Beware of the Train

Among the many good features of terpsichore1980's New Year party was the first full read-through of (the current draft of) the Forties play, which I think I'm going to call Birdshot! for now. Some interesting things were discovered, and some good ideas were suggested.

• At least some of the jokes are actually funny - this was something of a relief to me.
• Someone (Andy?) suggested having a big blueprint visible during the deathtrap scene, so PV can trace out the progress of his trap. I like this idea.
• The text takes a lot longer to perform than I'd realised. I'd thought (based on the number of words in Paradox) that 1hr =~ 15,000 words, and so I'd written about 20 minutes of script. It took us nearer 35 minutes to get through it all. There was some faffing, and some bits got read more slowly than they would in production, but we didn't have any fight scenes, so it averages out. And it's usually a bad idea to rely too much on the pace being faster in performance.
• The deathtrap/evil scheme scene is pretty long. This could be a Bad Thing, especially since the majority of the characters are tied to chairs for most of it. Shortening the deathtrap description would defeat the main point of the joke, but might be necessary. It would probably be funnier if delivered at great speed, anyway.
• Dancing contemporararararily while tied to a chair can be very funny.
• totherme suggested that all untying, de-gagging, etc, be accomplished by W snapping his fingers and the bonds falling to the floor. This would eliminate a lot of faffing.
• The S scene currently isn't working at all.
• The Cryptonomicon references probably aren't funny enough to compensate for their obscurity.

On a slightly related note, I got the complete DangerMouse on DVD for Christmas, and wormwood_pearl and I have been watching it (it's research for the play, honest). It's so good. Obviously I loved it deeply when it was first shown, but I think I'm loving it even more now - some of the jokes I simply couldn't have understood back then. The sheer crazy, anarchic fun of the show is just brilliant. Where else would you get a villain who'd try to take over the world by turning elephants into sugar cubes, then hiding them in the tea-services of the powerful? Or by stopping the Earth's rotation, causing a sessation in the gravitational force? (Gotta love the total disrespect for the laws of physics). Not even Pinky and the Brain were that daft.