Look Back in Anger: Rehearsal Diary pt 1
Oliver Baird, the assistant director on Look Back in Anger has been keeping a diary during rehearsals for the show. Here he shares the first part of his thoughts on the process - parts two & three will follow over the next week. Look Back in Anger opens on Fri 6 March.
Look Back in Anger is a play of contradictions. It is the play that turned British theatre on its head, yet is faithful to the old three-act structure. It is a play of huge ideas, themes, and rhetoric, squashed into a cramped bedsit. It is comic, heartbreaking, vicious, but these characteristics are not discrete: there is great humour in the pain, and great pain in the humour. In short, it is a challenge to put on, and rehearsals have confirmed our initial view that this is not some dusty old museum piece, and that the shock it caused in 1956 does not now seem quaint: it retains its power, and is as vital and energetic and raging as it ever was.
The early rehearsals are about getting to know each other, and getting to know the play. On the first day everyone is in the rehearsal room - cast, crew, and a large number of the staff from Northern Stage. It is important that everyone meets, for while the core of day-to-day rehearsing involves five actors and some of the production team, there is a larger team outside the room who support and help the production, from the costume, sound, lighting, and construction departments to marketing, accounts, and front of house - all of them will contribute hugely to putting the show on. Since they will not all regularly be in rehearsal, the meeting gives everyone a sense of team spirit. There is coffee, and cake, and introductions, and all the effusive but faintly nervous chatter that makes it feel a bit like the first day back at school. Or, for many, the first day at a new school entirely.
Erica (Whyman, the director) introduces the play, and talks about the design concept. Soutra Gilmour, the designer, can’t be with us as she is rather glamorously opening a show in the West End, so Erica takes us all through the model box, a three-dimensional scale model of the design. It is not realist - that is, it is not a faithful reproduction of a 1950s bedsit, where it is set - which is hugely exciting, as it will help the audience understand from the moment they walk in the theatre that this play is both historical in setting and urgently contemporary. The furniture and costumes are all 1950s - every iron, newspaper, chair, radio - but set on an open stage, a central square of which is bounded in a thin, faded line. A background flat is propped against the back wall, a relic, perhaps, from a previous production, and we understand that we are in a theatre - that back wall contains a meticulous reconstruction of a period theatre wall.
After the design discussions, it’s more coffee and the actors have their measurements taken for the costume designs, and those not directly involved in the rehearsal process leave. And then it’s down to discussion. In describing rehearsals it is nearly impossible to give an accurate impression of the work that goes on. From the outside, it is a very simple process: the actors and director read or act a section of the play, they stop and discuss what they’ve just done, and then often go back over it again to apply what was discussed. It is as practical as that. But what that discussion covers changes from director to director, actor to actor, play to play, and even day to day. In the first week, Erica wanted us to find out who these characters are, and the circumstances in which they live. Her first question to the cast was ‘what do you like about your character?’. In reading a play we are accustomed to focussing on the antagonism, but in order to play the parts the actors have to find something in that character they admire, for if they cannot find that themselves, the audience will not either, and therefore never truly understand what is at stake. Erica’s question is deceptively simple, and is a useful tool for unpicking the minds of the characters - and the actors playing them. Bill Ward, playing Jimmy, seemingly has the hardest job answering the question, given Jimmy’s almost continual outbursts of rage and cruelty. But even his first, instinctive answers give great possibilities: honesty, the ability to strip away the trivial, the desire for people to connect, to live fully, to feel deeply.
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| From LBIA Rehearsals |
Look Back in Anger is a play of contradictions. It is the play that turned British theatre on its head, yet is faithful to the old three-act structure. It is a play of huge ideas, themes, and rhetoric, squashed into a cramped bedsit. It is comic, heartbreaking, vicious, but these characteristics are not discrete: there is great humour in the pain, and great pain in the humour. In short, it is a challenge to put on, and rehearsals have confirmed our initial view that this is not some dusty old museum piece, and that the shock it caused in 1956 does not now seem quaint: it retains its power, and is as vital and energetic and raging as it ever was.
The early rehearsals are about getting to know each other, and getting to know the play. On the first day everyone is in the rehearsal room - cast, crew, and a large number of the staff from Northern Stage. It is important that everyone meets, for while the core of day-to-day rehearsing involves five actors and some of the production team, there is a larger team outside the room who support and help the production, from the costume, sound, lighting, and construction departments to marketing, accounts, and front of house - all of them will contribute hugely to putting the show on. Since they will not all regularly be in rehearsal, the meeting gives everyone a sense of team spirit. There is coffee, and cake, and introductions, and all the effusive but faintly nervous chatter that makes it feel a bit like the first day back at school. Or, for many, the first day at a new school entirely.
Erica (Whyman, the director) introduces the play, and talks about the design concept. Soutra Gilmour, the designer, can’t be with us as she is rather glamorously opening a show in the West End, so Erica takes us all through the model box, a three-dimensional scale model of the design. It is not realist - that is, it is not a faithful reproduction of a 1950s bedsit, where it is set - which is hugely exciting, as it will help the audience understand from the moment they walk in the theatre that this play is both historical in setting and urgently contemporary. The furniture and costumes are all 1950s - every iron, newspaper, chair, radio - but set on an open stage, a central square of which is bounded in a thin, faded line. A background flat is propped against the back wall, a relic, perhaps, from a previous production, and we understand that we are in a theatre - that back wall contains a meticulous reconstruction of a period theatre wall.
After the design discussions, it’s more coffee and the actors have their measurements taken for the costume designs, and those not directly involved in the rehearsal process leave. And then it’s down to discussion. In describing rehearsals it is nearly impossible to give an accurate impression of the work that goes on. From the outside, it is a very simple process: the actors and director read or act a section of the play, they stop and discuss what they’ve just done, and then often go back over it again to apply what was discussed. It is as practical as that. But what that discussion covers changes from director to director, actor to actor, play to play, and even day to day. In the first week, Erica wanted us to find out who these characters are, and the circumstances in which they live. Her first question to the cast was ‘what do you like about your character?’. In reading a play we are accustomed to focussing on the antagonism, but in order to play the parts the actors have to find something in that character they admire, for if they cannot find that themselves, the audience will not either, and therefore never truly understand what is at stake. Erica’s question is deceptively simple, and is a useful tool for unpicking the minds of the characters - and the actors playing them. Bill Ward, playing Jimmy, seemingly has the hardest job answering the question, given Jimmy’s almost continual outbursts of rage and cruelty. But even his first, instinctive answers give great possibilities: honesty, the ability to strip away the trivial, the desire for people to connect, to live fully, to feel deeply.
Labels: Look Back in Anger, Rehearsal Diary
posted by Northern Stage at
09:06
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