EQUUS – director’s blog 2

Just finished our first ‘proper’ week of rehearsals, meaning we’ve got the text up and moving and began to set some movements and make some decisions. I’m always reluctant to use the word ‘blocking’, when describing setting the actors movements in the space as it feels very rigid and unimaginative – like directing by numbers. There is certainly a good percentage of the play which is mapped out in my head, which is inevitably dictated by the design decisions I made with Lydia a few weeks ago. For example, you can’t get around the set so once you’re off on one side, that’s it you’ve got to enter from that side again so I have the entrances and exits pretty much mapped out already. However, subtleties within scenes, when characters sit, move and stand, can’t be dictated beforehand as those decisions need to be made with the actors, in discussion and with everything justified. I spoke early on about about ‘wants’, which essentially in theatre terminology are objectives. What your character wants leads to actions, how does your character go about achieving that want? The way you go about that action leads to an emotion, which is affected by the circumstances of the scene. For example, if your objective is to find your friend and at the moment they’re not late and you have time to make the show you’ve booked for you’re probably not that bothered but 20 minutes later and you’re going to be late, you may now be anxious and annoyed and probably looking frenetically for them. So we are working on finding the characters wants and letting that lead us movement wise.

EQUUS is a fantastic play for discoveries and for highlighting contradictions in people, which is important to remember, that people are essentially contradictory, we may believe one thing but we may also believe in something else that seems a binary opposite to the earlier belief. Dora, Alan’s mother is a case in point – on one hand she is a deeply religious lady, who believes in the judgment of God but she is also deceptive to her husband, buying a TV behind his back and allowing Alan to previously go and watch TV next door without her husband’s knowledge and knowing he doesn’t approve. So then we need to look at the ‘whys’, why does she feel the need to be deceptive? Each rehearsal we build up a casebook of these characters, which hopefully enables us to be rigorous and truthful in our work and to communicate the realism of the piece and to essentially I suppose allow us to understand how all this has affected and been a cause of Alan’s condition and subsequently his crime.

We are working chronologically through the play and I am trying to work swiftly whilst allowing time for decisions to be made and discussions to be had. Everyone seems to be happy and on board and my shameless introduction of the rehearsal biscuit barrel seems to be doing the trick…hey whatever works! Next week we have a group analyst coming in to talk with us, who is much like a psychiatrist so we hope he can provide useful insights into the workings of a psychiatric hospital and the condition which Alan is suffering from. And we’re also going to visit some horses!

Pericles – Director’s blog 12

 

We have just come out of three days of intensive rehearsal gasping for breath and a little heavy eyed but healthy both in body and spirit. For the first time in 29 rehearsal sessions, yesterday afternoon we had a full company to work with. When I told the company this there was a pleasing shock amongst them and appropriate shaking of heads – then some clapping to mark this achievement! This was a milestone in a way I suppose, not a good one to mark but it came at the perfect time for our fourth run through. I was pleased to be able to reach this point to understand the transitions and journeys through the play. To aid this process with such an episodic piece I asked the company to think each time just before they go on to think about the ‘6 W’s’, which are: Where have I just come from? Where am I? What am I doing? Why am I doing it? When is this happening? Where am I going to now? This is especially important with this play as there are huge sweeps of time change and journeying where action and circumstance must be remembered for the story to make sense. There was a perfect example of this yesterday when at the start of the second half Pericles came in to meet Helicanus returning to Tyre after years travelling. Pericles came in all smiles and greeted Helicanus warmly. In my notes afterwards I asked Joe, who plays Pericles why he was smiling if the last thing that happened to him was that he had thrown his dead wife overboard and then given up his recently born daughter…? The 6 W’s!!!

On our final day we managed to work with more of the production elements that will assist our story telling, namely the curtains underneath the platform that help define place and become practical in the storm scenes, nearly the complete musical score – we are now just adding in one main piece of set, lighting and costuming. These are obviously key elements and the costuming will be the main element for the company to get used to as there are quick changes and understanding of where the costume bands are placed for each country. Wearing your costume for the first time lifts an actor immeasurably particularly a younger actor as it acts almost like a mask part covering their own identity part giving license to truly ‘become’ this ulterior personality. Some of the company don’t need this mask as they have the confidence in their own skin to be able to find the physicality beyond themselves where others don’t have the body confidence to be able to push themselves yet, which can come with age but for some may never completely come as self-consciousness is a trait that is present in many people, young or not. I try to address this with physical warm-ups that encourage them to play and be stupid – my reasoning is that if I look a prat that will allow them to submerge themselves in this as well. Or maybe I just look like a prat…

I have been very impressed by the company this week everybody has lifted their game immeasurably and been professional, committed and enthusiastic in their approach to rehearsals. I asked them to raise the bar for themselves this week and they have done that with vigour and I can only applaud them for that. The piece contains many diverse sections drawn from different influences, from large physicalised choral scenes to single monologues spoken on a bare stage. There are some beautifully intimate moments in the play where I am drawn completely into their world and am beguiled by the truth in their playing. There are moments that make me laugh out loud every single time and I know they will continue to do so. I can’t wait for an audience to see this piece, as I want the company to have people watching and engaging in the world and characters they are creating and for them to feel their reciprocal energy. We are so close you want it come round quickly but now a part of me wants it to slow down as I don’t want it to end. I’m never happy either way! We still have a way to go to get up to performance level but we are on the right road and heading in the same direction.

Twelfth Night – Director’s Blog

Juliet Forster

Eight of the cast come together for the first week of rehearsals, the other four will join us next week. The staggered start is good in that it makes the best use of everyone’s time, and allows me to concentrate just on certain characters in more detail, and on certain elements of the production, rather than being faced with everything at once. However, it does mean that we won’t have all the voices for the first readthrough, and this is further complicated by one of my first wave of actors arriving in York and contracting food poisoning from a dodgy takeaway on the first night… Welcome to York.

So we have seven cast members on the first day, we meet, have a look at the theatre space then head down the road to the rehearsal rooms. After some general chat and introductions we look at the model box and talk about the design for this production. I explain that for me Twelfth Night is a play about dreams and fantasy – all the characters are wishing for something, and the theme of wish fulfilment is clear even in the play’s subtitle – What You Will – and that there is something in the play’s very nature, in it’s construction, that feels quite dream like, and as such I wanted to set the play in a dreamscape – something non-naturalistic, but not so abstract as to not have its own internal logic. The result is elements of Olivia and Orsino’s personality colliding into one another and washed up on a sandy shore. Something resembling a delicate, but broken gilded bird cage complete with swing takes up one side of the stage, whilst the masculine, athletic bars and equipment of a Victorian gym encircle the other side. A string on lanterns cuts across the stage as if it has landed there after a storm. I also show them a sail which will be in at the top of the show, on which we will project a film sequence depicting the twins arrival and separation from each other in the storm and shipwreck. We briefly discuss costumes, which they will see designs for the following day, and I explain that we are using accents of the Victorian era in the design, because of its association with slightly repressive shapes, that works well with the theme of repressed desires, but that it is not meant to be set in any specific time or place. The cast seem excited and inspired by the set, so we get going with a warm-up game then sit down to read the text. Hearing your cast read the script for the first time is always both an exciting and nerve-wracking time, as the stakes feel quite high – “have I got the casting right?” “will the different voices sound right together?” etc., but even though we are several voices short, the read-through is a joy and I start to feel excited at the prospect of the next few weeks. I set them a bit of homework and that concludes day 1.

 

On day 2 we are joined by Actor number 8, if not entirely recovered, at least well enough to make a gentle start on things, and he is anxious not to miss more rehearsals. The actors come with the four lists I asked them to draw up the night before, these are based on Stanislavski’s approach to character, where each actor goes through the play to draw up a list of a) Facts b) Things I Say About Myself c) Things I Say About Others d) Things Others Say About Me. We use these as a basis for discussion to understand the characters and their journey through the play, and to make suppositions as to what we think they might be like. This process is important particularly when tackling such a well-known play where we already come with an impression of who these characters are, but we need to strip things back and discover it for ourselves, otherwise we can end up creating quite a generalised characterisation based on other productions we’ve seen, things we’ve read, heard etc. Amazingly, we spend all day on this, and yet we also quickly realise that we could spend a day on each character. It is really useful, and fascinating, and highlights where there are areas of backstory that we need to decide on to inform certain relationships and points in the play. We finish with an imaginative journey exercise where the actors get to travel to Illyria and connect imaginatively with the world and the characters – this works well and the feedback is really fascinating – it is really interesting how the imagination makes links and connections to things subconsciously, and some  revealing discoveries about the characters are made. We all feel ready to get going on the text now.

 

The following day, our Voice and Verse Coach takes the warm-up and encourages the cast to find the clues to their characters in the text, and this seems to set the actors up well to get going with rehearsing the play. We take each scene at a time, reading it first, and then going through a second time putting it into our own words – which is a very useful process, but also provokes a lot of laughter – before we put it on its feet an work it lightly. The rest of the week seems to fly by, and the scenes seem to come flying off the page, we are enjoying the balance between beauty and the pain of longing, and the raucous bawdiness of drunken scenes, and I feel I could happily spend the next four weeks just listening to Feste singing, but we do still have a job to do! At the end of the week we run together what we have done, and it’s good, it’s a great start, and I feel that we can now go no further without our other four actors, so we call it a day and look forward to Monday…