"I’ve passed my notebook to a girl in the front row and she’s stepped in to do a piece about trees now growing fruit in multipack form." Tom Bell's Edinburgh previews are getting out of hand...
Pretty soon I’m going to be on a stage for an hour every day for a month with other humans expectantly sat facing me, eyes and ears hungry. So as not to disappoint, I have decided to prepare things to say and have even gone so far as to 'preview' them.
It’s going pretty well but by the heavens they’ve been overrunning. The last preview hasn’t even finished yet. Two days in, I’ve had to leave to take a break. I’ve passed my notebook to a girl in the front row and she’s stepped in to do a piece about trees now growing fruit in multipack form. It’s not strong but she’s finding some nice human truths in it. “Why do we do it fellas?”, she has just cried to great acclaim.
I’ve never had this problem before. I’ve done four solo shows as part of PBH’s Free Fringe which also had too much material, but I never previewed them, would chop and change every night and improvise new bits. It was never an actual 'show' with a script, or lights, or an ending. But now the young hearts of Edinburgh will have to pay upfront to even be allowed near me I am prepared to face the edit.
It’s not a task I look forward to. It feels as though I’ve fathered eleven children with the sole purpose of starting an all-family volleyball team only to find out, too late, that there are only six players in a team. I have wasted my time raising five pointless children that I now have to sit down on one of our family chairs (nothing fancy, we spent our money on volleyball lessons) and say “You are no longer in the team. Or family.”
But I can do it. My show Tom Bell Begins is a gritty Hollywood-style reboot of my life and I need to find that gritty strength now to make some big calls. An old man has joined the girl on stage now to perform a mini opera about pig iron, a brand new piece, like a kitten taking its first breath. Even as I hear the delirious, sleep-deprived crowd lap up every perfect word, I know in my heart, that’s one I can drown.
And so it begins; a comedy song about seagulls increasingly living inland? Splosh, gurgle, dead. A satirical cook off? Glug, glug, gone. Me doing a dance dressed as Neptune, God of the Seas? Actually… that’s staying in.
I’d better see if I can finish this preview now. From what I can tell, the entire crowd is on stage and no-one is left watching. That bit can go as well. I’m now wearing a blindfold and earplugs to make sure I don’t observe anything new to be pithy about between today and August. When I finally peel them off, I hope to be looking at your remarkable face and hear that weird laugh of yours.
Tom Bell Begins is previewing in London at the Boogaloo on Thursday 14th July.
Photo credit: Idil Sukan
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