Upstairs, coloured scarves are flying and shoulders snaking as choreographer Shobna Gulati leads a dance session with the Arabian Nights’ young company. “Now I need you to get a bit more Persian for me”, she tells the girls as they pull together a wedding dance. Downstairs, puppeteers Blind Summit are introducing the cast to puppet Sinbad, exploring how he enters, moves on stage and exits. “What’s he thinking?” Blind Summit asks one of the cast, who very honestly admits she doesn’t know. “I could tell,” comes the reply. This afternoon we’ll be in an English country garden as we discuss the set proposal for A Voyage Round My Father, and as the day goes on we’ll find ourselves in the honeyed warmth of a rural Irish bar for this evening’s performance of The Weir. A trip round the world and back all in a day’s work.
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I popped downstairs to get a cup of tea and found the Fame academy in our Green Room. A dancer sitting on the sofa, practising the complex hand movements for the dance she’s just learnt; an actor sitting on the other side of the room, playing a strolling rhythm on his guitar, two actresses improvising bluesy harmonies over it in between mouthfuls of their lunch. This is the enormously talented Arabian Nights cast, so full of energy and enthusiasm that, despite nine hours of dancing, singing, acting, clowning rehearsals, they still perform all the way through their lunch break.
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Guest blogger – Communications and Marketing Officer Clare Hargreaves
Most people think that PR people make good schmoozers. I’m sure that in most cases that’s true. Except I’m terrible at it. Worse than that, I actively make people feel uncomfortable. An unsuspecting mover or shaker being met with my incessant need to fill any silence is the social equivalent of being sprayed in the face with fly repellant. So the news that I had been asked to go to the TMA awards to ‘meet people’ was at first flattering, then exciting, then utterly terrifying. What would I say? Who was I supposed to meet? And most importantly – what would I wear?
The TMA awards celebrate the best in regional theatre and the New Vic had been nominated for Best Musical Production. I was privileged to see Chris Monks’ breathtakingly brilliant re-working of Don Giovanni earlier this year and it was a belter. So I was quietly confident that we might walk away with the gong.
After getting on a train in bright winter Stoke-on-Trent sunshine to emerge from the London Underground in depressing darkness, the glitz and glamour of the awards awaited. Armed with a new frock, a glass of champagne and something that resembled an upmarket Twiglet, the New Vic’s Artistic Director, Theresa Heskins, and I filed into the auditorium with everything crossed.
Entertainment came from a fabulously postmodern band of musicians donning bow ties and white suits – the irony of them playing a loop of West End show tunes at a regional theatre awards event was not lost. The awards themselves were great: a weird and wonderful skit from Brian Conley as he picked up his gong for Best Performance in a Musical; a moving acceptance from producer Bill Kenwright, his Lifetime Achievement Award presented by ‘The Tart’ herself – Bill’s term of endearment for Dame Judi Dench. Obviously they were chums and had that kind of relationship. I noted that, if I were attempting to attract her attention over a crowded room, ‘Dame Judi’ would probably be a safer bet.
Unfortunately, we didn’t go home with an award – we lost out to Liverpool Playhouse’s Once Upon a Time at the Adelphi. City of Culture and all that, I decided. But the nomination was the thing and being put in a bag with some of the Industry’s finest was a great – and well deserved – compliment.
In between eating a variety of indistinguishable nibbles we managed to do a bit of flesh pressing, assisted by Sir Brian and the impressive Ann Fender, who had forgotten more about PR than most people accumulate in their entire career; RSC Director Michael Boyd, Brian Conley, friends from our sister theatre – the Stephen Joseph in Scarborough, Chris Monks and multi-talented partner Jan Birkett, playwright Bryony Lavery – almost all posed for a photo.
I left the event suitably uplifted. An evening minus any fly repellant-type disasters or social faux pas was a result in my eyes. Plus I got to spend the evening with some inspiring and genuinely interesting people.
The only disappointment was not meeting Dame Judi. Despite some gesturing and hopeful eyebrow-raising I was unable to catch her eye. Maybe I should have gone with ‘Tart’ after all. But then again, I am hoping to be invited to another one.
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What with a normal-sized show in rehearsals and a huge Christmas extravaganza on the horizon the New Vic’s craft and production departments are ferociously busy at this time of year. The scale of our Christmas production threatens to crush them under a sea of demands – for dazzling costumes, intricate paintwork, meticulously crafted lanterns, ingeniously constructed puppets. So everyone’s keen to get Christmas underway as soon as possible, which means getting the show before it done and dusted as soon as possible.
As a result, when I entered the rehearsal room on Monday, ready to embark on the second week of rehearsals for The Weir, I found myself in a well equipped Irish pub. Underfoot were floorboards mellowed with the patina age and of thousands of footsteps following a well-trodden route to the bar, which sat imposingly loaded with bottles and glasses, a till, and dozens of knick-knacks suggesting the landlord’s been here for sometime. At the other end of the room a woodburning stove set on a quarry tiled hearth invited me to settle into the comfy leather chair. Tables, stools, ash trays and beer mats suggested I was in for a cosy evening. When the actors arrived to start rehearsals, sipping a water and burnt sugar concoction designed to look like whiskey and road testing a dozen non-alcoholic stouts, the picture was complete. The play is a garrulous, entertaining evening in a pub, and so the actors have spent all of rehearsals in that mode. As a result, I feel as though my entire week has been one long, cheerful evening in the cosiest bar you can imagine, populated only by friends. But no one’s got drunk, so no one’s become maudlin or aggressive or embarrassing or had to be poured into a taxi – and no hangovers, either.
Of course it’s rare to have the entire set so early in rehearsals. Fortunately theatre people have vibrant imaginations, and we’re quite used to imagining that this red tape on the floor marks a river; that this plastic chair is a Belfast sink; that a woman in jeans and trainers is dressed in flowing eighteenth century silks. Nonetheless, being surrounded by the real thing exudes an atmosphere that seeps into the play, giving it a richness and depth.
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Before I arrived at the New Vic I used to resist thinking about Christmas until the first day of December. No matter how much supermarkets would throw at me from September onwards, I was determined to avoid spending a third of my year celebrating Christmas. So it was somewhat disconcerting to arrive at the New Vic and realize that here, Christmas begins in January – at the very latest. In fact, I’m already well underway with planning Christmas 2009
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