the journey continues

Been back just over a month and so much has happened. After advertising on the Young Vic directors' forum, as of today I now have two new associates:

Amy Bonsall has joined as Associate Director, and she will direct a production of Romeo and Juliet to be performed in the gardens of Hall's Croft in Stratford. She has only just been appointed, and already I'm wondering how I managed without her energy and ideas.

Working with Amy as Assistant Director for R&J will be Roe Lane, who is coming to the end of her MA in Text and Performance at Birkbeck/RADA and has been associated with my Malawian theatre work since 2004 when she joined Nanzikambe for her gap year. I'm really looking forward to having her around again, and will be shamelessly exploiting her intelligence and good nature!

The second of my new Associates is Jemma Gross, who has galloped in on her white charger to take over responsibility for the PR and Marketing of And Crocodiles Are Hungry At Night and Romeo and Juliet. I am feeling very lucky!

Of course it's not all plain sailing. Today has also seen some very worried messages from Misheck in Malawi who is planning on travelling to Germany this coming Monday for the project with Theater Konstanz. Misheck and Dipo from our Crocs  company are both also doing the German project; they already have German visas (these took 2 days to process) and have sent their  passports to the British High Commission to get the UK visas before the trip to Germany. They have now been waiting a month with no feedback from UK visas - so now they have had to ask to cancel the application and have their passports returned urgently. Apparently the UK government 'outsource their visa function' to South Africa so the passports are not even in Malawi. Fingers crossed that the passports make it back to Malawi in time - and we will have to start the visa application all over again. This does not make me proud to be British. 

Also in the last month Amy and I have prepared and submitted the Arts Council application for Grants for the Arts. A long and arduous process, it's also very useful as it makes us be truly specific about why we want to do the project and what we hope to achieve. I only hope the application is strong enough to beat off the competition (at the moment only 45% of applications get approved for funding). Now our attention must turn to all the other funding applications waiting to be completed ...