Sad today to be saying farewell to the On Golden Pond company, who have been such a delight to have in the building. Tonight they will drive back to their homes in Cheshire, London, Leeds. The show has been terrific – so warmly received by audiences, who have, I think, been as surprised as I was to discover the play is a black comedy.
As On Golden Pond moves out of the auditorium, Les Liaisons Dangeureuses moves in to begin technical work in preparation for opening night on Friday. Yesterday one of the stage management team was making blood for the big final fight scene. Surrounded by powders, food colourings, mixing bowls, cloths and what looked like jelly he was mixing up different recipes and auditioning them by smearing them onto big white cards. Walking past them made me feel quite faint.
And next week the building will be packed with productions, since Laurel and Hardy joins us for rehearsals starting on Monday. When I asked a stage manager why there is a pink flamingo standing to attention outside the rehearsal room, she answered, “It’s for Laurel and Hardy, of course!”
Of course…
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This Saturday and Sunday we held auditions for local children to join the cast of The Wizard of Oz at Christmas. They’ll play Munchkins, the citizens of the Emerald City and the Winkie guards enslaved by the Wicked Witch of the West. We’re asking a great deal from the children, who need to be able to sing, act, dance; work together as co-operative members of a team; commit to a heavy workload and still stay smiling. So we have a rigorous selection process. This weekend we met with a hundred budding performers.
I’d expected it to be a fairly gruelling weekend for me – who would willingly commit to spending a weekend with a hundred children? – but in fact it was a total delight. Our stage management and admin staff had the whole thing under control, so that calm reigned throughout the building. Parents helpfully brought their children along in good time so that everything ran smoothly. Our education team ran the workshops and auditions, making them enjoyable for the children participating. Then at the end of every audition came a real treat, when each child sang his or her song. We heard some terrific versions of classic numbers; saw some wonderful performers; admired the intelligence and concentration of these young people who were giving us part of their precious weekend; and were overwhelmed by the eagerness with which they met each task. It will be a hard job to select forty of them to go through to The Wizard of Oz Summer School – and then even harder to whittle that forty down to twenty-four for the actual performances.
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Wardrobe is a confection of vanilla and cream. Boned corsets, gauzy petticoats, palest pastels shot through with gold crowd the costume rails.
Les Liaisons Dangereuses is in rehearsal, and the craft departments are busy making set, props and costumes. Especially costumes. Featuring a cast of bored women looking for love and adventure, this is the theatre equivalent of Footballers’ Wives, and the costumes need to reflect that. What’s on the rails is the Gucci, Galliano and Gaultier of the late eighteenth century.
Normally, with a play of this scale and costumes of this quality, we’d hire a lot of frocks in. But there are two movies currently being made set in this same period, and they’ve had first dibs on the costumes available from most of the major hire companies. As a result, we’re making a lot more pieces than we normally would – a mixed blessing, since our skilled wardrobe team love making these stunning costumes, but it takes a lot of time.
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I’ve been meeting actors this week for Cider With Rosie. As ever, this is when the play really starts to come alive to me, and ideas start sparking.
I hate reading in – I forget my lines because I get involved in watching the actor, plus I know I’m a dreary actor so no help whatsoever.
So I’d asked an actor to come and help me by reading in. As well as being extremely useful in the interview she brought in a copy of Cider With Rosie she’d got from the library.
It was an illustrated version, containing many of Laurie Lee’s own photos of his mother, the cottage, Slad Village and his siblings and school friends.
It was immensely inspiring.
The book is such a tradition, the story and characters so deftly drawn in the play, that it’s easy to forget they were all real people.
Discovering that they were, seeing their faces, seeing their names in the census, makes the piece even more poignant to me.
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Jamaica Inn is in its final two performances. It’s been hugely successful – a packed auditorium every night, and a real buzz from the audience who have enjoyed the story and style enormously. Now, with On Golden Pond due to open next week and the rest of our summer season in the hands of freelance directors, my thoughts are turning to Cider With Rosie, which will be the next show I direct for the Vic. I met up with the designer last week to start talking about it.
Like Jamaica Inn, Cider With Rosie is adapted from prose, so it has similar structural features – particularly a lot of different locations and events explored through a large cast of characters. There isn’t as much at all going on in the way of plot, though. I think that I want Cider With Rosie to be much simpler than Jamaica Inn. Jamaica Inn is all about people seeming to be what they are not, and it was fun to extend this to the use of props etc, so that everything on stage was performing some kind of subterfuge, and being versatile and complex. I think Laurie Lee’s world is much simpler and clearer. The narrative is so tremendously simple and clear, and all the more poignant for it. I like the thought that actors might transform from one character to another with the absolute minimum of change – what one remembers of somebody is often boiled down to a single significant characteristic (the shine on a pair of spectacles; a scent of lavender water). I like that idea, that memories don’t come cluttered with huge detail but as simple bold impressions: the essence of the thing, rather than the thing itself.
I think this time I’d like to create not an epic, but a very intimate play.
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