Stage three: one month in

I have been very bad with updating what’s going on, school is really rather busy. So a brief update on what’s happening: not a lot.

It hasn’t been moving as swiftly or as productively as hoped, for various reasons: struggling to get us all together at the same time; lack of concentration and interrupted rehearsal (though one interruption did see a fire engine come and put out a blaze in a car).

Not too happy with how rehearsals were going I got ‘stricter’ during them and this did see us getting somewhere. Mainly working out where the Voice’s lines would come and how lines are said. With small rehearsal spaces acting isn’t too easy but that’s been ok for the first few weeks; now I’m keen to rehearse in our performance space as much as possible, which isn’t proving easy a the room is unavailable apart from on Fridays.

Aware that it’s hard for the actors to learn their lines without the motivation of a definite date or performance in sight I went to Miss Blake and asked if a performance date was possible. Her response was we can do something before Christmas even if it’s just an informal one; this idea wasn’t met with much excitement from the cast. Oh dear.

The most recent Friday rehearsal finally saw some enthusiasm all round, I must say it left me with yet more questions. Miss Blake now said that there was a monologue night in January and we could do something there or on another evening, a snippet. That’s a really long time to do a snippet with the whole of the Christmas holidays to forget it. However, on a positive note (I really have been a bit of a whiner) the room is going to look great: we’ll make it look exactly like a Therapist’s office making the whole play far more intermit and realistic.

The rehearsal made me realise that I’ve maybe focused too much on the script, as I believe that the best play has to start with that; however, I think we should look deeper into the characters. In the next few rehearsals we’ll do some off script improvisation and hot seating (asking the characters questions irrelevant to the script about their life). This will hopefully make the actors more at one with their characters and remove the block of written words confining how they feel. The hot seating will be interesting here as Mr. Big won’t be able to answer the questions for he believes what Jane beliefs he is. He is the interpretation of the view she has towards her brother.

So then, onwards and upwards…