Crisis? What crisis

As quickly as the air chaos ensued the difficulties abate. We really can make a mountain out of a volcano. If the Axis powers in 1940 had waited for snow etc..well if they had stirred up an Icelandic volcano...

I have always had an admiration for the Icelanders; a nation with the population of Kensington and Chelsea has produced world class footballers, opera singers, pop acts AND managed to fleece half of Europe's population of their savings. There is a joke going around that says the Icelanders offered to switch of the volcano is we stopped telling them to pay us back.

I had another alarming dream last night in which I attended a rehearsal of Forza only to discover that everybody was singing in English. Now I don't want to ignite a debate about original language versus translation - it's just that the alarm in the dream stemmed from the fact that we have told everybody we are singing it in Italian. I took this up gingerly with James (who, it has to be said is appearing far too frequently in my dreams) concerned that he would be faced with another hurdle only to find he knew about it all along! I woke up just before I hit the ground.

These dreams about work might make you think that I am worried and concerned about everything which I'm not. But when I have a dream about carpenters I will consider therapy or retraining as a milkman or something.

Hmmm

As I sit here writing this under crystal clear blue skies (again), the surreality of the travel chaos, caused by a cloud nobody can see emanating from an Icelandic volcano nobody can pronounce, continues to have profound effects on our first two productions. With singers and conductors scattered to four corners of the globe, James is as much a travel agent as he is a producer at the moment.

Tricky kick-off

It is the start of Carmen rehearsals and various individuals are dispersed Europe wide. I suspect a large Islay Malt for James will be necessary by the end of the week. I'm not even sure I won't be driving hither and thither across the continent to gather them all together.

Cloud? What cloud?

The apocalyptic predictions that a country-sized cloud of volcanic ash would blot out the sun in the UK have been thwarted by..well, the sun. It has been shining endlessly for days and at the moment it does so with a strong heat too. If the cloud that has brought silence to the skies over London IS up there, it is of a kind that can only be detected by jet engines.

Holland Park was choc full of people enjoying the sunshine and we joined them after a quick check of some work that has been going on over the weekend. Hundreds (thousands) thronged the lawns of HP today and I kicked myself for not having a team of leafleteers out there on the North Lawn. Still plenty seem to know what is going on because I heard quite a few sounding eager now that we are getting visibly ready for the season ahead. Interestingly one lady wondered aloud to her companion that we "must be starting earlier this year" and a young girl asked if "there was going to be opera again mummy?" And it is nice to see the grand "Inspire" wall getting attention from across the pathway. The good weather is always a prompt for those who have a more laissez faire attitude to ticket booking. They had better hurry up.

No standing still

The past two weeks have been productive and very hard work for Stu and Kasete, his oppo and our deputy house manager but they have done very well. They nor any of the contractors working on site probably need me prowling around scrutinising every screw, line, cut and joint but they have been tolerant (although on-the- hoof decisions tend to get made when they are needed). This whole process of change has been a cycle of solving one issue and creating another but the road might now have straightened out. Yesterday (with Kasete in the Charlie Dimmock role of doing the work and me in the Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen role of mincing about with the aesthetic eye) we spent an hour arranging olive trees in pots around the perimeters of various facilities. That is something we normally do two hours before curtain up on the first night so it has to count as progress. We also made the momentous decision to paint four of the support legs of the mezzanine so that they match the colour of the seating structure they abut. Such things, as I have oft repeated, matter! Henceforth, all is detail and I hope we don't over-egg the pudding.

James is in full-on producer mode dealing with last minute problems of casting and the flicking tail of a volcanic cloud that is slowing the arrival of Europe based singers for the start of music rehearsals on Monday. He could do without it for sure but I think sometimes he couldn't really do without it if you know what I mean? He and the company have always flourished in adversity so the bigger the problems he describes, the more sanguine I tend to get; history tells me that the success of the outcome is directly proportional to the depth of the abyss we have peered into. Is that the mark of a good outfit? I like to think so. The challenges of Pelleas, our opening production, offer the most tantalising results, for example. And with that in mind we sit down soon to finalise the 2012 season.