Never a dull moment

Look Left Look Right is knee-deep in production week at Freedom Park. Gone are the days of comfortably air-conditioned rehearsal rooms at the British Council; we are now squinting through the sunshine on site and starting to get Make We Waka up on its feet (pun intended).

Mimi [Poksitt] and I have been working individually with our cast members as they finesse their one-on-one scenes. We are both impressed with their energy and resilience; doing a show like this (where the cast repeat their scenes 24 times a day to different audience members) requires stamina – even more so in 80% humidity! This form of theatre is new to our nine-strong cast, but you wouldn’t know it. They seem adept at creating the intimacy required to put the audience at ease, so that they feel engaged but not exposed. We are quietly confident that our performers are going to make this show stand out.

We are slowly bringing together all the elements of the performance. Tony (who plays our historian, Jimmy) has spent hours in a recording studio perfecting the audio tour. At the top of each show, the audience members will be given MP3 players, which will guide them around the site. This sounds relatively simple, but the logistics of creating eight bespoke audio tours which follow eight different routes has given me brain-freeze on more than one occasion. Tony is a total pro, though, and helps us naturalise the audio by adding the requisite pidgin translations to certain phrases. Whilst we are rehearsing, Tony’s wife goes into labour – the whole cast are geeing him up as we wave him off to the hospital! There’s never a dull moment here…

Look Left Look Right is in Lagos to make a new show, with the support of the British Council.