe, and if you weren't there then you completely missed out, but that in a way is by the by.
[embed]https://twitter.com/ASullivan_YA/status/652442723350351872[/embed]
What I can offer is a backstage view, at least from my perspective. Last night's performance of eight stories, with a backdrop of a 50-minute silent film of the river Wharfe at various points through Ilkley and Ben Rhydding, accompanied by a glossy programme to say who's who, and a booklet of seven of the stories for the bargain price of £2, was the culmination of at least three months' work. All the stories we read in front of the audience had been through several drafts, and not all of them were the stories we started out with - I had written another beforehand, someone else was on their third I think.
We read our stories to each other at a dozen or so meetings, suggested improvements or reassured each other as the self-doubt set in. We laughed a lot, despaired occasionally, and spent a fair amount of time in the pub (we did set out for an evening picnic by the river some time in the summer, but it turned chilly that teatime and we ended up in a pub a stone's throw from the river, complete with a variety of camping stools and blankets). Yesterday the nerves set in, some suffering far more than others (with a certain amount of gin and red wine being consumed in the hour or two before curtain-up. Not by me, I might add), but for me at least, the excitement as we sat on a line of wooden chairs in the wings and glimpsed the audience filing into the auditorium through a gap in the curtains, washed everything else away.
From where I sat I couldn't see the film properly, but I listened to each story as though I was in the audience, enjoying the performance, being caught up by the characters and noticing where yet another change had been made since I last heard it. When I stepped out onto the stage and adjusted the microphone (being probably six inches taller than the person before me), I realised to my horror that I couldn't see the audience at all, just blackness with a dazzling spotlight shining forth. All that looking up and making eye contact I'd been practising at home, wasted! I tried it anyway, guessing at where OneMonkey was and aiming my gaze there from time to time (I missed, apparently, and was looking intently at the side aisle) as well as peering into the gloom here and there. It was a surreal experience (we were in a studio theatre last year, sitting among the audience ourselves until we went to the front to read) and I did have a dizzying moment of belief that I'd somehow managed to go through the wrong curtain or point in the wrong direction, and wasn't standing in front of 80-odd people at all.
Afterwards in the foyer, people I didn't know came up and said nice things (some of them were connected to other members of Ilkley Writers but some seemed unknown). OneMonkey and Mark the artist exuded enough pride to light up the town, and I was half a grin away from dancing up the hill singing I Feel Pretty from West Side Story (thankfully, I didn't, but I do have a character who does in one of the stories in my SF collection Cracks in the Foundations, which you can download free here. Seamless plug).
The Ilkley Writers literary festival appearance is over for this season, but I've got another crack at it, at the Open Mic night on Sunday October 18th. I'll let you know how that one goes.