High Peak Writers' radio play, The Last Laugh, an Oen Up Initiative

Since my last blog I/we have been on a roller coaster of a journey.  By 23 February 2010 we had recorded most of the play: Jackie, the lead, the nasty nurse Stella, Luke,  the psychiatrist,  Susan, Maggie (seriously depressed) and the nice Nurse Colleen, me.  Incidentally, I attended the first Steering Group Committee meeting in November 2009, having been elected to represent the High Peak and later, after I had introduced myself and talked about the play and the 'time to change campaign', Nick W, to my amazement, offered to play the part of the psychiatrist as he was a drama school graduate. What a decent chap! If you remember from the last blog, Nick Hollis, the sound engineer, was trying to keep Prem's voice in the play from the original recording by combining it with Nick's so that he could cut out the 'reverb' on the voice. Nick Hollis tried to do this but it proved to be time-consuming and costly, so we abandoned this idea and we are just using Nick's voice for  Jimmy. In February 2009 Nick Hollis had recorded the sound effects and the 'voices' that Jackie hears by recording Jane and Lucy fom High Peak Writers. This meant that we had engaged 6 initially reluctant, underconfident service-users and ex service-users in the project. I felt this was a great achievement.

As I felt that it was unlikely that she would recover soon, I decided to try and engage a professional actress, near to Belper, to play the whole of Jackie's part. I met Rhiannon through my work with Rethink. She is considering this today and thinks it is a really good project. Nick Hollis found a local drama student called Matt, who he has recorded for the part of Paulo, and we spent most of Sunday 7 March recording Francesca, a teenager at Buxton Community School. Matt, Nick and I spent a lot of time trying to get Francesca to relax as she was very nervous. In the end she really enjoyed it and she and Matt will be in the stage version of the play in the Buxton Fringe Festival in July. We are dependent on funding as to whether we can engage Helen Grady, an excellent local professional actress, for the main part, but the rest of the actors I have recruited for the stage play are amateurs, not service-users. Someof the actors in the radio play are also going to be in the stage play. As there are Fringe awards for films this year, Nick Hollis said he would film the stage play with Nick Whitehead, who used to work for the BBC as Post-production Manager. There are a few clips of us during the recording session on Youtube and the link is www.nchaudiovisuals. I'm afraid that's all I can squeeze into this blog. Happy blogging and good luck with all the projects! Things are really progressing well. Best wishes to everyone. Louise Glasscoe (still receiving cold weather payments)