Portblog III: Readthrough

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.

 

Portblog II: Meet the Director

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.

 

Portblog I: Initial reading.

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.

 

Enter New Idea.

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!

 

Sensory Overload

This week I have…

…been to the theatre twice. Firstly to see White Boy at the Soho Theatre, which was disappointing. Secondly to see the dress rehearsal for Kneehigh’s Brief Encounter. Which was brilliant. A bunch of us from school went (those free tickets work a treat) and it was really uplifting to see end a hard week with a show that realises so many of the ideas that are being thrown at us every day about what makes good theatre. This was a great show, with loads of really simple but brilliantly executed ideas, a simple, beautiful story and a ridiculously talented cast. I left the theatre feeling very guilty that I’d ever given up playing the clarinet. This was my first Kneehigh production, and I think I now understand the hype that surrounds them. It also changed my ideas about Noël Coward’s material being old-fashioned, white and unappealing. Turns out I was just a little bit presumptuous on that one. Anyway, Brief Encounter. Go see it.

…seen No Country for Old Men. A weekly trip to the cinema might just be one of the better ideas I’ve had this term. No Country is a great thriller, with some brilliant tense moments, a great cast (including a cracking performance from Javier Bardem as a psycopathic killer), and a pleasantly un-Hollywood ending. The dialogue is great as well, with some brilliant comic lines creeping in amidst all the doom and gloom. Hopefully I’ll get round to reading the novel it was adapted from at some point.

…started keeping a sense diary. One of the assignments we’ve been given this week is to keep a diary of ten sights, sounds, touches, tastes and smells each day. The general idea is to show us how much more attentive and productive we can be if we keep our focus, noticing things that we’d never acknowledged before or perhaps seeing them in a whole new light. Three days in and it’s already pretty tough going, but it’s one of those really good ideas that I’m going to get all excited about before realising that it’s realising easy to run out of either enthusiasm or ideas. Not at all like this blog then. Still if I keep it up it could be a great way of generating ideas for writing, as well as honing my powers of description (I’ve already realised that I’m pretty rubbish at describing smells).

…been rediscovering songs. Not that I’ve ever gone off music or anything, but I guess I’ve become a bit lax when it comes to paying attention to the lyrics, probably because I’ve been listening to so much predominantly beat- or rhythm-driven stuff recently. We’ve been looking at song lyrics for a couple of weeks at school, and at how often the sense of the words and the rhythm of the music don’t always go together that easily, with single thoughts often being split up to fit the melody. It all sounds a bit technical, but hearing some of my classmates singing their songs with a renewed emphasis on conveying the lyrics was really inspirational, with the result that I spent far too much time last night shuffling around on my iTunes library trying to look up as many lyrics to as many different songs as possible. It reminded me of something I used to do when I was younger: get hold of an album by a band that I liked (often with a view to seeing them live in concert – which I don’t do as much now) and then learn the lyric book from cover to cover so that I knew every song that they might possibly sing. The work we’ve done at school has made me rediscover a lot of the music that has been gathering cyberdust on my laptop. It’s funny what you can discover about a song that you think you know really well when you check what the lyrics are (so that’s what the first line of Virtual Insanity is…).

 

Dead, dead, dead.

I need to sleep more. This means less gallivanting around after school trying to see everything because I’m keen. Half-dead, sleep-deprived Nikesh becomes grumpy Nikesh, and grumpy Nikesh is no fun for anyone. (Of course, once I’ve caught up on sleep I’ll completely ignore this and go nuts again.)

Saw Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead on Tuesday, which was brilliant. It’s worth going for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance alone, but the film as a whole has great pace and is a bleak, tense depiction of the horrible things human beings will do to each other because of greed. At first I thought the structure was a bit weak, jumping around between past and present, but the more I reflect on it the more I warm to it. I have a feeling that when we get round to doing Greek tragedy at school (next year) I might need to watch this again. The title of the film comes from a great little Irish proverb: “May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead.”

Didn’t get round to seeing Dead Wedding on Wednesday in the end, because of my aforementioned state of living-deadness this week. And now I feel bad, because it got a great review over at Culture Wars. Ah well, on the plus side I saved some money. And watched Lost instead.

 

What the monkey saw

Last week I went to see Paso Doble at the Barbican, which, after all the press coverage, was a little underwhelming. Two guys messing around with clay onstage was amusing, and while it was certainly interesting to see this performance art piece rather than merely viewing the artists’ finished product, I couldn’t really take away any lasting impression from it. It disappeared a little bit up its own art.

I also saw a preview performance of The Lover/The Collection at the Comedy Theatre, after the Old Vic/New Voices deal allowed me to nab a £45 ticket in the dress circle for only £12. I know very little about Pinter, having never read or seen any of his plays, and seeing as we’re meant to be studying him next year at school I figured this might help give an insight into what makes Pinter so brilliant.

Not a lot, on the strength of this double bill. Or at least, not much of substance. The evening seemed a little too twee and safe for my liking, very much suited to a West End audience who were happy to chuckle away during those famous Pinter pauses, which tended to follow after lines that didn’t strike me as particulary hilarious. That isn’t to say the plays weren’t funny, or good. I just couldn’t help thinking there was underlying darkness to them that never really got a chance to break through – especially in The Lover. I’m always reading about Pinter being celebrated as a writer of comic menace. It’s a shame that this production chose to focus on the former at the expense of the latter.

I read my first Eugene O’Neill play at the weekend – The Hairy Ape – and thought it was great. I haven’t really read much American drama apart from the Tennessee Williams that I studied for A Level, and there were definite similarities between the two, especially in the incredibly detailed, poetic stage directions. O’Neill’s Yank struck me as a kind of tragic version of Williams’ Stanley Kowalski from A Streetcar Named Desire. I couldn’t help recalling the brilliant The Brothers Size at the Young Vic when I was reading The Hairy Ape and thinking it would benefit from the same kind of approach.

Also saw Sweeney Todd at the cinema with me mum. A little underwhelming. I thought it was fantastic visually, but the songs never really held me. It was a bit like Sleepy Hollow with more gore and some songs chucked in. Whereas I watched Hairspray and thought “I bet the stage version would be brilliant”, whilst watching Sweeney Todd I found myself thinking “I wonder if the original is any better?”

Coming up: Dead Wedding at the Barbican, White Boy at the Soho, and hopefully I have time to squeeze in a viewing of Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.

Oh, and I’ve started watching Lost again from where I fell off ages ago: a third of the way through Season Two. I think I might get hooked again. Which is probably just as well seeing as J.J. Abrams’ weirdfest Cloverfield is coming here very soon.

 

Chekhov? Indian!

Anyone remember this sketch from Goodness Gracious Me? Anyway, this post came about after I had to read Chekhov’s The Proposal (homework for school) and started thinking how Indian the whole thing was. Hypochondriacal bachelor. Self-pitying father. Ebullient daughter. Three ludicrous characters, all greedy, all ready to argue over nothing at the drop of a hat. Classic Indian domestic drama, and probably a lot more fun to watch than a lot of straight Chekhov (okay, massive generalisation, but the last I saw was Trevor Nunn’s The Seagull, which didn’t do much to convince me that old Anton is one of those great writers for all times). I googled “Indian Chekhov” to see what else was out there. Quite a lot of interesting comparisons between famous Indian directors and writers, as it happens. I really liked this blog post though, which suggests that the atmosphere of “clenched teeth compromise” that pervades India is distinctly Chekhovian.

Indian Shakespeare is another thing that interests me, and Jatinder Verma’s excellently-written article in the Guardian got me all excited about Tara Arts’ production of The Tempest. I missed it when they toured it the first time round, but fully intend to see now that it has returned to London.

And to (tenuously) continue the India/Western classics theme, The Stage reports that Parminder Nagra is going to star with Ray Winstone in an ITV adaptation of The Changeling. Potentially awesome.

 

There’s still some Christmas Spirit left

Tonight I took my mum to see A Christmas Carol (Ikrismas Kherol) at the Young Vic, and it was brilliant. It was a fantastic, South African production of a traditional English story, and it was stuffed with great images and visual ideas, and loads of great music and singing. There was so much heart and passion from the cast – Mum asked me afterwards whether this was their first performance or not because there was so much emotion on their faces at the curtain call. The same company are also doing The Magic Flute (Impempe Yomlingo), which is now sold out at the Young Vic, but has done so well that it’s transferring to the West End. If it’s as good as what I saw tonight (I’ve heard it’s better) I’ll definitely fork out to go and see it. Two really good shows in two nights. I’m very chuffed (another cheap £2 programme, too).

Before we went, we watched U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha, a South African interpretation of the opera Carmen, made by the same company behind the Young Vic double-bill. I’ve had the DVD knocking around at home for a couple of years, but never got round to watching it, so I figured today was as good a time as any. I have to be honest and say I didn’t appreciate it as much as A Christmas Carol, but that’s probably because I know nothing about opera, whereas the Dickens story is much more familiar to me. Still, U-Carmen had the same distinctly South African spirit to it, and I enjoyed watching it. i recognised a lot of the music from Carmen even though I’ve never seen or heard the opera. I’m still not sure if I’m ready to go and see an opera yet, but who knows – fours years ago I decided I was going to be an investment banker, and look how that turned out.

There are some interesting candidates jostling for the space on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. The idea behind the burnt-out car is nice and reactionary, but I don’t think the pigeon-feeders would immediately think “Oooh, the spoils of our dodgy war on terror” if they saw a knackered car. I thought Antony Gormley’s idea was a bit lazy at first, but then I thought – theatre on a plinth! There could be a whole therieth of Plinth Playth.The ‘Make Art Not War’ sign has a nice message, but looks tacky. And the Guardian was a bit sniffy about Tracey Emin’s meerkats, but I say why not? People get meerkats. Meerkats are cute. Now, if Emin planned to mount anti-pigeon lasers on the meerkat, that would seal my vote.

Also, Guillermo del Toro is rumoured to be interested in directing the last Harry Potter film. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! (that’s a good noise). Never mind that I was pretty bored by the book by the time I finally got to the end of it, I’d watch Guillermo del Toro direct Bratz the Musical III if he decided to do it. Although, Guillermo, if you’re reading this, Empire is right, you should really sign on for The Hobbit instead before New Line goes mad and gives it to Brett Ratner.

 

Playing with Ideas

Just went to see Statement of Regret at the National, and I loved it. I’d read a few reviews that complained that it was a bit too overloaded with ideas. Well, it certainly demanded a high level of concentration, but that’s only because it’s dealing with big issues that are not often approached in the theatre (or at least, not at the National). I think that’s A Good Thing. And yes, it was about ideas, and the discussion of ideas, but it was also a great story, fizzing with bitchy putdowns and powerful outbursts, and full of personal conflicts to complement the debate.

I was reminded of a comment about Roy William’s Fallout on the Guardian theatre blog: “to simply describe it as a play about black-on-black gun crime is as stupidly reductive as describing Hamlet as a play about Dane-on-Dane violence.” The issue of how black people deal with the legacy of slavery was clearly an important theme in Statement of Regret, but it would have been a much weaker play if this was not tied in with a story about fathers and sons, and about men struggling with their own personal, familial heritage (there was a brillliant twist right towards the end which gave me one of those fantastic “Ooooooh, shit!” moments I normally associate with films like The Sixth Sense).

I also really liked the way that problems were often shown from contrasting perspectives. For example, the protagonist, Kwaku Mackenzie, is at one point criticised for choosing to take a “slave name” (Kwaku) to replace the one he was born with (Derek). Later on, it is revealed that one of his close friends has taken the opposite step: trading his African name for an English one in order to integrate into society more effectively.

This was my trip to the theatre in 2008, and it was good modern drama – extremely current, unafraid to pull its punches and buzzing with ideas that gave me plenty to think about on my way home (as did the programme, which was great value for £2). Shameless plug: Clifford Samuel is an ex-Guildhall student, and he’s very good!

I look forward to Kwame’s next show, Let There Be Love, on near me at the Tricycle in Kilburn, which he’s also directing, and which features Joseph Marcell (that’s Geoffrey from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air!)