So after the excitement/relief of finishing the editing process last week, we sat down on Monday morning and realised…we really haven’t finished editing at all. In fact we’ve barely made a dent. We read through half the play and it took us almost an hour (oops). All is not lost though and we’ve been working hard to continue the cutting process so we can start getting this play up on it’s feet.
Once again editing has thrown up some interesting discussions. One in particular provoked a lot of discussion (especially as we learned in our seminar that our buddy group had also debated the same thing). We found ourselves continually going back to the question-
‘So where is the Vieux Carre?’
Ok, so we know that the Vieux Carre is in New Orleans. But where is our Vieux Carre?
Perhaps it’s in England? After all we all have British accents and don’t intend on putting on American ones.
Perhaps it’s in Europe somewhere…or the Middle east…or Australia…
Or perhaps it’s just somewhere and that’s okay.
My personal opinion is that while the plays rich cultural roots to New Orleans is interesting to play with, we only have half an hour and need to prioritise the themes such as madness and sexuality, themes which are all explored internally within the building and not particularly contributed to by knowing the specific location of the hostel. Therefore we can quite literally set our piece anywhere, or (even better in my opinion)- no where.
The Vieux Carre is like a strange limbo, a lonely stop off point for these characters until their lives can either move forward or end. Maddy Costa describes the piece as ‘shadowy and heightened as a dream’, an observation I feel to be very accurate. I believe that the dream-like, ambiguous atmosphere we want to create will be helped by not giving the audience a place as this would root the piece more in reality.
Featured image: new orleans night skyline (source- Pinterest)
Referenced- Vieux Carré – review, Maddy Costa. The Guardian (2012)
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