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.
