Henry - a work in progress

The show finally played well yesterday with our third audience. At last. The first well paced run since we did a scratch of Henry at Wimbledon in January and a student said they really liked the line about the bin bag coming from the hospital with my father's things after he died.

Dress rehearsal on Friday we got the lighting all wrong and changed it from specials to general cover and black outs between every scene, and just one lighting cue of a spotlight on the shopping bag just before the final scene.

On Saturday we got the show on its feet. On Sunday we made the character stronger and changed the opening to "Let's get started, let's get started, let's get this done!" which is fun and energetic the effect was good but the show slightly lost energetic as it goes on.

Yesterday we realised we weren't telling the audience what the show is and that there was a growing expectation that we were about to get out come puppets, which we aren't! Our first review complained that it wasn't puppetry but more like "object manipulation", which gave us the idea to say exactly that, so we added "This show is not about the puppet, it is about the puppeteer". The audience laughed and the whole show went well all the way to the end.

Which is a relief!