Saturday 31 May 2014

There's about five weeks left before our production of Twelfth Night, which will be an open-air performance, and acted by young actors. I've been working on it, off and on, after the last couple of months, but it's only now - now that the Brighton Fringe is over - that I've been able to attack it with all guns blazing. The cast have had distractions of their own - exams, and the like - but they've been doing extraordinarily well, what with all their line learning, and discovering rich characterisations quite outside of any interfering directing that I might throw at them. 

Something at today's rehearsal wasn't quite working though, and I couldn't quite how to fix it. As I said, it will be an open air performance, within some walled gardens. The audience will sit in the middle of the space, and all the scenes will take place 360 degrees around them, meaning that the audience will have to do a bit of shifting around each time a new scene begins. It's certainly a bit different from a traditional 'end-on' performance. But something today wasn't making that work. The actors couldn't quite stop themselves facing each other when their characters were speaking to each other, meaning that the audience were getting a lot of back, which meant that the voices were getting lost - being outside, there's no wall for the sound to bounce off, and anyway, there's traffic from a nearby road vying for your attention to. 

When I realised what I had to do, it was just annoying that I hadn't thought of the solution in the first place. It - obviously - has to be a promenade performance. If I'm going to make the audience have to shift around anyway, I might as well make the most of it. With a promenade performance, I can get the audience to really enjoy the space we're in, and have a very unique experience - everyone genuinely seeing the show from a different angle. Once we started rehearsing it that way, with the actors able to constantly change where they were directing their performance toward, the entire thing lifted several degrees. 

Not only should I have spotted this somewhat obvious fix weeks ago, I REALLY should have spotted this fix weeks ago, since I've spent the last few months actually being in a promenade performance myself. I hadn't made the connection between the two, despite the fact that their Venn Diagrams were pretty much overlapping. It's a useful skill to keep developing - that whatever you're reading / watching / doing in your life, can be directly translated into something else you're reading / watching doing, even if the connective tissue isn't that obvious. That feels like something I could write an entire thesis on, but frankly, I'm not feeling quite intelligent enough to do that just at the moment. 

Sometimes the obvious fix is found by examining what the problem actually is. When directing Four Play, there was a problem when two characters had to drag a body off stage. The actor playing the corpse was a fairly tall lad, and wasn't the sort of boy you could simply sling over your shoulder. I'd written in some dialouge to cover, so it wasn't just two women dragging a body across stage in silence. But it still wasn't working, and we were opening the following night. We'd tried everything, a fireman's life, the actor trying to 'help' the girls - but it all looked awful. There seemed to be no way to get the body from one end of the stage to the exit door. It took me ages to work out that there was absolutely no reason why the character couldn't die at the door, thereby negating any need for fireman's lifts. Problem solved. 

I'm an idiot sometimes. But I think I'm an intelligent idiot. 

Wednesday 22 May 2013

My back started to give in today. A viscious twinge, that actually stopped me in my tracks on my way to work. For a moment, I almost had to double over. That hasn't happened for a while - in fact, the last time was when I was in the later stages of rehearsals for Medea last year, when, for about twenty minutes, I had to give my director notes from a sitting position, almost unmoving. But here's the thing. There's an app called TimeHop, which sends you a message occasionally to remind you of what you were doing (or at least, what you put as your status update) on this day a year, or two or three years ago. I just got today's text, and it turns out the last time my back locked up was exactly this day last year. Of course, it could have something to do with the last minute stresses of directing, but Medea wasn't until the end of June - almost a month away. The fact that my back twinged on the same day, a year apart - before I'd make enough of a connection for it to be psychosamatic - is a bit odd, really. I'd happily declare it as an entirely meaningless coincidence, but I've seen enough films to know that it must be a glitch in the system. Any minute now, I'm going to wake up. That feels appropiate, actually, since right now, I just feel half asleep.

Rehearsals continue to go well for A Beginning, A Muddle And An End, and we continue to learn stuff about improvisation even in this last week of rehearsals. (Oh, yes - it's the last week of rehearsal: you should really be getting your tickets right about now - https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/search/searchEventDetails.asp?sid=&returnPage=promoter&event_id=35283 ). Much of it is reaffirming what we already know, like the fact that we've got a pretty unique - and very challenging - set up in terms of the long form improv that we're attempting. Most troupes (read: sane troupes) will have a cast of four, maybe five. Sometimes just two. Occasionally even one. A show with nine - count 'em, nine - performers, all jostling for stage and story time, is a great testament to each improvisers skill and generosity. When I consider that a couple of them had rarely (or never) improvised before, it's genuinely breathtaking.

I've already known this for a while, but I won't be directing next year, or at least I don't expect to. It's a process that takes up a shocking amount of time, and I've not been able to see anything in the last three Brighton Fringes by sheer dint of being busy with my own productions. I'll always be greatful to the New Venture Theatre for allowing me to indulge some simply manic and entirely risky ideas. When people - management commitees, fellow directors and writers, and indeed the actors that you are responsible for - give you their trust, it's an empowering thing. Not just for you as the director, but also for the person giving the trust. I'm not saying as a director that you're always right - or even often right - but when someone has faith that you want the best, then - even if you both make a couple of mistakes along the way - you get to the best a helluva lot quicker.

Fear Of Peers

Good, but strenuous, rehearsal tonight. I don't think I was communicating my intentions or wants as a director particularly well, which meant that my cast (of one woman) spent a lot of time feeling her way in the dark, trying to work out what I was on about. Not literally feeling her way in the dark, of course. I'm not like Werner Herzog. Although, that might be a good warm up exercise for another time.

The other thing that was interesting for me was that while I was directing my leading lady (Sarah), we were visited by my last leading lady (Sarah). It shouldn't rattle me. But it did, slightly. Whilst we get on well, and while I think she enjoyed her time on Medea, I was very aware that she herself is a director, and one who speaks with straight-to-the-point clarity, whereas I can sometimes be guilty of chatting around a subject in order to get to the point, rather than taking a direct route. Both ways have their value, but it's easy to get very self conscious.

We all know of, and in some cases, have worked with poor directors ( I've noticed that I started that sentence with 'we', somehow assuming that anyone reading this blog is definitely involved in some way with theatre. While that's certainly very likely, it's by no means guaranteed.) These are the directors who passively offer no opinion (or, indeed, direction), or at the other end of the scale, stamp their opinion on absolutely every aspect of the production, meaning anything about the actual script is pulverised. I would give examples, but that would mean, you know, giving examples.

I like to think that I'm a pretty good director. I talk slightly too much in the early stages, but in context, I think it's a forgivable sin. Interestingly, even now I can feel myself channelling a director I used to know almost twenty years ago, when I worked at a theatre in South London: CYTO, or the Croydon Youth Theatre Organisation. I can't ever remember him sitting down to direct, he was almost always on his feet. Quite a few directors do direct from a seated position, and insomuch as I've thought about it at all, it's always disquieted me somewhat. Certainly, I've never felt comfortable staying seated while directing. Maybe it's nervous energy; and that's certainly how I remember this director from twenty years ago, right down to the habit of clicking the fingers on both hands while trying to get his head around a concept or narrative problem. In recent years, I've begun to wonder if I've imagined, or invented that tic. It doesn't really matter, I suppose, even if I seem to have adopted that tic for myself.

So, most of the time, I think I've got a pretty good handle on what it is to be a director. I've got a certain style and approach that I return to, but that gets altered and shifted depending on what the project is. A knockabout farce with just four people is going to have different demands than a drug survival play with twenty five young people all aged under 18. But that's the thing, I know all that. But, if someone I know and respect is in the room, I suddenly feel like a fool and an idiot. Well, more so than usual. I feel like an amateur, like a snake oil salesman who's one paragraph away from being unmasked as the liar everyone has suspected him of being.

It's ridiculous, of course: both the women in the room have elected to work with me on a number of occasions, and both have asked my advice on creative and artistic matters. I have to be logical about this: they wouldn't do that just to be nice (actually, if we're going to be logical, it's entirely within the realms of possibility that they'd collaborate with me 'just to be nice', but that gets a bit too Truman Show and oddly egotistical to make a great deal of sense, so I have to put my faith in my lack of faith.)

In last nights rehearsal, I began talking about the image of Russian Dolls (you see how I talk around something rather than getting straight to the point?), and it's just occurred to me now that that's how the rehearsal itself felt - while was looking in on Sarah (my actor), hoping to guide and support her, I felt Sarah (my previous actor) looking in on me, offering guidance and support. Didn't always stop me feeling like I was being exposed as an idiot who didn't know what he was talking about. I don't know why I was worried: I achieve that quite well enough by writing this blog.