Wednesday 4 June 2014

Oversaw my first rehearsal for Return To Steyning last night. It's a short play by a local writer - Richard Hearn - that's going to be performed in our next 'Cast Iron' night of new writing next month at the DukeBox Theatre. Yes, that's next month: but I haven't had a chance to do any rehearsals with the cast yet, mainly because I was fully committed to another play until the middle of May. People have been asking me what I'm going to be doing with all my evenings back. Other people, people who actually know me, haven't bothered to ask. 

I was late for rehearsal. This is both highly improbable, and virtually impossible, given that the rehearsal space last night is only about six minutes away from where I live, and it's pretty much a straight line from one to the other (indeed, if you veer too much to the left, you end up in the sea). But I still managed to be late - in fact, I'd already walked past where I needed to be. By the time I eventually arrived, my cast were already deep into rehearsal. In real terms, they didn't really need me. This is both encouraging and mollifying. 

They were doing so well, in fact, that I was loathe to interrupt them. But I did anyway, because this will be a very quick turnaround of rehearsal. Normally, I like to give my actors a bit of elbow room, and not straight jacket them into a limited character that I've already decided to pen them into. I'm not always successful at that, possibly because I like the sound of my own director-y voice too much, but I was very chatty last night - hopefully more chatty than I will be at any subsequent rehearsal, partially because I'm having to abandon at least some of my high ideals as a director and give the cast fairly limited parameters to work with. My justification is the limited rehearsal time: we don't have a helluva lot of time to try things out and go down weird artistic blind alleys (which of course, are the very best kind of blind alleys to wander down). The cast understood this, and accepted my constant interruptions with great grace and intelligence. 

Haven't had a chance to do a rewrite on the next draft of the current script yet, despite the two ideas that I had to insert into the text yesterday. I have, however, managed to scribble some notes on the most recent hard copy. I always find that the more time you spend away from a WIP, the more difficult it can be to get back on board - leave it alone for more than a few days, and it feels more than overwhelming to attempt to get anywhere near the script, like it's some kind of monotholic beast. But as long as you're checking in every so often on the days that you're not able to fully commit to the writing, then you've still got a leash on the monster, and it shouldn't escape you too easily. 

Three Kinds Of Rehearsal

A night off tonight. Earlier this week, we'd become terrifyingly aware of the concept of four weeks being actually quite a short amount of time. With that in mind, we went through diaries and plugged up any spare night going with an extra rehearsal. Turns out that there's not a great many spare nights between now and curtain up. Not that we're using a curtain, but you get the idea.

We had booked in a rehearsal for tonight, but we pulled it - giving ourselves a chance to gird our loins before things really kick in, and anyway, I suspect that Sarah's boyfriend would quite appreicate actually seeing her before Halloween. Because between now and then, the rehearsals get quite intense.

One of the reasons the rehearsals are now getting a bit intense (apart from the subject matter) is the method of rehearsal we're using. We're doing something called 'actioning', which is something I've tended to avoid as an actor. Very roughly speaking, you endow every single line - every one - with a seperate 'action', a word that describes what your intention is within that line alone. It doesn't have to be (and possibly sometimes shouldn't be) in the context of the lines that surrond it on either side. In terms of performance, it can make for something of a jolting, even unrealistic narrative, which is possibly why I've previously always been a little wary of it. In this sense, I suspect it's more of a director's tool than that of the actors, if only because it makes the director's life easier - they can simply engineer their actor to be in a particular place/postion/mood at a particular time.

Of course, the key word there is 'tool' - it's not the end, but a means to an end. Something I've become very aware of while directing Three Kinds Of Me is that while I might generally be the same kind of director whatever project I work on, I'll employ very different tools depending on what the show is - a one woman show about mental health, for instance, or a big cast Shakespeare. I've known a couple of directors who operate in exactly the same way no matter what they're directing - knockabout farce, or mid-80s AIDS drama. One director, in particular, I remember saying absolutely nothing in any rehearsals, but would spend the first five minutes of the following rehearsal passing around little notes (no bigger than a Rizla) before another wordless rehearsal. Incidentally, I seem to remember that my only note said something like 'Speak slower, speak louder'. To be fair, I'll concede he had a point.

Because we're doing this 'actioning', the intial bout of rehearsals are going slower than I'd expected - not too slow, but certainly not as quick as I'd first planned (to give you and idea, I'd hoped to do five pages on Tuesday. We didn't quite manage one). It means everything is very textured and toned, and as the subsequent rehearsals follow each other, our 'muscle memory' will kick in, and we'll start speaking in a shorthand. It's one of the most endlessly interesting projects I've had the pleasure to work on, and I'm looking forward to continuing the journey.

By the way, tickets went on sale this week, which means that we haven't just imagined it, or anything, and the play will actually happen. I think I mentioned before that it's a very limited run, (only two nights) and tickets are already selling. Pop along to the new venture theatre ticket page to relieve yourself of a few quid for the pleasure of a great one woman show.

Three Kinds Of Me

So, I have a new upcoming project. This one has a bit of a quick turnaround, as the show goes up in October. That doesn't leave a great deal of rehearsal time. I'm not yet sure if the fact that it's a one woman show will make rehearsal more or less difficult. It's by no means a foregone conclusion.

One conclusion you may have correctly drawn from that first paragraph is that I'm not in it. The one woman in question is a good friend Sarah Charlsey (she's such a good friend that I even manage to spell her surname correctly occasionally), and she's written the piece that she will be acting in. It's not precisely the first time I've directed a friend - it's not even the first time I've directed Sarah - but this time, the dymanics are somewhat different.

First of all, I've been asked to direct someone else's creation (we'll pass over the small detail that I wasn't actually first choice. I'll keep that in reserve if things aren't going my way in the third week of rehearsal). Normally as a director, at least at this level, when it's all local, and a compartively small amount of people are watching, you choose your own project. Therefore, I have in my head (as I imagine a great many directors do) a bubbling pot of various images for possible in-the-future productions that may never happen. I have great opening images for both Three Sisters and Twelfth Night, both of which I imagine are far too expensive for any venue I currently have access to. Likewise, I have a whole series of ideas for a show that I tell anyone that will listen that I definetly will write a script for one of these days (it involves Victorian women using silks and Arial skills. I have yet to convince anyone - including myself - that that little detail isn't just for my benefit).

However, the goal posts change somewhat if you are directing your friend in the script they themselves wrote. I'm not exactly expecting to have any arguments regarding costume ('but they have to be wearing a Thomas The Tank Engine jumper, that's what the real David was wearing!'), but you never know. Quite often as a director (and indeed, as actor, designer, or most anything else) you play around with the expectations of the script: you know that such and such a scene is a moment when everyone's royally annoyed with each other, so you see how it will work if each actor plays it really positive and nice. Usually, the audience will pick up on the tension anyway, in a passive aggressive way. I'll let you know how it all goes; the first rehearsal is this week, after I get back from Edinburgh.