http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php Copyright 2012, Theresa Heskins Theresa Heskins en-US SPHPBLOG 0.5.1 http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php?entry=entry120111-151521 Two days in London meeting actors, a video artist and an aerial choreographer. I love living in Newcastle-under-Lyme, where it’s friendly and leafy and only takes me fifteen minutes to get into work; but occasionally it’s nice to spend a few days in London and move projects on apace at the same time – despite spending hours sitting in traffic!

I’ve been auditioning for the New Vic’s fiftieth anniversary documentary Where Have I Been All My Life and a dramatisation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd , which we’re going to create with the same nine actors. Together they make a very exciting prospect. We’re holding meetings at the Drill Hall, where lots of auditions and rehearsals happen, and it’s a joy to bump in to people I’ve been out of touch with, catching up on news and gossip. It’s interesting, too, to see actors encountering Alecky Blythe’s recorded delivery technique. So rare, to have the privilege of introducing people to a whole new theatrical form.

Back at my favourite hotel, where there’s always the gift of an interesting book on the bedside table. What better treat can there be there a good book? Past joys have included the poems of John Wilmot and Pablo Neruda; the plays of Stephen AdlyGuirgis; Milton’s Paradise Lost. Unless the New Vic’s administrator who booked the room tipped them off, surely it’s entirely coincidental that today’s book is….Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd...]]> http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php?entry=entry120111-151521 Theresa Heskins Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:15:21 GMT http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/comments.php?y=12&m=01&entry=entry120111-151521 http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php?entry=entry111230-154818 As we progressed through the week the office lights did eventually get turned on, but things remained eerily quiet. At times like this things can go two ways: either disaster strikes, and everyone who’s on holiday has to be called in or nothing happens at all, and the week slowly and uneventfully slips by. At first it looked as though the former would be the case, we lost a bank of lights, had to replace the entire sound desk between shows, found the Jabberwock refusing to travel any direction but backwards and crashed the Jabberwock so that he needed facial reconstruction. Thankfully, things calmed down after that, and I got casting for Where Have I Been All My Life and Far From the Madding Crowd well under way (usually I’m as eager to start it as I am to have my teeth pulled); and worked through a first draft of a future production. All with feet up eating chocolates. It’s a hard life being on duty over Christmas.

]]> http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php?entry=entry111230-154818 Theresa Heskins Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:48:18 GMT http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/comments.php?y=11&m=12&entry=entry111230-154818 http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php?entry=entry111227-174518 My, what a quiet day.

More than a thousand people made use of the New Vic today, which meant that the customer facing departments – box office, catering, front of house, stage management, technical team, dresser, actors security – were all out in force. But the office staff and those in the craft and production departments all had the Bank Holiday off, so it was a strange experience to walk in from a colourful, noisy front of House to the creepily quiet main office, where no one had even turned the lights on.

Which of course was a great opportunity to get on with shifting as much work as I can normally achieve in a week. Whilst sitting with my feet up, eating chocolates. What could be more perfect?
]]> http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php?entry=entry111227-174518 Theresa Heskins Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:45:18 GMT http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/comments.php?y=11&m=12&entry=entry111227-174518 http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php?entry=entry111222-184350 Oh, did I mention that I’ve been invited to attend a reception at Buckingham Palace?
I’m not doing a very good job of pretending to be nonchalant about something I’m inordinately delighted by. Which disturbs me somewhat as I’m not a great supporter of the tradition of hereditary monarchy. But an invitation to celebrate the bicentenary of Dickens, a writer whose stance on social justice I admire inordinately, makes me throw caution and principles to the winds in a desire to snoop around Buck House. At least that’s my excuse. Really I just want to tell my mum I met the Queen.
]]> http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php?entry=entry111222-184350 Theresa Heskins Thu, 22 Dec 2011 18:43:50 GMT http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/comments.php?y=11&m=12&entry=entry111222-184350 http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php?entry=entry111201-133552

Into Newcastle town centre for the big Christmas lights switch-on. Signal Radio’s booming roadshow; screaming and pop music from fairground rides; thousands of young people.

Some of them in a shop window: the New Vic’s Senior Youth Theatre, doing an unusual piece of theatre – a slice of detailed, lovingly polished, warmly lit fifties life, kitchen sink and all, but taking place in a shop front behind a plate glass window. It was fascinating to watch something on such a different scale from the rest of the evening’s activity. And especially to see how the many young people passing by reacted, noticing something on the periphery of their vision moving in a place where one normally expects to see stasis; turning to look; being surprised and delighted; staying to watch how the story turned out.

Sometimes finding the thought of joining in irresistible: pressing their faces up to the glass, trying to divert the performers (whose tremendous focus and concentration wavered not a whit). I took particular pleasure in the tiny tots walking past, a hassled parent pulling them along by the hand, oblivious to the little anoraked figure’s amazement as they stared at the extraordinary sight they were passing, as if they’d found themselves in a toy shop after midnight with all the wares coming alive. ]]> http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php?entry=entry111201-133552 Theresa Heskins Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:35:52 GMT http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/comments.php?y=11&m=12&entry=entry111201-133552 http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php?entry=entry111124-101004 After a long but pleasant tech week Alice opened in canon, first on Saturday night to an audience of adults, tiny tots and teens; then on Monday afternoon to 550 schoolchildren accompanied by a handful of teachers. Having been anxious about how it would be received, both performances were a relief. Adults and children alike were thrilled by it – such focused and attentive audiences, responding in all the right places, and a pleasure to perform to.
So I relaxed.

Which was a mistake.
Because half way through Monday’s performance, just as I was thinking, ‘they like it!’, an actor who’s tumbling, fighting, lifting, dancing, puppeteering throughout the play picked up a wicker skip by its rope handle and broke a finger.

Everyone took it in their stride, staying after the show to make change including another actor covering some of the more complicated moments and some fights and dances reworked to accommodate the finger without making an appreciable impact on the show.

The next day, one of the actors who was covering some of those moments began to feel more and more unwell. A trip to the doctor diagnosed a chest infection and recommended a few days in bed.

The upshot is that, five performances into the run, the only show we’ve done that’s the way we rehearsed and dressed it is the first one! That said, I don’t think the audience would notice, as we’ve reworked and covered moments remarkably well. The cast have been just amazing at taking all this on board. You’d think that so early in the run they’d need to get to grips with the normal show, but they’ve been so calm and inventive. Plus, thank goodness for an assistant director who’s approached the task with clarity and focus just at the time I’d exhausted all of mine.

So, this morning, a delight to hear five hundred children helping Alice to spell ‘Eat Me’ when she wondered what was written in icing on the top of a tiny cake…37,000 people will see the show, two thirds of whom are children; many of whom will be having their first ever theatre visit. A real privilege to know we’re giving them a special experience they’ll remember all their lives.
]]> http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php?entry=entry111124-101004 Theresa Heskins Thu, 24 Nov 2011 10:10:04 GMT http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/comments.php?y=11&m=11&entry=entry111124-101004 http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php?entry=entry111027-142747 Today our choreographer Bev Edmunds put together the first sequence of the show: a boat arriving at Etruria and Alice heading off into the market place to get something to eat.
If you don’t recall those scenes from Lewis Carroll’s books, it’s not your memory that’s at fault. Although in fact Looking Glass begins with a prologue remembering that hazy summer’s day when the author drifted down the river on a little boat with three little girls, Alice and her sisters Edith and Lorina, on board, these scenes are pretty much a construct: a framing device for my dramatisation of the stories.

Our Alice is rather a different child from the iconic one we’re used to. The real Alice lived in the rarefied academic atmosphere of an Oxford College was receiving an excellent education from a private governess who taught her French, geography, drawing room card games and etiquette; the fictional Alice was taking a journey through her learning, encountering Red Queens based on Miss Pricket that real-life governess, and hearing parodies of the school-room songs she was learning by rote. Lewis Carroll’s own sketches showed her as dark-haired but refined; Tenniel’s memorable engravings made her a neat little blonde in that famous blue dress. But my inspiration has been a snapshot amateur photographer took of Alice Liddell dressed as a beggar girl. Tattered clothes, bare feet, hand cupped in the hope she might receive a penny: the kind of child who’d have been an all-too-common sight on the streets of any mid-Victorian city.
]]> http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php?entry=entry111027-142747 Theresa Heskins Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:27:47 GMT http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/comments.php?y=11&m=10&entry=entry111027-142747 http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php?entry=entry111026-142635 An exhausting but very rewarding day today.
The designers and I started working on this show back in the spring, so it’s many long months we’ve been discussing how to make Alice fall down the rabbit hole; how to make her shrink and grow. These kind of scenic effects are particularly hard in the round. We don’t have any real flying capacity; and using traps or any kind of mechanised scenery is limited both by the size of entrances and under stage area, and by the audience’s proximity to the stage, which means it’s hard to disguise the noise of any such machinery.

So we’ve spent this year designing and re-designing flips and traps; touring the country to look at those belonging to other theatres; thinking our way round these sequences. I felt that many of the solutions we were exploring were reliant on design magic rather than actor magic, and the latter is the one I favour in a show like this. So eventually we put all our construction plans until we’d started rehearsing, knowing that there might be better solutions available once we started putting the play on its feet.

And today, thanks to our supremely talented cast and our composer James Atherton, we did indeed solve all those problems in the rehearsal room. I’m especially pleased with the rabbit hole, which uses the same principles as the journey to Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
]]> http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php?entry=entry111026-142635 Theresa Heskins Wed, 26 Oct 2011 13:26:35 GMT http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/comments.php?y=11&m=10&entry=entry111026-142635 http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php?entry=entry111022-142548 ‘A magician is an actor playing the role of a magician.’ Illusionist Darren Lang is working with us today, showing our White Rabbit how to make large objects disappear into impossibly small bags, conjuring magic wands and rabbits and flowers from nowhere and teaching our Alice to con a living as a street hustler. We watch some footage from The Real Hustle, and gasp at how easily people can be manipulated. Hopefully our audience will be as obliging!
]]> http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php?entry=entry111022-142548 Theresa Heskins Sat, 22 Oct 2011 13:25:48 GMT http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/comments.php?y=11&m=10&entry=entry111022-142548 http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php?entry=entry111020-142453 I’m just staggered by the number of skills our Alice company have at their disposal. It seems that every time I turn round there’s something new to surprise me. This afternoon I popped into the rehearsal room during tea break to find two actresses on pointe practising their ballet moves; in the Green Room another was rehearsing a refrain on the violin; another had found a quiet cupboard to go through his trumpet part; another was manipulating a cat puppet, finding how to make it breathe and move and clean behind its ear. Then the call came to go into a choreography rehearsal, and suddenly everyone was leaping and twirling and cartwheeling, all whilst singing in harmony. I got a bit of a shiver down my spine – a feeling that it’s going to be a rather breathtaking show to watch. Easy to get that thrill in week one: harder now to sustain it through to performance!]]> http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/index.php?entry=entry111020-142453 Theresa Heskins Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:24:53 GMT http://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/blog/comments.php?y=11&m=10&entry=entry111020-142453