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…