Festival blog: Blood on the Mile, by Ben Pollard

Published on Monday 4 August 2008 19:11

OH, the joys of the mobile phone.

Just as the musical director and I were about to abandon the cast flyering on the Royal Mile (it's their turn to do some work: we've been working on this since February) and head to Starbucks, the phone rang. "Mr. Pollard. Alex has fallen and cracked his face open." The word "paramedics" was probably our cue to ditch the coffee idea, so off we went to find a key cast member in a small but visible pool of blood with his two front teeth akimbo.

Thankfully a few hours at the Royal Infirmary seem to have sorted him out, but this was not the sort of drama I was hoping for when I decided to bring the musical Kiss of the Spider Woman to the Fringe. It could have been worse. The last time our school came to the Fringe they made it into The Sun because of the unsuitability of the play's content. Kander and Ebb's Spider Woman is similarly raw, but it's also haunting and incredibly beautiful.

It's difficult to believe that the insanely ambitious plan devised by me and Robert Jacobs after our huge production of The Who's Tommy has finally made it to the Fringe. It's been a long time. I was last here as a performer with Cambridge ADC in 1997. Bizarrely, I was recognised yesterday by a lady who had seen me in that production. It hasn't been easy being one of two adults amongst a group of sixteen to twentysomethings. I could live without the communal fridge, the unnecessary need to sleep until the early afternoon when we should be flyering and having to explain to Ms. Dale that the microwave is, in fact, accessible to all and not for the sole use of the Butler. They won't tidy up the common room. Simon Brett doesn't take me seriously when I tell him that it IS unreasonable to wake up the housemistress at 4am. I wish they wouldn't strum that bloody acoustic guitar from the moment they wake up. And why is that girl incapable of going into the kitchen without smashing a plate?

But the good definitely outweighs the bad Above all, they are making me laugh, which is just as well given the terrible scenes sent to challenge us on a daily basis. Turns out that the small piece of plastic I saw flying off the trailer as we drove up the A1 was, in fact, a tyre. Oops. Forgot to put that in the risk assessment. Oh well. It's still an incredible feeling to be here doing this brilliant musical which deserves to be rediscovered. Just to be free from the shackles of the day to day drudgery of teaching is a massive release. I don't think anybody really believed that we could pull this together, but we have and it's a good feeling. Just wondering whether the Headmaster will cope with the expletives when we return home with the show in September…

• Ben Pollard directs Eltham College's production of Kiss of the Spider Woman, at C until 7 August