Romeo and Juliet opened this week with a clutch of enthusiastic reviews and audiences gripped by the fights, the surprising musical score and the clog dancing, as well as by the young lovers themselves. It’s a great show. But how was it ever two hours’ traffic of the stage? Broadsides resist the urge to lounge about in the verse, grasping hold of it and running with it. And the director has made careful cuts, but plenty of them. Despite all this it’s still half an hour longer than the prologue promises. Perhaps the answer is less arithmetic and more history: before the Victorians invented the railways and made timekeeping a profession, maybe we were less conscious of the passing minutes than we are now, surrounded by clocks and living our lives so precisely according to the morning alarm clock; tea break, lunch break, close of business; the start time of Eastenders or CSI.
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How to work most effectively with other directors is a question I constantly ask myself. How to be supportive without interfering; how to be useful without toe treading. Different directors require different input – some like to meet and chat over lunch, others like a fresh eye on a run through and thrive on comments afterwards. Others just need someone to congratulate them on doing a good job.
My mind has been preoccupied with the question of how to be useful to other directors because there have been so many of them about this week. On Wednesday, I had lunch with a writer and director who are embarking on a new production, Flamingoland, for us. As I’d worked on an early draft of the script, my job was to hand over responsibility. On Thursday I saw a run through of Romeo and Juliet, where the director is on stage in some scenes and so found a second pair of eyes useful. On Friday I saw a run through of The Flood, a new play for schools, where my job was to encourage the director to grasp the nettle and take some bold steps she’d been considering.
I had expected it would be difficult to work with other directors. Not a bit of it. In fact, it’s a great pleasure to have someone around whose job is to think about many of the same things that preoccupy me, and to observe how they do that, picking up ideas and techniques on the way. I’m always impressed by what directors make of the plays I’ve programmed, and grateful to them for the diligence, tenacity and creativity they bring to the table. And, of course, it’s so relaxing to watch someone else working!
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The first read through of Romeo and Juliet. We’re producing this with Northern Broadsides, whose trademark is classic work presented with simplicity and clarity – and, most notably, with largely northern actors speaking the verse with their own accents. So everyone, from Duke to pot boy, has a regional accent, taking us on a tour from the Yorkshire Moors to the Peak District and from Liverpool to Hull. I’m reminded, listening to the actors reading the first act, how inspiring this is. Actors find a genuineness, a candour, a groundedness, when speaking with their natural accents – remembered from childhood dinner times, from playground games, from furtive kisses behind the bike sheds – which they seem to lack when speaking through the polish of received pronunciation, when perhaps a little of themselves is packed away in order to be someone else.
And Shakespeare’s language takes on a new vibrancy when watercolour southern vowel sounds are rubbed out. I’m constantly surprised to hear it, but I shouldn’t be; for Shakespeare’s England the word ‘love’ had a full-blooded vowel sound that was wrung out by successive generations to become a politely limp ‘u’ sound that, for me, makes love an airy concept instead of a fleshy, vital thing. When Mercutio tells Romeo, “If love be rough with you, be rough with love”, there is a fresh muscularity to the line that brings out the sense that passion and pain are near cousins.
And there’s one other thing. The spoken vowel sounds, as much as the consonants, are grist to the performer’s mill; when they have such robustness, they can be used in the way an opera singer uses them, soaring and twisting with them to get the sense across, in a way that’s hard to achieve with the light touch of received pronunciation.
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Be My Baby has been in technical rehearsals all week, working through the minutiae of scene changes, of which there are many, and lights, costume, entrance and exits, props and sound. It’s been a tough week for the performers, who are all adorned with big pregnancy bumps but still have to work hard on stage. Tonight, finally, we welcomed an audience in to the building to see it, and were delighted with the experience. Having watched a moving, delicate piece of theatre all week, the presence of the audience reminded me of what had surprised and enchanted me at first reading – how funny it is! It’s such a clever piece of writing, to be so witty and lively and yet so profoundly moving.
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Guest Blog: Vivienne Rowdon’s Blog on Rehearsals for Be My Baby.
In a play charting the journeys of four unmarried mothers-to-be, the initial challenge for the cast was that none of us had ever been pregnant.
Fortunately, many of the female staff at the New Vic are very keen on having babies and gratifyingly generous in their openness regarding all aspects of labour, various physical changes during the nine months and how your movement and mood may change.
We have all sat wide-eyed (and occasionally wincing) at their vivid memories, from waters breaking to holding their newborn for the first time.
Our fake ‘bumps’, crafted expertly by the Wardrobe Dept, have induced others to respond courteously and gently in and out of the rehearsal room. Indeed, actors working on other shows have instinctively offered us their seats during a tea-break.
So, armed with background knowledge we have embarked on Amanda Whittington’s script in rigorous detail, revelling in music of the 1960s, while our movement director, Lucy Hind, creates a physical narrative where words end.
Director Sarah Punshon is keeping us on our toes, genially demanding specifics and intuitively shaping the scenes.
The New Vic itself is a remarkably open building, consistently friendly and lively with a dedicated creative team who are delighting us with period costume, props and an ever shifting sound design.
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