Monkey in the Wilderness

I’ve fallen behind a bit with the blogging, so we’ve had quite a few rehearsals since my last entry. Things have really stepped up in our last week before the showing. We’ve learnt two songs: Adele’s Hometown Glory, which will be sung by the whole group, and Lilly Allen’s Littlest Things, which the two pairs of Danny and Racheal from Scenes Five and Seven will sing together. Both songs were picked by Tom when he was set the task of coming up with a track list for the group, and they’re both really effective at evoking the mood of the play. The best thing about learning to sing them as a group is how we’ve made them our own songs rather than an imitation of the way they were originally sung.

There have been some emotional moments in the last few rehearsals. I think that’s partly because the more that we work on the play, the more we realise the power of the writin, but also more and more we’re starting to get a sense of the shape of the play because we’re looking at scenes in sequence rather than in isolation. In many ways the trajectory of Racheal’s journey is really painful to be a part of. Some of this came out in the hospital scene, when Dinah asked Terry, playing Racheal’s father Jonathan, to keep shouting at Amy, playing Racheal, whilst Amy said the lines where Racheal lets down all her walls and tells her father exactly how she thinks he has ruined their family. Needless to say, the eventual result was brilliant, and I think everyone learnt what level of commitment was required in order to carry these kinds of moments, which occur a lot in the play.

Other moments that stood out included a run of Scene Seven, in which Dinah asked Jack, playing Racheal’s husband Kevin, to play more to the audience, as if he was a character making a case for his wife’s infidelity before a jury (which was us, the audience). The result was a much more entertaining version of Kevin that we’d seen before. Obviously this wasn’t how the scene would ultimately play out when it came to the showing, but it allowed us to see a much more charismatic, humourous side to Kevin, which made his slide into violence and abusiveness even more shocking. Dinah made a very interesting point to all of us about how, as actors, we would have to learn to be able to bring certain parts of us to a role that we were perfectly happy to make use of in realise (e.g. being a practical joker) but weren’t as comfortable showing onstage. I was very interested to hear this, because it’s already something I’ve been asked to think about after our first notes session a few weeks back.

On Saturday we learnt a couple of new games, after our now-obligatory beanbag time. Everyone stands in a circle, and one person walks into the middle and turns to a person of their choice, who thens join them in the middle for a hug. After this, the original hugger takes the new space in the circle and the game carries on. As we played, Dinah would call out character notes like “That’s your son”, “That’s your husband” etc. Then we changed the game slightly. Whenever someone decided to leave the hug, they would say “I have to go” while their partner resisted letting them go. This immediately changed the emotional feel of the game, particularly when we thought of ourselves as the characters in the play. Suddenly we were watching Racheal’s holding on to their parents, or Kevins holding on to their Racheals, and so on.

One of the best things about how we’ve worked on this project is the way in which some really important discoveries have come out of nowhere. A good example of this was when we all came in to rehearse on Saturday morning, and Dinah laid out her plan for how we would spend the afternoon. Just before we were about to start, Dave asked if he could play the “trust game” because he hadn’t had a chance to play it yet and wanted to see what it was like. So he stood in the centre of a circle and we gently supported and pushed him around the circle with our arms held in front of us. Eventually we laid him horizontally and carried him above our heads around the room, before laying him on a mat on the floor. Meanwhile, Dinah put on a CD she had brought with her that morning, and we listened to Trouble by Ray LaMontagne. After laying Dave down and making him snug with different items of clothing, we then laid Freddie down too, so that both the characters playing Billy were laid out sleeping on the floor. Dinah asked various people to speak any lines from the play that pertained to Billy, and we could speak them to either actor regardless of whether we were actually in a scene with them or not. After this, we then laid Jack down too, and he proceeded to speak Scene Six with Verity while he had his eyes closed. Something about the combination of watching the three of them all looking vulnerable, and listening to Scene Six, particularly harrowing because both Jack and Verity seemed to have connected with it intensely at that moment, left a very strong impression on the whole group. After Scene Six ended, we all gathered close to the three sleeping boys and sang Hometown Glory a couple of times. The whole thing was exhausting, but also cathartic, and sparked a discussion about how difficult it was to put ourselves into the material we were doing without feeling physically and emotionally exhausted.

After this, we had a site-specific fun of Scenes Five, One and Seven. For Five, which is set in the changing room at Somerfield, we used the boys changing room at school. Although I wasn’t really able to watch the scene because I had to come in as Mr Moran halfway through, the general consensus seemed to be that it felt very intimate and natural. Obviously this was something we couldn’t replicate for the showing, but it was nice to do nonetheless. Before running Scene One, Dinah asked Verity, Freddie and Eleanor to run the action that takes place before the play starts, namely Christine banging on the door of their apartment and screaming at Jonathan to let them in. Terry, as Jonathan, stood silently inside the staff room whilst Paloma, as Christine, hammered on the door, and we watched from outside as she became more and more frustrated. It was also interesting to watch how Freddie and Eleanor responded as the children. From this, we all went straight down into the cafe where chairs were used to create the cramped space of the car. Terry, meanwhile, had left the staffroom and was standing on a walkway which was visible from down in the cafe, so that the three actors in Scene One. The scene played out with brilliant immediacy, especially when bystanders in the corridor could be heard saying “Oh no they’re just acting, let’s go over here.” As with the changing room, this is not something we are able to replicate for the showing, but it will undoubtedly help the actors when they come to recreating the sense of place. Finally, we ran Scene Seven using the benches outside by the lake to recreate the beer garden of the Elizabethan pub. One of the things that came out of this run was how we weren’t quite connecting with our environment. One problem Eleanor and I had come across in this scene was that we had become so caught up in trying to connect to each other that often our exchanges became rooted to the spot. Dinah told us we needed to think more about being outside and not just standing on the spot, but perhaps using the bench. I definitely want to rehearse the scene a few more times outside and see what else we can draw from it.

An interesting addition to our pool of warm-up games: we all walk around in the space, giving our attention to each other, until the group suddenly comes to a stop. At this point, someone speaks some of their lines, directing them to whichever actor they’re playing opposite in the showing, and that actor replies with the appropriate response. Once this is done, the whole group sets off walking around the room again (taking care that there is no obvious leader in the stopping and starting), until we all come to a standstill again. Very straightforward, but it was a very good way of finding out whether we were, in Dinah’s words, “on it”. The test in this game was not just to show that we had learnt our lines, but also be able to plug into our character and our scene without any preamble. It was interesting to relocate from the familiarity of what we had rehearsed so far and suddenly be transplanted into the unfamiliar “setting” of this game, where everyone was on their feet in the space, and things like blocking suddenly ceased to be important. It was all about getting on it, be able to connect to the material in a split second, connect with the person(s) we were talking to, and then go as soon as we were done.

I had a chance to get stuck into my scenes today, because we had a look at Scenes Five and Seven. Just before I sat down to watch Tom and Verity rehearse Scene Five, Dinah reminded me that I was in it – having been given the role of Mr Moran to learn. Oops. Still, I only had a few lines in the scene, and the main thing I was told to focus on was recognising that Moran is very much a functional character: he comes in in order to break up the romantic moment between Danny and Racheal, and then leaves. To emphasise this, Dinah asked Terry to pull me backwards as I came into the space, so that I had to make sure I kept driving forward physically in order to get my lines out before leaving. This is definitely something I can push more. Moran is quite different to my other part, Danny, and spending some time on exploring those differences would be well worth it.

I also got to run Scene Seven with Eleanor for the first time. This was a bit manic, because Dinah was cutting out lines and skipping parts as we made our way through the scene, but these cuts served to highlight the main focus of the scene, which was Racheal asking Danny to leave everything and come with her. Streamlining the scene in this way was actually very useful. It made it much simpler in a way to ask questions like “what do I want?” and “what am I trying to do?”. One thing that Dinah kept coming back to with all of us was “play the situation”. Just because we know that Simon Stephens has written a scene that is particularly tragic, does not mean that we have to do everything with a heavy sense of melancholy or finality. This was particularly useful to bear in mind when we were looking at the scenes with Danny and Racheal because there is a temptation to play “in love acting” or “tragic acting”. In fact, the power of both scenes comes from the fact that the poignant moments are very subtle, and there is a lot of amusing, comic dialogue between Danny and Racheal that makes the romantic sub-text all the more effective.

We also had a chance to speak to Dinah’s friend Christine, who comes from Stockport and has worked in the past with Simon Stephens (one of Christine’s friends actually played Racheal when Port was on at the Royal Exchange). It was really interesting to hear from someone who’d grown up in the place where the play is set, although hearing Christine talking about her own experiences growing up made me realise that although she might have a closer “fit” to the characters in the play (in that she comes from Stockport), in many ways she was (thankfully!) very different from Racheal. One of the things that struck me when Christine was answering our questions was how the core themes that the play deals with are accessible to everyone in our group. Although we all come from different backgrounds, that doesn’t change the fact that we all have our own experiences of family life and the pressures of growing up.

Today we started out with some more ComeStopGo, and then revisited an exercise we looked at in the first lesson: the family photos. All the Racheals were made into a composite Racheal, and all the Billys into a composite Billy. They then moved around the space, behaving as a cohesive, single person. It was interesting to see how two or three different takes on a character could find a cohesiveness by maintaining physical closeness and paying close attention to on another. Slowly other characters were introduced into the photo. Christine, Jonathan, Ronald and Anne all came and went, each reacting to the others depending on their relationship in the play.

Tom and Nanou had prepared some music and city sounds for us to listen to. The combination of the city sounds and the various tracks Tom had picked for each scene was a really nice way of capturing the mood of the play. Tom said he did something similar for himself for the Mysteries project, and it’s definitely something I’ll consider doing for myself in future as another way in to a particular period or setting. Particularly exciting was Dinah’s suggestion that we might actually sing some of the songs in the showing: Adele’s Hometown Blues as a kind of finale piece with everyone sing, and Lily Allen’s  Little Things, perhaps after Scene Seven, with all the Dannys and Racheals singing along.

We spent some time looking at various maps of Stockport, to get a sense of where different locations mentioned in the play were in relation to each other. Following a run of Scene Two, Dinah asked everyone to grap an pencil and paper and quickly sketch what they thought Racheal and Billy’s granddad looked like. Despite some of our contributions (okay, mine) lacking in quality somewhat, what was interesting was how similar some of these sketches were. Once they were all done, Paloma then quickly did a master drawing of Granddad, trying to incorporate as many of the elements from our sketches as possible. The result was a very realistic, very individual image of Racheal and Billy’s granddad. This exercise was very useful to do as a group, as several people were playing characters that talk about granddad. Now those people would have a unified idea of what he looked like, rather than their own personal image.

We ended rehearsal with a run of Scene Six, looking at the relationship between Racheal and Kevin. Dinah suggested that Racheal should not be played as if she knew something awful was going to happen, but that she fights to keep the peace between her and Kevin until it is no longer possible. Similarly, Kevin’s outbursts should not look premeditated, but should come out of a losing battle he has with himself to try and ignore his nagging suspicions about Racheal. Someone pointed out something very interesting about the exchange between Racheal and Kevin: he does actually make some effort to engage her in conversation, even if it is just to confide in her about what he doesn’t like. Racheal, willingly or not, only ever seems to say things that are contrary to whatever Kevin things. With this in mind, it’s possible to see their increasingly tense exchange in this scene as indicative of their whole marriage. The whole scene has more subtlety and depth as a result.

We started as usual with a few familiar games from previous sessions. We then did several exercises in pairs. The first of these involved simply spltting into A and B, with A taking B by the hand and taking them for a walk around the room while they kept their eyes shut. After we swapped so that both partners had a chance to lead and to follow, we took this a stage further. A silently led B around the room as before and then, under silent prompting from Dinah, gently laid B on the floor, or in a chair, and covered them with clothes as if they were tucking a child in bed, resting a hand on them as they “slept”. As an A, it was amazing how I immediately felt paternal and full of responsibility and care towards my B. And the end of the exercise, all of the Bs talked how safe and secure they felt, and how strange it felt when their “parent” suddenly broke physical contact with them at the end of the exercise and walked away.

Dinah then asked us to form into pairs and make two lines on opposite sides of the room. One side (A) was chosen to issue commands across the space to their respective partners (B). These commands were simply “Come”, “Stop” and “Go”. On “Come”, B would walk towards A, and would keep walking until he was either told to “Stop”, in which case he would stop still where he was, or “Go”, in which case he would turn around and walk away from A. What was interesting about this exercise was how easy it was to pre-empt the “Stop”, rather than walking with full conviction when told to either “Come” or “Go”. Also, quite simply, it wasn’t very nice being told to go!

After a few turns of this Dinah added an extra rule: in the event that B was told to “Come” and came right up to A, there shouldn’t be any awkward shuffling to a halt. In such a situation, A should be welcoming B into their space, and so should give them a hug! After changing round so that both sides got to be A and B, we then started to play so that neither side was in charge, and so both partners could give commands and move around. Simple actions like being told to walk away from someone, being told to walk towards them, and hugging them, very effectively evoked – in a fundamental way – many of the relationships in the play.

Following this, Dinah told us to make two lines in the centre of the room, again facing our partners, but this time standing much closer together. We then played a mirroring game, with both sides taking it in turns to physically mirror their partners actions. This was something we had done a while back in first term, but it was nice to revisit and make us think about the impact of all our physical gestures, no matter hwo small. After a while, Dinah mixed the pairs up and assigned them a character. So some were pairs of Racheals, or Dannys, and some pairs were made up of two different characters: Ronald and Jonathan, Anne and Christine, for example. After receiving our name, we carried on playing the mirror game, bearing in mind what we knew so far about our character. I was paired with Tom, and the two of us were Danny. We started experimenting with what the physicality of Danny might be – with neither side leading the mirroring exercise. Then, Dinah told us to start playing ComeStopGo, still in our character pairs. Again, it was interesting to play these familiar games but with the extra level of being a character. It gave everything a new significance. How might Danny respond to being told to Come, Stop or Go? Dinah went on to tell us that the characters we had been assigned would be the parts we would work on for the showing, explaining which actor would play which scene, and also clarifying whether anyone would be doubling up or not.

After this, David gave a very interesting presentation on his weekend trip to Stockport with Jack. It was great to see pictures of places that were settings in the play, such as the Lancashire Hill estate, the viaduct, the bus station and the Elizabethan pub. There was even a picture of David looking like he was about to nick something from Boots (somewhat prophetic, as he ended up being cast as Billy in Scenes Two and Three). The stories Dave told us about the area were very interesting, particularly about a notorious local criminal called Chris Little, who’d terrorised Stockport for almost ten years before being killed in a car crash. David and Jack managed to talk to a group of young lads in town, who enthusiastically told them that their plans for the weekend consisted of getting pissed and making trouble. The age range in this group ranged from ten to sixteen. This got us talking about often younger kids, like Billy in Scene Three, would tag along and hang around in gangs with their older siblings.

After reading through the last two scenes of the play, we had a rough run of Scene Three at the bus stop, with the actors playing Chris, Racheal, Lucy, Danny and Billy getting up in the space, while others hovered by them to feed them the lines. Several things came up from running this scene a few times. We all noted the extra precision and concentration required in a scene when several characters are speaking to each other at once. There was also a tendency for people to want to close the distance between themselves and the person they were addressing, which is not only unlike real life, but also makes things difficult in terms of stagecraft. If characters close in on each other too much then the visibility and clarity for the audience suffers as a result. From this point on we all had one very obvious bit of homework: lines!

Our second rehearsal started with a few more of those games that we found so liberating in our first session, and then another simple exercise which started to make us think more about the world of the play. We were asked to decide which character we wanted to be for this exercise, and then walk around the room with the physicality of that character. After a few minutes, Dinah asked us to tell the rest of the group who we were, and then selected two lots of four to be the family unit of Christine, Racheal, Billy and Jonathan. The rest of us were to move about the space as the outside world while these characters moved around, extending their physicality to signify their relationship with one another. Racheals and Billys held on to their anxious Christines. Overlooked Jonathans tried to catch up with the rest of their family.

Because Dinah has to leave early, we decided to crack on with reading through the play. First, however, we talked about the homework we had been given at the end of last lesson. Not all of us had got round to calling our siblings yet, however, those that did had some interesting things to say about how much they benefited from the experience in the light of what we had thought about in our last rehearsal. For my part, although I hadn’t yet called my little sister, I had a very interesting experience to share courtesy of my parents getting into a heated discussion about whether or not my dad was more partisan to me or my sister. Dad was telling Jack (who is in my group at school, and who happened to be staying over at my house this week) and my cousin Krishma (who happened to staying for dinner that evening) about how he had always had more confidence in my sister’s talent for doing things when we were growing up. Mum immediately rubbished this, saying that Dad was a lot more generous to me, not only because I was the eldest, but because I was a boy. It almost felt like Jack and I should have been writing the discussion down, especially after Krish started to weigh in with how much pressure she felt under to match the achievements of her older brother – pressures which Mum argued were entirely produced by her imagination.

Back in the rehearsal room, Dinah passed around some photographs that her sister had taken of the sights in Stockport, particularly of bus stops, which would be useful when visualising the setting for Scene Three. This made me wonder about whether there might be any tension when working on this project, between not worrying too much about the specificity of the location in terms of accents, and yet making sure that we spent some time researching what Stockport looked like. Not that this is a major conflict for me at this early stage, but I’m interested to see what will become of it.

We read through Scenes Three, Four and Five, learning new things about all of them as we read them alound. Scene Three, between the various kids at the bus shelter, really came alive when the various interspersed lines of dialogue were spoken aloud. It also illustrated how unsuitable it was for Billy to be hanging around with kids his sister’s age, who treated him like some of crazy performing monkey rather than an impressionable ten year-old boy. The discussion between Racheal and Lucy was also interesting. It immediately threw up the question of whether Racheal and Chris had had sex or not, but what was perhaps more interested was how the issue of sex was addressed in the scene, with Racheal perhaps trying to sound out Lucy to decide how she should reply, and Lucy suddenly becoming disgusted with Racheal once she had decided that the answer to her question was yes.

Scene Four was unusual. A lot of us spoke about how it felt somewhat disconnected to the rest of the play, almost dreamlike. Part of this was to do with the strange behaviour of Racheal’s grandmother Anne. Was she really demented? Faking it? Or a combination of the two? Racheal’s violent behaviour when she learnt of her Anne’s inability to give her money was very uncomfortable to hear, and it again highlighted the theme of grief being perpetuated through families, particularly when Anne suddenly calls out to Racheal at the end of the scene, suggesting the inevitable path that Racheal’s life will take.

Scene Five, by contrast, was a breath of joyous fresh air after the difficulties and drudgery of what had come before. The spectre of the previous scene was present slightly – did Racheal steal money from Anne to finance her new living arrangments? – but her first discovery of love with Danny was heartwarming. It made it even more a shock to move on to the next scene, where we were suddenly introduced to Racheal’s husband Kevin, and then just suddenly witness their marriage disintegrate. Racheal’s desperation to maintain normality in the scene was palpable, and once that normality is shattered she quickly tells Kevin of how much he is like her own father (tellingly, Stephens suggests that Jonathan and Kevin are played by the same actor). Throughout these scenes we had a growing sense of Racheal’s desire, and her need, to try and escape from Stockport, not only from her own family life, but also from this one stifling environment which is the only one she has ever known. Even by Scene Six, where it looks like she has escaped and created her own life, the past seems to catch up with her.

At the end of the rehearsal we split into guys and girls and spent some time going through each scene trying to establish the chronology for key characters, as well as looking at what is said about each character in text (i.e. clues given by the playwright that didn’t require any fleshing out on our part). Dinah also asked to think about which characters we might like to play, which came as something of a surprise, and left a lot of us scratching our heads as to who we might pick. Of course, that’s not to say we’ll get who we want. I think there is a lot about all of the male characters in the play that would give me room to try out new things and play with being out of my comfort zone, so I might not name one specifically. Besides, the main thing, as Dinah told us, was not to come up with who we didn’t want to play, as negatives are only limiting to an actor.

Our first rehearsal working on Port, and words can’t describe the sense of joy and relief that I and the rest of the group felt after just twenty minutes. Why? Games! Something had definitely felt flat about our group when we were working on the Mysteries for the first half of term. And after spending a bit of time taking part in name games, throwing bean-bags, counting as a group, clapping round a circle, and other games I can’t remember right now, I realised why we felt flat. Compared to last term, our first at drama school, when almost every teacher we worked with spent some time on making sure we introduced ourselves to each other, we hadn’t really had a chance to break the ice this term, despite the fact that we were in new groups. I think this meant that we were still trying to find ourselves as a group – irrespective of whether there were people we had already worked with – even after the halfway point in the term.

Thankfully, Dinah sorted that all out for us! After facilitating some much needed playing, she sat us down to talk about what she had in mind for our project. Any worries that we had about having to master a Stockport accent in five weeks were dispelled. What appealed to Dinah about Port was that it dealt with very human relationships that everyone in our group could relate to in some way. Working on accents would have been a bit much at this relatively early stage of the training, so we were encouraged to use our own voice to speak the text, perhaps with the possibility of adapting any specific vernacular touches in order to fit better with our group.

Having spoken about the play as fundamentally being about families, Dinah then divided us into three groups to explore this idea: eldest siblings, youngest siblings and middle children (as it happens, no one in our group is an only child). For the next hour or so we took it in turns to talk about how our ’status’ as a child had impacted on our lives. People were encouraged to address others from different groups. For example, as an eldest sibling, I turned to one of the young’uns and told one of them something about how the difficuly of being the older brother – as if they were my younger brother/sister: “You probably don’t realised that you get away with a lot more than I did at your age, because I had to get in a lot of trouble with parents in order to open the doors that you could just walk through later in life.”

After this, we were asked to recreate the family portraits of various people in our group, based only on what we had all shared an heard in the session. One person would be appointed as the photographer for someone’s family portrait, and would use the other students to represent that person’s family members. Dinah asked the photographer to position everyone according to how they saw the relationships in the family, so that, for example, step-siblings might be positioned further away from each other to suggest a distant relationship; someone in the shadow of their older sibling might be placed on the floor to suggest that they were overlooked, and so on. After the photographer had completed their shot, the subject of the family photo was then allowed to step out and ‘correct’ the photo so that it more accurately represented their family. We did this a few times, and the results were really interesting, especially when there was a big difference between the original and the corrected photo. A lot of the time these differences were contrary to people’s preconceptions – highlighting how unique everyone’s relationships were within their own family, and how those relationships were often difficult to pinpoint for those outside of that family (represented by the ‘photographer’ in this exercise).

After this we looked more specifically at physicalising the relationship between older and younger siblings. Without words, we were asked to come up with gestures that might represent how we felt about our own siblings. These gestures might be dismissive, signifying embarrassment, harassment, annoyance, superiority, neediness or aloofness. On the other hand they might suggest acceptance, care, playfulness or a need to be the centre of attention.  After we spent a bit of time moving around the room trying out various gestures, and accompanying them with non-verbal sounds, Dinah then started pairing people up so that we could look at how a relationship and a story could be created simply by watching two people react to each other physically. Something about the simplicity of using no words made these relationships very childlike and truthful.

The remainder of the rehearsal was spent reading the first two scenes of the play, the group dividing themselves according to who wanted to read which part. What came out of this reading was the startling pace at which Racheal had to grow up after her and Billy were left to their irresponsible father. A lot of the pathos from this reading came from appreciating that Stephens was not interested in portraying caricatures of bad parents. As we would see later in the play, part of the tragedy of Port was the cyclical way in which children from broken homes subsequently became involved in abusive, unfulfilling relationships themselves, unable to escape the limitations of their personal lives. Reading Scene One, it became clear how damaging the parents’ lack of care was to their children. Racheal keeps asking her mother why Billy gets run over so regularly, a very harsh signifier of the lack of care shown by his parents. Similarly, Racheal’s admission that she has been to the park with a friend to try and catch perverts is met with a laugh from her mother, who only starts becoming seriously concerned when she questions Racheal about swimming in dirty water. This sense of a skewed moral compass reoccurs in the next scene, when Jonathan, the children’s father, allows Billy to steal a can of Fanta from the hospital, and makes a lewd joke to Racheal about having his way with one of her teachers.

Dinah ended the rehearsal by giving us an interesting piece of homework: asking us to call up our siblings and talk to them about some of the things we had discussed in rehearsal today.

While we were working on our Mysteries project (which I initially thought about blogging, but never got round to), we were told that our next project would Simon Stephens’ Port. Seeing as I’d never heard of Simon Stephens before, I decided to pick up the first collected edition of his plays, especially since our director Dinah had recommended that we read a few of his other plays to get a feel for the world and the characters that he writes about in Port.

The first of Stephens’ plays I read was Bluebird. The setup is very simple: a cabbie in London having conversations with various different passengers, or ‘fares’, and gradually revealing more and more about the tragedy of his own personal life and the deterioration of this relationship with his wife. A simple, beautiful play. I then read Port, which was noticeably different in that it was set in Stockport, not London. The protagonist is a young girl called Racheal who, over the course of eight scenes, grows from an eleven year-old girl to a woman of twenty-four by the end. Just as with Bluebird, my first impressions of Port were of how poignant and truthful the writing was. All the dialogue felt beautifully natural, which made the story all the more moving. I was very interested to see how Dinah would work with our group, especially after the experience of the Mysteries, which I felt had slightly stifled the group energy. Also, working on the Mysteries  and receiving notes from teachers afterwards forced me to question my own inhibitions when it came to taking risks in rehearsal.

I’ve not been blogging regularly. Shocker. However, seeing as I’ve recently been set the task of keeping a journal of my experiences on our latest project at school (Port by Simon Stephens), I’ve decided, why not blog it? And lo, the Portblog is born!