Tuesday 7 March 2013

Right, that's the first week of rehearsals for Beginning Muddle End done. Three rehearsals already, and if I'm honest they were more intense and hard work than I'd anticipated. That's by no means a bad thing; it means we can apply the brakes slightly after having sped ahead at the start, and begin to get down to some basic skills of improvisation. I'd decided even before I started rehearsals that I was going to - quite deliberately - go in somewhat blind. That meant that, for the first few weeks of rehearsal (at least), I wouldn't decide on any sort of structure, or format on which to hang the final show. Obviously, as we got closer to the performance date, that would change, but for now, I'm quite happy for it to be a little loose. Let the structure be dictated by the group dynamic, by the performers' individual wants and needs.

That's all well and good, of course, but I think many of us have been involved in productions where the director has voiced a similar intention, and it's clearly been code for 'I have no idea what to do, and frankly I'm just a bit too lazy to buckle down to a final decision'. It's something I've been acutely aware of in this first week of rehearsals. True, I don't yet know the exact journey my cast and I will take (and if I come up with a more pretentious phrase today, you can slap me on the back of the neck with any number of improvisation text books), but it's important to have a pretty good idea of where you want to end up. There's nothing wrong with heading out into woodland area in a generally aimless fashion, as long as you're pretty sure that you're not going to get panicky and start walking around in very tight circles, banging your fists against your thighs, sobbing 'why does this sort of crap always happen to me?' Its OK to get (sorta) lost, so long as you can keep the destination in sight.

Except, screw it, even that's not exactly right, because it suggests that you should always know how things are going to resolve themselves, and that's not improvisation. I guess I'm still thing about the Great White metaphor. Keep moving or die. You can get as lost as you like, but if you're afraid of moving forward, if you let the entire expanse of - nothing - overwhelm you, then you're screwed. When my mum was coming up to her fifties, she suddenly decided - on a whim, it seemed - to learn to drive. She was an insanely terrible backseat driver. My stepdad's nerves were no doubt shot, because my mum was never able to understand that her field of vision was deceptive, that her depth of perception was off kilter just by virtue of sitting in the passenger seat. So she would spend entire car journeys screaming like a banshee, convinced that the car was about to plough into traffic coming the opposite way. The woman who tries to wrestle the steering wheel from her partner in panic, succeeding only in steering the car closer toward whatever it is that's causing a problem in the first place? Yeah, that was my mum, years before someone else stole the idea for a reality TV show. You'd think that things would improve once my mum became a driver herself. They didn't, because, bless her, she wasn't the best driver in the world (according to her, she was exactly that - the very best driver in the world. I know this because of the very firm opinion she voiced about everybody else on the road).

However, she was really pleased to be able to drive. She certainly had no real reason to, but she loved to take the car out on Sundays for long drives. Because she needed the company, I was often taken along for these rides. Rides that I found teeth grittingly, eyeball poppingly frustrating. Because they appeared to have absolutely no purpose. I had no idea where we were going. The journey had no point whatsoever. My mum would just be content to drive the car around for three, maybe even five hours, just for the joy of driving. I mean, OK, I get it - she's a child of the 50s, growing up in rural catholic Ireland. The idea of simply taking the old jalopy out for a spin has a certain romance to it. Yeah, great, I get it. But I think it's maybe worth pointing out that we weren't in Ireland. We weren't even in the 1950s, where cars were a much rarer sight. When my mum drove around purposely, we weren't driving around the countryside, on the hunt for a pub or a car boot sale.

We drove around housing estates in Croydon.

I'm not kidding. Because my mum still wasn't a confident driver, she didn't want to get too far away from her starting point. But she didn't really have any idea of where she wanted to go. And so we kind of simply drove around in circles, achieving almost nothing but the emptying of a petrol tank. All that energy, and nothing to show for it. We ended up nowhere. And I mean, literally nowhere, because, almost inevitably, despite the fact that the car probably never got further than 15 miles from the house at this point, we seemed to always find the trading estate with absolutely no signage, or people. Well and truly lost. With almost no petrol. Fifteen years before mobile phones or the internet. Still a few years before I drank in front of her. Although, to be fair, the experience probably hastened that activity quite significantly.

Wait. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Improv. This is exactly like that. Improv is like getting stuck in a Datsun Sunny with my mum with absolutely no comprehension of how we're going to get back. Shut up. I know what I'm talking about. Well, maybe. The point is this. Nobody knows where they're going with improv. That's the point. But to stall, to meander in circles, to not dare to get away from your starting point, doesn't mean that you're not going to run out of juice, and that you're not going to get totally lost.

Hell, that metaphor worked out a helluva lot more successfully than I expected to. Yeah, I know it sounded clunky to you, but I didn't know I was going to come up with until I was in the middle of typing it, and I'm pretty pleased with it. Yeah, it's ugly, and with jagged edges, but it makes the point, and it gets the job done.

There's probably another metaphor in there somewhere. I've got to stop with the metaphors, they're getting to be like -

Hell. Really gotta stop.