Went to the Tate Britain for the first time yesterday, to see a very good exhibition called TheLure of the East: Britisl Orientalist Painting. Definitely recommended, but it’s closing tomorrow. Ah well. I came away wanting to know to find out more about several of the artists involved, particularly Richard Dadd. I found out about Dadd from a friend a couple of months ago, who told me the condensed version his extraordinary life story and showed me a copy of one of his most famous paintings, The Fairy-Feller’s Master Stroke. A quick search on the interweb yielded some very interesting results. Great paintings, big Shakespeare fan, inspired the likes of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Oh goody!

There’s an interesting article on Dadd written by Jennifer Higgie, another name I’d never heard of until yesterday, when I saw her novel Bedlam on sale at the Tate shop. It’s a novel based on Dadd’s life story, and it lookd very interesting from the few pages I flicked through. I resisted the urge to buy it though because I still have squillions of books to read, and because it’s £20. But I’ll buckle soon. I always do…

Speaking of strange and beautiful, I’ve finished Watchmen. Not for the first time, I imagine. I want more Alan Moore! I might as well go ahead and add everything else he’s done to my extensive wants list.

So many fascinating artists, so little time!

Typical. Just recently after deciding to curtail my spending on comic books, I get sucked back into reading them again. V for Vendetta is done and dusted, and I’m currently working through Watchmen. Alan Moore is a genius. Both are fantastic stories with grand scope and a great mixing pot of references. It must me the geek in me but I’ve always been a stickler for metatextuality in fiction; there’s just something really satisfying about seeing a writer use a great quotation (as an old English teacher of mine used to tell us, repeatedly, calling them “quotes” is WRONG), particularly fantasy writers, for some reason. Neil Gaiman and Philip Pullman are two who I can think of that do it very well, and I can now add Alan Moore to my list. I feel that good references serve as a way of grounding a work of fiction, particularly fantasy, in our own world. Plus, it can also lead to some great discoveries of poets, books, singers etc. that the reader would otherwise never have come across.

The Shelfquest continues. I’ve been reading a fair bit of poetry recently as well, from a massive anthology of Romantic poetry that was one of the core texts for a module I did at uni. I’ve decided to be brave and try and read as much of it as I can, rather than just cherry-picking certain poets, and it’s lead to some pleasant discoveries so far. The revolutionary energy of the Romantics is one of the most appealing things about them, and it has been picked up on by the fantasy writers I mentioned: both Pullman and Moore refer to, among others, Shelley, Coleridge and Blake in their work.

I feel very cultured right now. Who knows, maybe some of that revolutionary energy will rub off on me. For now, I’ve been scavenging away, magpie-like, for pretty chains of words, and here are some I’d like to share. In some cases I’ve just included the names of poems, which I’ve indicated with a [*].

William Cowper:

*Crazy Kate
(A great little story with a killer ending: “Kate is crazed.”)

“There is no flesh in man’s obdurate heart -
It does not feel for man.”
- On Slavery

Thomas Paine:

“Society is produced by our wants, and governments by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The once encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.”
- Common Sense

Anna Laetitia Barbauld:

“‘Tis passed! – the sultry tyrant of the south
Has spent his short-lived rage.”
- A Summer Evening’s Meditation
(I love this description of sunset)

“Still the loud death drum, thundering from afar,
O’er the vexed nations pours the storm of war.”
- Eighteen Hundred and Eleven

“But who in their mingled feelings shall pursue
When London’s faded glories rise to view?
The mighty city, which by every road,
In floods of people poured itself abroad;
Ungirt by walls, irregularly great,
No jealous drawbridge, and no closing gate;
Whose merchants (such the state which commerce brings)
Sent forth their mandates to dependent kings;
Streets, where the turbaned Moslem, bearded Jew,
And woolly Afric, meet the brown Hindu;
Where through each vein spontaneous plenty flowed,
Where Wealth enjoyed, and Charity bestowed.”
- Eighteen Hundred and Eleven
(Wow, it all sounds so wonderful!)

“There walks a spirit o’er the peopled earth -
Secret is his progress unknown his birth.”
-Eighteen Hundred and Eleven

“But fairest flowers expand but to decay;
The worm is in thy core, thy glories pass away;
Arts, arms and wealth destroy the fruits they bring;
Commerce, like beauty, knows no second spring.
Crime walks thy streets, Fraud earns her unblessed bread,
O’er want and woe thy gorgeous robe is spread,
And angel charities in vain oppose:
With grandeur’s growth the mass of misery grows.”
- Eighteen Hundred and Eleven
(There we are, a bit more like the London you get on the front pages.)

Hannah More:

“O great design!
Ye sons of mercy! Oh complete your work;
Wrench from Oppression’s hand the iron rod,
And bid the cruel feel the pains they give.”
- Misquoting from Thomson’s Liberty

*The Story of Sinful Sally
(A bit like a nursery rhyme, this. It’s didactic and I’m not sure I’d agree with the moral, but it’s a great story nonetheless.)

Charlotte Smith:

“So round the flame the giddy insect flies,
And courts the fatal fire by which it dies.”
- Elegaic Sonnets

*Beachy Head

George Crabbe:

“‘Still there they stood, and forced me to behold
A place of horrors — they cannot be told:
Where the flood opened, there I heard the shriek
Of tortured guilt no earthly tongue can speak:
“All days alike! for ever!” did they say,
“And unremitted torments every day!”
Yes, so they said…’
But here he ceased and gazed
On all around, frightened and amazed;
And still he tried to speak, and looked in dread
Of frightened females gathering round his bed;
Then dropped exhausted and appeared at rest,
Till the strong foe the vital powers possessed;
Then with an inward, broken voice he cried,
‘Again they come!’ and muttered as he died.
- Peter Grimes

William Blake:

“The voice of one crying in the wilderness.”
- All Religions Are One
(Blake is here clearly talking about a monkey)

*The Sick Rose
*The Angel
*The Tyger
*London
*A Divine Image

“Children of the future Age,
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time
Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime.”
- A Little Girl Lost

“Now is the dominion of Edom.”
- The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
(Means a time of revolution, ‘pparently.)

*The Proverbs of Hell
(A mate and I tried writing our own Proverbs of Hells whenever we were sitting next to each and got bored in lectures. We got down about five.)

“Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying, ‘Empire is no more! And now the lion and wolf shall cease.”
- A Song of Liberty

“Ask the blind worm the secrets of the grave, and why her spires
Love to curl round the bones of death; and as the rav’nous snake
Where she gets poison; and the winged eagle why he loves the sun -
And then tell me the thoughts of man that have been hid of old.”
-Visions of the Daughters of Albion

“Does not the worm erect a pillar in the mouldering churchyard,
And a palace of eternity on the jaws of the hungry grave?
Over his porch these words are written: ‘Take thy bliss O Man!
And sweet shall be thy taste, and sweet thy infant joys renew!’”
-Visions of the Daughters of Albion

“The Daughters of Albion hear her woes, and echo back her sighs.”
-Visions of the Daughters of Albion

*The First Book of Urizen
*The Mental Traveller
*The Crystal Cabinet
*Jerusalem (referenced in V for Vendetta).

Mary Robinson:

“Who has not waked to list the busy sounds
Of summer morning in the sultry smoke
Of noisy London?”
- A London Summer Morning

“Full thirty years his task has been,
Day after day more weary;
For Heaven designed his guilty mind
Should feed on prospects dreary.

Bound by a strong and mystic chain,
He has no pow’r to stray,
But destined mis’ry to sustain,
He wastes, in solitude and pain,
A loathsome life away.”
- The Haunted Beach

Assorted references to other stuff:
(these are from footnotes to the main poems, but I liked them any way).

“For the Lord thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God.”
Deuteronomy 4:24
(another footnote, not Blake)

“Rage on, ye winds, burst clouds, and waters roar!
You bear a just resemblance of my fortune,
And suit the gloomy habit of my soul.”
- Edward Young, The Revenge
(Reminds me of King Lear: “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks!”)

Wow. That was longer than I thought. Next up in the anthology are a couple of the big guns: Wordsworth and Coleridge.

J.M.W Turner's Slave Ship

Yes, I’ve finally decided to go ahead and write that adventure game about DIY I’ve had gestating in my brain for the last three years. Or not. The Shelfquest is an unnecessarily epic name for the task I set myself once I’d graduated from uni, of reading every single book in my room that I haven’t yet read. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it was some kind of weird withdrawal from not having six different reading lists to keep up with during my degree. Probably it’s because I have slight sadomasochistic tendencies and love a challenge.

Anyway, seeing as I’m forever trying to think what to use this blogspace for, I’m going to blog my Shelfquest. That doesn’t mean reviewing each book – I’ve learnt from trying to keep a theatre reviews blog that I don’t have the patience to constantly write good reviews. Nope, instead I’ll just offer random nuggets of interest I gleaned from the book in question.

I’ve just finished reading a Hugh Thomas’s mammoth account of the slave trade called, rather handily, The Slave Trade. Very long (800+ pages) and very history-ey. It was quite hard work, and I did skim a lot of it, but I figured that since I had a book on such an important historical event mysteriously lying in my room, I ought to try and digest as much of it as possible. For a book that wasn’t a novel (and therefore not my usual preference) I really enjoyed some of the language, mostly from the excellent primary sources that Thomas drew on in his research.

Some nuggets:

Portuguese slavers describing one of their own as being so vile and immoral that they thought he had “hairs on his heart”. Lovely.

Samuel Eliot Morison writing in praise of American clipper vessels:

Their architects, like poets who transmute nature’s message into song, obeyed what wind and wave have taught them, to create the noblest of all sailing vessels and the most beautiful creations of man in America…. They were our Gothic cathedrals, our Parthenon.

A biblical quotation: “Though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not got unpunished” (Proverbs 11:21).

An old English term for kidnapped or stolen: “panyared”.

Words I looked up: ephemeral, filibustering, secession.

Things which were referenced about which I know very little: Manifest Destiny, the Mexican Caste War, the Crimean War.

(A quick Wikipedia search for “Manifest Destiny” yielded the discovery of this painting by John Gast, which is just crying out for the satirist’s brush. I wonder what Banksy would make of it…).

Next up now that I’ve finally finished The Slave Trade (it took me almost three months): Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta. Goody!

———-

My Shakespeare-sense (Shakesense?) is tingling! A new movie is in development based on the graphic novel Julius, by Antony Johnston. It’s essentially Julius Caesar, updated to the modern day and set in the London criminal underworld. There’s a five-page preview of the comic available here. This could be good, even if the movie sucks (I hope it doesn’t, but The Negotiator, Be Cool and The Italian Job remake is a rather mixed bag from the director). I’ll have to try and get hold of it.

This blog never seems to do what I intend for it to do. Theatre reviews? Scrapped. Blogging my drama school projects? Nice try. In an attempt to keep it topped up more regularly, I’m going to turn it into a free-for-all. No guidelines. It’s about whatever I think is interesting.

Today, Hamlet is interesting. Not the Doctor Whomlet currently running in Stratford, but the Factory Theatre Company’s Hamlet, which I caught today at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Despite being late – which meant I missed seeing all the actors assigned roles by rock/paper/scissors – I had a blast. Thier method, which you can read about in detail on their webste, is a very, very good way to make Shakespeare exciting. And it looked like everyone in involved was having loads of fun. I think, having been scarred by the one and only production of Hamlet I’d seen until now – which was seriously lacking in fun – I’m finally over my aversion to the play, which is good because it was a bit ridiculous really (the aversion, not the play). Everyone should go and see Hamlet.

The Factory company has also been blogging about its process, which is well worth a look. I can’t wait to see what they’re going to tackle next.

i’ve been watching a lot of The Shield recently, after picking up all six series on ebay for a bargain. I’m not normally into cop shows, but this is brilliant. The writing is great, the acting is great, the camerawork is great. Except now my mum has got wind of the fact that I have all of the DVDs and has snagged them for herself. I’d better not tell her about the first season box set of The Wire I borrowed off a friend…

It’s the day after our showing, which just leaves me to reflect on how the whole project went before wrapping this blog up. First of all, we started the day with brief hour and a half of rehearsal, running through our scene changes, a few bits of lines, and the songs. Dinah made a fantastic speech about the work we were doing, about the three things that made good acting: talent, application and courage. The first, she said, was already taken care of, because all of us were at Guildhall. The second is what we were effectively learning every day during our lessons at school. Courage was what Dinah really wanted us to go out and show that afternoon, and I think we all did it brilliantly.

First we watched Group A’s showing of Nina Raine’s Rabbit. It was really good to watch, because as a play and an exercise it was quite different to Port in a lot of ways. At the same time, what Christian (who directed it) and Dinah later commented on, was how universal the themes were, and how both plays demanded the same sorts of qualities from us as actors.

We got in to start at 2pm, but unfortunately had to wait half an hour because there had been a mix-up with the staff about the start time. Thankfully Dinah took the edge off our already frayed nerves by starting a discussion with the other group about some of the common themes between our two plays. When that looked like it was in danger of drying up, she got every up and we all played with beanbags until the staff arrived!

Then we did the showing. I can’t really say anything more than what I already have – everyone showed real courage and commitment. For the first time, I think, we all really saw the jounry of the play. It was a journey we’d seen in part in rehearsal once we started running the play in sequence, but it was great that in our final run of the play everything seem to really fit together. I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite like I did when we sang Hometown Glory for the last time, but it felt fantastic and a little terrifying at the same time. The most unexpected thing was watching the effect that we had on our audience. People were genuinely moved, some to tears. Wyn talked to us the day after about this – about how good it was as an actor, to get this kind of reaction from an audience, especially one made up of fellow students. It was much more honest and heartfelt than the stereotypical whooping and clapping that can often happen, and I think for the first time I really realised what it means to “affect” an audience.

So that’s Port! We’re on to Chekhov next term, which hopefully means a new, more punctual blog…

Yesterday was our first day of rehearsing all day from 10am til 6pm. We spent the beginning warming up, using the beanbags, going into fragments of scenes from running, etc. and then spent some time working out how we could transition from each scene to the next smoothly. Then we ran the first six scenes of the play in sequence. Although we’d had a chance to start seeing how the play fit together as a whole, this was the first time we’d ever done any kind of run. If anything, it was frustrating that we broke for lunch when we did, because the way the rehearsal had progressed up until that point felt like the perfect point for Eleanor and I to do go on and do Scene Seven. What was particularly about the scenes that had gone before is that they all conveyed the toughness of Racheal. Seeing her with Nana in Scene Four was heart-wrenching, particularly because we’d never really watch the full scene before. Also, Dinah decided to put back the phonecall to Billy that she’d cut from the end of Scene Six, which made a big difference to the trajectory of the play. It showed Racheal refuse to fall apart even when her marriage to Kevin had totally collapsed.

We ran the last two scenes after lunch, after having had some time to rehearse outside. One of the things I was struggling with was trying to convey the truth of the scene without feeling like we had to lock down and stand opposite each other in order to connect. One of the things that helped was trying to make the exchanges less emotionally heavy, although I feel like, after our rehearsal, we might need to restore a bit of the balance to make sure the whole scene has enough weight. After finishing off the run of the whole play, we then got a chance to run Scenes Five, Six and Seven in sequence, which was very helpful to watch. Eleanor suggested that her and I run Scene Five for ourselves, so that we have a chance to see what that early stage of Danny and Racheal’s relationship was like, rather than looking purely from the perspective of the scene that we’re playing.

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!