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!
