My Role: Co-Producer, Actor, Internet Marketing
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| Rehearsal - Jackie threatens the police officer with a knife |
The Slick and The Dead was
Breakneck Productions' first performance of an original playscript.
It's a dark comedy crime thriller for six actors, dealing with issues
of identity, media saturation, and social unrest during the current
recession.
After our success with Romeo and
Juliet and the following year's production of Bones by
Peter Straughen, Megan and I as the leaders of Breakneck Productions
decided we wanted to do something different - we wanted to showcase
original writing while furthering our goal of bringing theatre to
young people and other non-traditional theatre-goers.
Megan didn't feel comfortable using her
position as a leader of the company to get her work produced, but
many of the group had read her play and wanted to perform it.
However, people in the group were reading her reluctance to put the
play forward as reluctance to have it performed.
I solved this issue by inviting the
members of our loose conglomerate to a social gathering-slash-script
reading, in which everyone was able to talk face to face, and at
which we could make a decision about the script as a group. When in
agreement, we assigned backstage roles.
I was initially just to act in this
production while Megan directed and produced, but while she excelled
as a director we found that the expertise I had gained from the past
two productions was indispensable, and I took on much of the
production role.
Having made our name and start-up fund
in the past two years, performance space was easier to acquire. We
were quickly accepted to perform at Halifax's Square Chapel as part
of the Halifax Festival.
For me, however, while this would be an
excellent platform for the work, that alone was not entirely in the
spirit of our mission. I spoke to the group and we resolved that in
order to truly take theatre to non-theatre-goers, we needed to take
it outside the theatre.
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| A promo shot inspired by The Usual Suspects |
After a few unsuccessful contacts, we
finally arranged to perform at The Parish Bar in Huddersfield in the
space normally used by bands. This was the first time anything of
that nature had been done there, and as before I handled all the
logistics, insurance and rules.
In terms of publicising the show, I
felt that something unconventional was in order. While we marketed in
the normal fashion, with fliers and posters, and were greatly
assisted by the Halifax Festival marketing doing some of the job for
us as far as Halifax was concerned, there was still the worry of not
reaching people outside the community of regular theatregoers.
It was eventually decided that, since
the downfall of the characters in the show is that they are far too
indiscreet in planning a bank heist, we would set up a marketing
campaign inspired by the creators of Alternate Reality Games, which
frequently post fiction-posing-as-fact in unlikely forms online.
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| The main poster, designed by Emma Spencer |
Each actor controlled a fake Facebook
account for their character in the show. These were distinguished
from their regular profiles both by name, and the fact that all the
profile pictures featured stock photographs of models who looked like
the actors in question posing with bananas as weapons and implements
(the banana-as-gun being both the perfect symbol of the play's
tragicomic elements, and our 'brand' for the play, as well a banana being the
focal-point of our Banksy-inspired poster). These profiles began as
'friends' only with friends of members of Breakneck who were part of
our plan – but slowly began appearing on other people's feeds as
'friends of friends', posting messages about secret meetings, what
they were going to do with their share of the cash, and similar.
I received great feedback about this
scheme, and it seemed very successful – both as a way of marketing
the piece, and as a form of entertainment for people who were going
to see it that heightened their anticipation for the show – a sort
of teaser trailer that hints at plot points to come.
All of this played into our vision of
making Slick 'feel' like a movie; the faux Facebook pages were
even independently described in our comments book as reminiscent of
the viral marketing for Batman: The Dark Knight, we
referred to the play as a 'crime thriller', and the information of
our fliers at the bar described it as 'cheaper than the cinema and
happening right in front of your face'. The aim of this was to
attract an audience made up of people who don't normally go to the
theatre, and judging by the full house at The Parish and words in our
comment book, it was successful.
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