You are currently browsing davidwalterhall’s articles.
I’m a big fan of Spotify, the music streaming service – it is essentially like magic iTunes – and I’m an even bigger fan now they’ve improved it slightly, with new features including the ability to create a profile and share playlists more easily.
My profile is here, with some playlists I already had linked up on my website, and possibly more to come.
You’ll need to download the new version of the program.
For the past five months I’ve been working on an extended version of my play Now Is The Hour, originally produced at the Edinburgh fringe in 2008. It seems like a very long time to have been spending on it. By most standards I think it is.
I finished the first draft at the weekend, and emailed it off to the show’s original producer (and got paid instantly – thanks Peter). I had originally promised to get it to him in January.
The play now has two acts and a cast of 12 playing 20 speaking parts and a few more besides, and will run for about two and a half hours plus an interval.
The original version told the story of some of the people who found themselved marooned in a lifeboat following the sinking of the Laconia in 1942. The play began with the torpedo striking and the abandon ship, and ended when the few survivors sighted land. The new version keeps much of the original text, but adds a first act set mostly on board the Laconia while on its final voyage.
It’s a very neat separation (which wasn’t my idea), and means, in broad terms, that the audience will hopefully have a far greater emotional engagement in the lives of the characters whenever the second act comes and they are thrust into crisis.
It’s also meant that I’ve had to invent a lot more of the story: some very detailed accounts of the lifeboat journey have been written by the survivors; not much has been written about what happened on ship (other than eating, drinking, fighting and dysentery – all of which feature in the new script).
I don’t have enough distance from it yet to know how I feel about the new work, but I have a feeling that it’s a huge development on the original, which I have always been immensely satisfied with.
Once it’s been redrafted a few times and everyone’s happy with it, the next step will be to find a producer or production company and a theatre for it. It won’t necessarily be easy, as it’s not going to be a cheap production, but I’m confident.
Hopefully it will find a home somehow, and we will be able to have as many of the amazing original cast back together as possible.
Watch this space…
I’ve managed to fix the website. No point explaining how. But rest assured you can browse this place now in confidence.
Very frustratingly, just as I had this website all set up and looking nice, it got hacked, presumably by an evil robot. I’ve tried fixing it but some problems remain. If you’re visiting the site on a Windows PC, you’ll probably get a message from whatever security you have installed saying that it’s blocked some malicious URL. If you don’t get this message you should probably scan your computer for spyware. (Try AdAware.)
As far as I can tell so long as that problem is blocked everything works more or less okay, although the image slideshows on each of the play pages don’t work at all anymore, or they don’t on my computer.
I’m working on solving all these problems. In the meantime I hope my website doesn’t do anything malicious to anyone that visits.
I’ve just added a couple of links to some playlists I have on Spotify. One is a very incomplete list of CDs I actually own (inspired by an atavistic feeling of pride of ownership), which I tend to update when I find myself listening to something I already have on the shelf.
The other is called Bedside table, and is a list of stuff that I’ve either been listening to recently or am planning on listening to soon.
…just in case anyone’s interested.
The new website is almost up and running now. Enjoy.