All week I’ve been in the rehearsal room with ten actors and a designer working through a draft of my Bleak House adaptation. Over the course of the week we’ve read the script a number of times, worked through every scene, talked about ways to improve it – and every night I’ve gone home and worked furiously on rewrites to bring in the next day. Finally, today, we read through an entirely new draft, which I was pleased to find sat well and made sense.
We also did some work on the staging, whilst designer Liz Cooke moved towards developing a physical world for the play. She’d brought in some Dore engravings, and we tried to recreate some of the images of poor people: shapeless bundles from which a hand stretched or a pair of eyes looked out. We tried to create some of the environments in the play – the chintzy warmth of Bleak House itself; the rickety staircase in Krook’s shop. We looked at some difficult staging moments - how might Miss Flite’s birds fly away at the end of the play? How might Krook spontaneously combust? We spent some time creating a crime scene and exploring how it might be animated CSI- style.
And of course we worked through the idea of the pre-shop promenade. We’ll create a number of environments backstage, each inhabited by one of the characters, and audience members will be able to walk through gathering clues with which to solve the mystery at the heart of the story.
This kind of week is valuable. Not only is a head-start on rehearsals, but also, for me, it’s nerve-wracking committing to adapting something, especially something so difficult as Bleak House, without someone else around to assess whether it’s good enough. Being able to hear the actors working with it gave me the objectivity I needed, as well as the all-important confirmation that the piece works on its own terms.
Sigh of relief! Now to gear myself up to direct this epic…
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Swine flu’s dominating the news, and we feared this might keep people away from our Open Day, but we were wrong. There was already a queue outside the doors before we opened them at 10am, and during the course of the day a steady stream of people have been exploring the New Vic.
We’ve flung open the doors to all the secret backstage places that usually remain hidden: in the costume department tailors dummies show off frocks from every period and part of the world; in the workshops displays of masks and puppets are ready to be animated; tours of the control room, with its lofty view of the stage, take place on the hour; in the Green Room our intrepid stage management team have cooked up a bucket of blood and are busy slitting throats with a cut-throat razor – a children’s favourite! Everywhere tight knots of people are grilling our staff on how they do what they do.
There are events for people of all ages. There are storytelling sessions for under 4s; a mummer’s play performing in the car park; demonstrations of lighting and sound effects. A careers desk for people who want to learn more about the industry. I’m leading a directing masterclass with the help of two actors hastily enlisted earlier this morning.
I knew it would be a treat for audiences and others to spend a day looking round this very special building, but I didn’t realise what a delight it would be to meet them properly. And not just for me: members of our backstage craft and production departments rarely see the audience, and almost never hear how much their work is noticed and appreciated.
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The Wicked Lady is a hit.
Listening to the audience is more akin to listening to people watching a firework display than a piece of theatre, with laughter and gasps ringing round the theatre and people eager to tell our front of house staff how much they’d enjoyed it.
The critics have, on the whole, been full of praise, which in the case of Lyn Gardner I’m especially pleased about as I have tremendous respect for her. Box office is buzzing. And the actors are clearly enjoying themselves, getting better and better all the time, and enjoying the enthusiasm with which each performance is greeted.
It’s a huge relief, especially as it’s all been such a risk, such an adventure.
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Come tech week and the country’s in the grip of a heatwave. Staggeringly hot weather.
I woke up on Monday morning knowing that not only would we spend 12 hours a day in a darkened auditorium, seeing little daylight, but also that the performers would be layered with costumes – lycra shorts and vests to provide a secure base for harnesses; stockings and wigs and hats; shirts and breeches and coats for the men; huge sack backed frocks with yards of petticoat fabric for the ladies. Both, in the case of the Wicked Lady herself.
But, having expected to be on our knees with heat exhaustion and light deprivation, it has in fact been a curiously pleasant week. I’d reckoned without the air conditioning, which keeps the auditorium at a steady 18 degrees, and keeping out of the sunlight isn’t so bad when it’s a fierce as it’s been.
Every night, though, I look forward to the treat of getting home about 10.30pm to a glass of chilled white wine and a breath of fresh air in a lantern lit garden.
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Getting The Wicked Lady ready for tech week has been touch and go.
About half way through rehearsals I realised I'd been over-ambitious. Five weeks should be enough to do a new play, and perhaps just enough to incorporate aerial techniques which were new both to the actors and to the building; but to do both I've begun to fear will be impossible in the time we have. Too late to do anything about it now: with tickets sold and opening night bearing down on us all we can do is work hard and keep our nerve.
The actors bear the brunt of this. Every day is a tough one for them, with several hours of hard physical work every morning before they even start rehearsing the scenes, not to mention the anxiety as the thought of an audience looms.
One thing's for certain though. Although we may not be ready for tech week, the run through this afternoon convinces me that we have a production that works very well indeed in the safety of the rehearsal room.
Now I'll hold my breath and see whether it can fly in the auditorium.
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