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Two weeks after ‘E’ day, playwright (and TF ticket-wallah) Simon Harvey-Williams is finding time to reflect on one of the summer’s hottest tickets…

It’s late… Thursday evening has become Friday morning and around me is very loud and very drunk chatter. Eddie King’s Unforgettable Tour of the Forgotten (officially the last mention… honest) finished its short run earlier in the evening to a full house and a great reaction. Many of those involved in the show are standing outside the Tobacco Factory main doors clutching roll-ups and wondering where to find more drinks at 2am. Everyone’s up for getting ridiculously drunk but sleep is all that’s on my mind – like I say, it’s late and it’s been a long week.

As I’d left the technical rehearsal the previous Sunday I wondered whether the whole thing would actually work at all and wished we had just one more week to get it right (rather than one day). The first half of the show involved splitting the audience into two groups, so one half watches one play in the bar and the other half watches another piece in The Brewery courtyard; then they both swap to view the other piece. The Sunday was the first time we were able to find out if it actually worked in practise; it hadn’t looked promising as one piece over-ran, leaving Eddie to do a lot of improvising in an attempt to fill the time until the other piece finished. Of course on the first night everything pretty much ran flawlessly, which is a reminder - if ever I needed one - that I should stick to writing and leave the production side of things to others.

I had the week of the production off as holiday, which I’m not sure was a particularly wise idea because I just spent most of my time milling around, drinking far too much coffee and waiting for 7.30pm to arrive, by which point I was a highly-strung gibbering nervous wreck. I ended up watching all four nights and by the end of the run I’d seen it so often even Eddie’s insane ramblings were beginning to make perfect sense to me (which is slightly troubling). It’s hard to be objective having been so closely involved in the production, but I genuinely thought all of the seven pieces were uniformly strong and it was interesting to see the audience’s reaction to each piece, and also how audiences responded differently on each night.

As with last year’s production there are things all of us involved can take away and learn from the run. If Eddie is coaxed out of retirement/rehab for a third time then next year’s show will be fairly different from the previous two, I think. The promenade element of the performance really worked; so even if people didn’t like every piece or didn’t take to Eddie’s abrasive personality, they seemed to love moving around the spaces and not knowing what would happen next. The novelty of using the various spaces might wear a bit thin a third time around, so next time there is likely to be more continuity between the pieces and one continuous narrative running though the evening, which the audience will – hopefully -  piece together. But hey, that’s a year away and I probably need a couple of week’s Eddie detox before we all get together to discuss the next step. 

After all the build up - and shameless plugs for the show - the whole thing was over before I knew it, and I leave the other smokers outside the Tobacco Factory as they embark on their search for more alcohol. I sit in the taxi on my way home, tired, a little drunk, but ultimately very happy with how the week went.