Portblog VI. An Insider’s Perspective.

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.