Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In August 2013, producer Francesca Moody found herself in a dank cellar at the Edinburgh Fringe for the first night of a one-woman show by an unknown writer. They\u2019d had a three-hour technical rehearsal in the middle of the night, the actress was still learning the script on the journey up \u2014 despite having written it \u2014 and proceeded to forget a whole chunk mid-performance. Which might not have mattered, except that Moody had invited the national press.\u201cWe were all young and we didn\u2019t know,\u201d she says now, grinning. \u201cYou only get better by making mistakes.\u201dThat show was Fleabag. It would go on to travel the world, win multiple awards, become a TV hit and make a star of actress and writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge. It would also confirm for Moody exactly what she wanted to do with her life. We\u2019re sitting in the office of Francesca Moody Productions \u2014 a buzzy, brightly coloured space in the heart of the West End. She\u2019s now one of the theatre industry\u2019s most dynamic young producers, with a string of successful, slightly off-the-wall shows to her name \u2014 Baby Reindeer, An Oak Tree and Kathy and Stella Solve a Murder! among them \u2014 along with co-producing bigger hits such as Rebecca Frecknall\u2019s A Streetcar Named Desire and the New York staging of A Doll\u2019s House starring Jessica Chastain.To anyone outside the business, producing looks like a nerve-racking profession: finding projects, funding them, getting them on to the stage. Moody says you have to trust your gut. \u201cYou have to really love what you\u2019re working on,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m always looking for things that are from an original point of view. And it has to be funny. I can\u2019t imagine producing plays that don\u2019t have a comic edge to them: I think comedy invites an audience in.\u201dThe latest of her maverick finds certainly tests that hypothesis. Weather Girl, about to play London\u2019s Soho Theatre, is a darkly comic monologue in which Stacey, a Californian weather presenter, struggles to keep a lid on her rising panic about the state of the climate. As wildfires scythe through California, her sunny disposition goes into meltdown. A tough subject, yet it won widespread praise at its Edinburgh Fringe debut last year. \u201cForecasting the apocalypse has never been this entertaining,\u201d wrote one critic.\u201cI would say Weather Girl is Don\u2019t Look Up [Adam McKay\u2019s 2021 satirical film about impending doom] but for the stage,\u201d says Moody. Given the recent wildfires in Los Angeles, the show has only gained in grim topicality. And its arrival in London means that both Soho Theatre and Soho Place Theatre \u2014 five minutes\u2019 walk apart \u2014 will be showing innovative drama about climate change (Kyoto is playing Soho Place). For Moody, that feels significant.\u201cThis is the most important play we will produce for a while,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s really about now and it feels more relevant now because of everything that happened this year. But it\u2019s also very funny and there is hope in it. Brian [Watkins], who wrote it, and Julia [McDermott], who performs it, are from LA. So it\u2019s very much a love letter to their home.\u201dMoody is a vivid, sparky presence, with her lime-green blouse and trainers, and around us there is a hum of activity. This is a building packed with theatre producers: Eleanor Lloyd Productions and Jamie Wilson next door, Wessex Grove and Playful Productions on the floors below. Between them they\u2019ve shepherded many West End hits into place. Does that foster any competition? Any eavesdropping in the lift?Moody gives a huge laugh. \u201cOur office used to be on the first floor and the walls were paper thin,\u201d she says. \u201cThere were no secrets\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009But we\u2019re all very distinct from one another. I don\u2019t feel any rivalry. Especially from the women. It has been a boys\u2019 club for a long time, with the exception of people like Sonia [Friedman], Nica [Burns] and Caro [Newling]. I think we all feel quite passionate about holding each other up, to be honest.\u201dMoody herself trained to be an actor and fell into producing almost by accident, when a friend asked her to work with him on a project at the Edinburgh Fringe. She realised that her priorities had shifted when she began to resent auditions for taking up producing time. And the Edinburgh Fringe is, in a sense, her alma mater \u2014 it\u2019s where she learnt the nitty-gritty of making theatre.\u201cThere\u2019s something about producing in Edinburgh that allows you to get your hands dirty and do all the things. I\u2019ve stage-managed shows, I\u2019ve painted sets, I\u2019ve built things, I\u2019ve driven vans, I\u2019ve flyered\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009You make loads of mistakes when you\u2019re starting out and that\u2019s good. People shouldn\u2019t be afraid of making mistakes. You\u2019ve got to be strong and wrong to work out how to be right.\u201dIndeed, she\u2019s such a passionate champion of the Fringe, that in August 2020, when the pandemic halted live performance, she teamed up with Scottish writer Gary McNair to produce the Shedinburgh Fringe Festival: a packed programme of acts live-streamed from performers\u2019 garden sheds. This highly eccentric project arose from a throwaway remark made by McNair, but at its core was a firm belief in creating a showcase for emerging artists.There are high hopes for a Shedinburgh return. But what of the Fringe itself? Can it still perform that critical function when accommodation prices alone can be crippling?\u201cIt is eye-watering,\u201d agrees Moody. \u201cI think it\u2019s incumbent on producers like FMP, who have had some success at the Fringe, to work out how we can create pathways for people \u2014 whether that\u2019s about creating schemes for more emerging talent or investing in earlier career artists.\u201dAccess and affordability are rumbling concerns for UK theatre. Another growing issue is the rise in prices, particularly in the West End, with some top price tickets hitting hundreds of pounds. Moody suggests that theatre producers have a responsibility to \u201cbake in\u201d schemes for accessible prices across the board. \u201cThe challenge is whether we can make sure that the accessible prices are available to people who actually need that price point.\u201dWeather Girl will run a weekly lottery and release \u00a325 standing tickets daily from March 3. And Moody adds that the health of the theatre industry, its ability to experiment and find new audiences, has a much wider impact. She has just announced a first-look deal with Well Streets Films (Phoebe Waller-Bridge\u2019s production company), opening a possible pathway for shows to progress from stage to screen \u2014 as Fleabag did. But the key to the success of a show like that, she says, is its origin in theatre.\u201cThe best way to tell a story first is through theatre. There are fewer voices, there\u2019s less noise, the writer really is king or queen. Fleabag and Baby Reindeer \u2014 those shows would not have been commissioned as TV shows if they hadn\u2019t been theatre shows first. The ideas are too strange, wacky, out there.\u201cPeople say we want the next Fleabag or Baby Reindeer \u2014 the truth is, you don\u2019t want those things, you want the thing that we don\u2019t know exists yet. And the theatre is where that comes from.\u201d\u2018Weather Girl\u2019, Soho Theatre, London, Mar 5-Apr 5, sohotheatre.com; \u2018An Oak Tree\u2019, Young Vic, London, May 6-17, youngvic.org<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In August 2013, producer Francesca Moody found herself in a dank cellar at the Edinburgh Fringe for the first night of a one-woman show by an unknown writer. They\u2019d had a three-hour technical rehearsal in the middle of the night, the actress was still<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":225882,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-225881","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225881"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":225883,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225881\/revisions\/225883"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/225882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}