1984 Production Blog - 3

Monday 28^th January

 

Tonight we are working with Craig Vear, our composer.

We are working on the scenes in Room 101, where Winston is tortured.  During these scenes Winston is electrocuted repeatedly.  Craig wants to support these scenes with a sound-scape which will build from Winston simply enduring pain, to a point at which his memory and consciousness begin to fragment under the pressure of sustained torture.  We want to record a range of ‘torture induced’ sounds, from screams and whimpers to gasps and agonized murmurings- a tall order for our actor Oliver O’Shea who arrives expecting to ‘do a few voice-overs’. 

We begin with a warm up- we are going to be asking Oliver to scream and shout, so it is important that he doesn’t damage his voice in the process.  We talk through what happens to the body when it is electrocuted, then we hand Oliver the microphone and let him start to play with some sounds.  The result is terrifying- the effect of hearing another human ‘in pain’ is extremely uncomfortable.  I am also worried that at any moment the Police will burst in to our rehearsal room in response to the blood-curdling screams emitting from it. 

Oliver is still very much in control at this point- he is choosing when to make each sound.  We decide to play a game.  Myself, Craig and company member James Swanton play the part of torturers.  Oliver must respond vocally to the number of fingers we hold up.  If we hold up five fingers: the electrocution is severe, if we hold up one finger: the electrocution is mild- Oliver must react accordingly.  This is better; Oliver is not in control of when he must scream, so the sounds produced are more impulsive.  Finally, we need the sounds created by Winston after many hours of torture- at the moment he is still very energetic in his delivery.  We ask Oliver to sprint up the rehearsal room stairs 10 times and then pick up the microphone.  The effect is great, a completely different quality of sound.  At the end of this process, Oliver is exhausted; he has been contorting his body, writhing on the floor, running up stairs and screaming and shouting at the top of his voice.  Oliver has done a great job, and we have plenty of material for Craig’s sound-scape.

We then work with James who is playing the Voice of Goldstein.  James has developed a fantastic deep-throated roar for this character, which he delivers with huge energy and vitriol.  Finally, we work with David Leonard.  David is currently performing in Sinbad the Sailor and has very kindly volunteered his services to play the Voice of the Telescreen.  This voice is the voice of The Party: authoritative and commanding, and David delivers it with aplomb.  A long day but a fun one.  With all of the voice-overs now recorded, another piece of the jigsaw-puzzle is completed.

Review - Uncle Vanya

THE TELEGRAPH 

Uncle Vanya: A perfect illusion of life itself  Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 28/01/2008

 

Charles Spencer reviews Uncle Vanya at the Rose Theatre, Kingston After five years of struggle and setbacks, the new Rose Theatre in Kingston has finally opened its doors to the public with this superb production of Chekhov. The shell of the building came gratis, as a planning gain from property developers who were erecting luxury flats on the rest of the site. But it has taken a further £11 million to finish the Rose, to which neither the National Lottery nor the Arts Council has contributed a single penny. The good news is that the theatre, which has been doggedly championed by Sir Peter Hall, is a palpable hit. Based on the layout of the Elizabethan Rose Theatre, with a horseshoe-shaped auditorium surrounding an unexpectedly wide and shallow stage, it seats an audience of 900 in comfort and close proximity to the performers. There is also space at the front where spectators can sit on cushions to watch the show at just £7 a time. This is a theatre at once intimate and epic. It feels immediately welcoming, is designed in a functional but stylish manner, and there are big, open foyer spaces. It is, says Hall, the theatre he has dreamt of all his life. The big question now is whether the Rose can flourish. It will cost £600,000 a year to run, with no sign yet of any public funding coming its way. Hall’s vision of creating a permanent ensemble in which seasoned professionals would be joined by postgraduate students doing a masters degree in drama at Kingston University is still no more than an aspiration, and at present the programme consists largely of visiting touring companies. But this opening production, in which Hall directs the English Touring Theatre, gets the Rose off to a cracking start. At 77, Hall is enjoying a blaze of autumnal glory, directing with a freshness and directness that is entirely devoid of self-advertising flashiness. He is there simply to serve the play, and he does so magnificently, catching the miraculous mixture of humour and sadness at the heart of Uncle Vanya with uperb precision. There is none of the directorial nudging and prodding that marred Trevor Nunn’s recent production of The Seagull, and the actors, many of them familiar from previous Hall projects, all seem fully immersed in their characters. Like all great Chekhov productions, this Vanya creates the illusion that we are watching the unmediated flow of life itself rather than a carefully calculated piece of art. Nicholas Le Prevost, a superbly distinctive and endearing actor, is in blissful form as Vanya, the loyal steward who falls hopelessly in love and belatedly realises he has wasted his life. He brings out all the poignant, bumbling humour of a character who can’t even manage to shoot his enemy at point-blank range, but our laughter is always sympathetic because Le Prevost also captures the goodness that underlies the character’s absurdity and pain. Loo Brealey (a name to watch) is equally affecting as his plain, equally lovelorn niece, Sonya, and her plucky final speech, with its longing for the eternal peace of the grave, is beautifully delivered and piercingly affecting. Michelle Dockery is pitch-perfect as the beautiful Yelena, caught between languid indolence and self-loathing, Neil Pearson memorably captures the mixture of idealism and cynicism of Astrov, while Ronald Pickup is gratingly unpleasant as the desiccated art professor Serebryakov. Antonia Pemberton, meanwhile, lights up the role of the kind old nanny more powerfully than I have ever seen before. Surely even our asinine Arts Council can’t fail to reward such an outstanding project. But then again…

Review - Uncle Vanya

THE TIMES - ****

Uncle Vanya

 

Benedict Nightingale at the Rose, Kingston

It’s one of the great moments of Chekhovian or, come to that, modern theatre. You might almost say it marks the point at which tragi-comedy replaced both tragedy and comedy as the drama’s dominant genre.

Maddened by the selfish brother-in-law who wants to sell the estate that he’s spent his life tending, Uncle Vanya shoots, shoots again, and each time misses. He himself ends up wildly cursing his failure to commit murder and, in Peter Hall’s production, a terrified Professor Serebryakov is left staring at the floor on which he assumes his own corpse must be lying.

It’s awful, it’s hilarious, it’s both at once. Certainly the scene works wonderfully well in the revival that opens Kingston’s elegant reworking of an Elizabethan original.

A director friend remarked to me in the interval that the Rose’s stage was a bit wide, and maybe it’s not the place for something claustrophobic, such as Sartre’s No Exit or a Punch and Judy show.

But, boy, it looks and feels good, with its three-tiered arc of seats half-orbiting a stage that’s slightly thrust forward. And, yes, a spread-out mix of samovars, trees, old furniture and a crateful of damp hay are enough to prepare you for Chekhov’s rueful attack on Russian country life.

With Stephen Mulrine’s colloquial translation adding punch to last night’s premiere — Vanya calls the parasitical professor “a dry old stick, a sort of scholarly kipper” — Hall brings every character to life without leaving you in any doubt that their lives actually vary from the enervated to the dead.

I’ve never seen Nicholas Le Prevost better than as the title character himself. He avoids the usual wounded passivity and suggests a Vanya who is simmering and bubbling with resentment, boiling with thwarted desire for the elderly academic’s creamy young wife, Yelena — so that, when his rage bursts out, it does so quite logically yet also like a sudden flash flood in summer. “There’s something badly amiss in this house,” says Yelena, in Michelle Dockery’s well-balanced performance both an intelligent woman and a terminally bored sexpot. You can say that again. Le Prevost’s Vanya won’t stop kissing her hand and crowding her. Ronald Pickup as her husband crankily fidgets and moans beneath his blanket. Faith Brook as Vanya’s insensitive old mother pores fake-sagely over her books. Loo Brealey’s Sonya, who adores the local doctor, has bossy instincts, a pale, drawn face and an odd, scuttling walk that combine to explain why her love will never be reciprocated.

That doctor is Astrov, a character who gives the play a contemporary twist with his ecologically sound opinions and worthy attempts to fight Russia’s deforestation.

And as played by Neil Pearson, he has an enthusiasm, a toughness and a capacity for passion missing in those around him, yet also a slight sottishness (braces hanging down from a grubby vest) that suggests that provincial life and personal frustration have damaged him too. Altogether, this is a production well worthy not only of the Rose but of the national tour to follow.

Review - Uncle Vanya

THE GUARDIAN - ****

 

Michael BillingtonMonday January 28, 2008The Guardian 

The theatrical establishment was out in force for the launch of this new building. And rightly so, since the 900-seat, three-tiered Rose is a seductively handsome space, while Peter Hall’s strongly cast production gets to the heart of Chekhov’s tragicomedy. For the Rose to bloom, however, it needs to create a distinct personal identity.The stage helps. Based on the dimensions of the Elizabethan Rose, it is wide and shallow. This precludes deep-focus grouping, but it brings the action well forward. What is sad is that the original plan, which was for Hall to create a resident company doing eight shows a year, has been cancelled due to lack of funds. Hall has handed over directorship of the Rose to Stephen Unwin, the outgoing boss of English Touring Theatre, which has produced the current Vanya. All this may be sensible and pragmatic, but if the Rose is to make its mark, it needs to possess its own policy rather than simply be one more receiving theatre, which produces no work of its own.Ironically, Chekhov’s play is about thwarted hopes. And the virtue of Hall’s production is that it conveys the characters’ rich potential for life. Nicholas Le Prevost’s Vanya is a figure of crackling energy, corroded by his loathing for the Professor, whom he dubs “a sort of scholarly kipper” in Stephen Mulrine’s lively new translation. Neil Pearson’s Astrov is a visionary ecologist driven to drink by a mixture of overwork and the mediocrity of Russian provincialism. And Michelle Dockery, the outstanding Eliza in Hall’s Pygmalion last July, suggests in the feverish kiss she finally gives Astrov that Yelena has a sexual voracity which is blocked by her marriage to an ailing academic.Hall brings out not just the dynamism behind the characters’ lassitude but also the quality of endurance that makes Chekhov so moving. It is there in Sonya’s last speech, which Loo Brealey delivers with defiant optimism. And you see that capacity for survival in Ronald Pickup’s Serebryakov, who counters impotent decrepitude by writing yet another pamphlet, and in David Ganly’s Telegin, still struggling to cope with his wife’s desertion the day after their marriage.

Hall’s production, which goes on an eight-week tour after its Kingston run ends, gets this gleaming, glass-fronted playhouse off to the brightest possible start. It reminds us that Chekhov’s elegiac note is the paradoxical product of an unsatisfied rage for life. 

 

1984 Production Blog - 2

Sunday 20^th January

Today was our first extended rehearsal and it was infinitely more productive.  Having 5 hours of rehearsal rather than two means we get far more done.  Today we are working on Act 1.

The cast meet at 10am- all looking a little shell-shocked at having to get up early on a Sunday morning; I know how they feel.  After an energetic warm-up to wake everyone up, we get down to the business of rehearsal.  The rehearsal is slow as we are trying to incorporate as much of the furniture as we can and with a play with so many scene changes, the cast have to spend time lugging tables, chairs, benches and beds in and out of the rehearsal space.  We manage to get through most of Act 1, stopping a few pages shy of the interval.  We have achieved a lot today, the flow from one scene to the next is getting better and we are getting glimpses of how powerful the ensemble scenes (in which we have 30 actors on the stage) are going to be.

A good day, hope next Sunday is as productive.

 

Sunday 27^th January

Another early Sunday start.

Today we are focussing upon Act 2.  The second half of the play is very different  from the first, and concentrates mostly on the love affair between Winston and Julia.  So far, we have rehearsed these scenes with just these two actors.  Today is the first time that they will have to perform these scenes in front of the rest of the company.  They both do really well, they are clearly getting more comfortable with working one and other, which really helps for the more intimate moments of the play.

We do some detailed work on the moments of violence in the play.  We have to rehearse a fight sequence in which a Patrolman (the Police of 1984) has to beat another character with a baton.  The batons we have ordered (American style ‘nightsticks’) have yet to arrive, so we have to use a length of plastic piping as a rehearsal prop.  We mark the scene through slowly and carefully, making sure that all of the actors involved are safe and happy.  Despite the plastic piping, the scene looks suitably brutal.

Today has been a more difficult day for our ensemble- there is far less for them to do in Act 2 and they are clearly itching to get up and act, but I appreciate their patience.

We stop just before we get to Room 101 and the torture scenes- will save those for next week.

Review - Twinkle, Little Star

If someone mentions Kenneth Alan Taylor, you will no doubt think of pantomime. Famously, Taylor has not only written and produced the Nottingham Playhouse pantomime for the last 24 years but he always plays the dame. What you might not know is that he is a fantastic actor and this play gives him a perfect opportunity to demonstrate this. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Philip Meeks’ play is that it wasn’t written with K.A.T. in mind. The play is a monologue delivered by Harold Thropp, an aged pantomime dame, reminiscing about a life spent doing what he loved and regretting the loss of history and tradition. Thropp sits in a dingy dressing room cleverly reproduced on stage in a pantomime style where the furniture is drawn as if in a comic book. Harold goes through his well practised routine as he dons frock, wig and make-up to be Widow Twankey at the turning on of the town’s Christmas lights. He arrives fuming that he has been given a third-class dressing room and this is to be a constant theme as he complains of the decline in respect for pantomime traditions. His arch enemy is Jezz, the famous-for-being-famous reality TV star who is the real draw for the audience. Harold suffers multiple indignities and humiliations as his scenes and costume changes are cut in favour of his brutish nemesis’s cheesy pop tunes. In between these foul-mouthed rants, Harold’s mood becomes more reflective as he tells of his early career as the youngest pantomime dame and the joy of his early performances. He remembers with warmth nights spent cottaging in London’s public conveniences and the odd characters he found there, troubles with the law and his many happy years with his now deceased partner.Harold, living within a world of memory and sentiment, seems to be as obsolete and unsuited to the modern world as others see him. Though he is pitiful, bitter and malicious, we also grow to have respect for him and the tradition he represents as he coaxes us into seeing the world through his eyes. Although this piece is mostly a character study, Harold’s plan for revenge on Jezz is gradually revealed and we share his delightful anticipation of its fulfilment.Since the Lakeside began producing its own plays, they have yet to present anything of less than top-notch quality, mostly it seems thanks to the wonderfully talented producer Matt Aston who co-directs this piece. Twinkle Little Star is another triumph for the Lakeside Adrian Bhagat - Left Lion 

REVIEW - Twinkle, Little Star

Twinkle, Little Star

This real-time monologue from a panto dame making his final appearance as Widow Twankey is the perfect vehicle for Kenneth Alan Taylor. A master of the craft, his own Dame performances used to border on the anarchic and he is returning to play Twankey once more in 2008.

It is a riveting piece, played out here on a quirky comic strip set that suggests all the wonderful silliness of panto. Harold Thropp is the wrong side of 60. He is assigned to a basement dressing-room, upstaged by a talentless soap star and overlooked and underestimated by a shallow theatre management that bulldozes the panto tradition and can’t even spell. His revenge is sweet, in the darkest and most triumphant of climaxes.

Taylor is hypnotic to watch as he potters around his dressing room, performing practised pre-show rituals like unpacking his kettle, scattering his face powder, unwrapping the tools of his trade from folded cloth, pulling on his glossy tights. His account of Thropp’s life as a gay man in the era of police raids on public toilets is outrageous but the parallel tragedy of lost love is aching.

The audience is fiercely on his side, drawn into despising the third-rate show as much as he does and loving this dogged, arch, comic trouper. Distant sounds of piano and chorus rehearsing and fragments of voices and memories flutter in and out. When Tropp finally dons the Twankey wig, he is utterly transformed, walking like a dame and speaking like a dame. It is brilliant.

 

• By Pat Ashworth
• Published Wed 23 January 2008 at 13:20
• THE STAGE

 

 

1984 Production Blog - 1

The blog - Owen Calvert-Lyons (DIRECTOR)

Welcome to the rehearsal blog for York Theatre Royal Youth Theatre’s forthcoming production of George Orwell’s classic novel 1984.  Hopefully, this blog will give an insight into the rehearsal process without giving too much away for those planning to see the production!

Monday 8^th January

Rehearsal of Act 2 with actors playing Winston (Oliver O’Shea) and Julia (Sophie Ramm).  At the beginning of the second act, time has moved on by two months.  This can often be a challenge for actors as their character relationships have developed without them having the opportunity to perform those changes.  We begin with discussions: how have those 2 months been spent?  How many times have these characters met in that time?  How has there relationship developed since we last saw them at the end of Act 1? 

We then get the scene on to its feet, blocking the action of the scene.  One of the pivotal moments in this scene is the point at which we discover Winston’s fear of rats.  A rat scurries across the room and Winston freezes in absolute terror.  This is a complex challenge for Oliver, as phobias are instinctual and deep-rooted; it is difficult to convey such an extreme reaction.  We look at the way that the body responds- muscles contract giving the body tension and rigidity, the body releases adrenaline which causes Winston to shout in panic.  It’s an important moment, a moment in which we see that Winston’s fear of rats is absolute, it overrides all other instincts and emotions; including his feelings for Julia.

Tuesday 9^th January

First meeting with Michael Nabarro, Lighting Designer for 1984.  We go through the text page by page discussing the location, time of day and atmosphere of each scene.  Michael will then have to translate each of these into an appropriate lighting state.  This is an opportunity for Michael to ask me questions about the staging of each scene, so that he knows which areas of the stage need to be lit and what effects I want to achieve.  Michael will now go away with detailed plans of the stage and the lighting rig and begin to create a lighting design.