Look Back in Anger: Rehearsal Diary pt 2
Oliver Baird, the assistant director on Look Back in Anger has been keeping a diary during rehearsals for the show. This is the second part of three. Look Back in Anger opens on Fri 6 March.
The rest of the first week consists of reading a section of the play and pulling it apart, piece by piece. As assistant director I have to look up references and quotations in the text that we don’t know, or research historical facts that have some bearing on the play - I find myself looking up everything from Lytton Strachey, TS Eliot, Max Miller, Flanagan and Allen, the Suez Crisis, the Archbishops of Canterbury, and 1950s newspapers, to the introduction into Britain of the teabag. Some of this information is playable, some not, but it all contributes to the evocation of an era. And of course understanding the language is paramount - especially with regard to Jimmy, whose use of language has a virtuoso quality. He speaks in long, tumbling sentences, often with high rhetoric, in what Osborne himself referred to as ‘arias’, and has a real ear for the cadences of different types of speech - the political, the religious, music-hall. This all has to be broken down and examined, so that it can be strung together with fluency and clarity - and simply learning that number of lines is no mean feat. In addition to the language and text work, the actors share their memories of their ‘most boring Sunday’, and each one conjures up vivid, and often highly amusing, childhood memories of Sundays that stretched on for hours, quiet, and painfully subdued. This helps us all understand the situation right at the start of the play - the idea of the everlasting, unbroken tedium that can envelop a Sunday - and the idle conversation, speculation, teasing, and needling that can result. The actors are not on their feet until Friday afternoon, and we make the tentative first steps towards staging.
Hannah Benoy, the deputy stage manager (DSM), is in charge of the rehearsal room, and together with Rachel Rowlinson, the assistant stage manager (ASM), has marked out the dimensions on of the stage in coloured tape on the rehearsal room floor. This gives the actors not only a sense of the size of the actual stage, but also the position of various useful architectural details, such as doors and windows. In addition, because this is a touring production, they have marked the width of the narrowest stage on tour. Part of my job is to see the production into each touring venue, and having an early indication of what moves/objects will be affected by moving from the wide stage at Northern Stage to smaller venues is incredibly useful. Hannah also notes down all the moves the actors make in a scene, making endless rough notes until - after many weeks - the final sequence settles. She is also ‘on the book’, meaning the actors can always turn to her with the traditional cry of ‘line!’ if they ever forget their words in rehearsal.
The stage is now marked out, but the furniture is not fixed. We are using a selection of rehearsal furniture, that gradually gets swapped for the real thing as an when they are found or made. Erica wants the position of furniture to be very flexible for the first few weeks, so that it doesn’t inhibit her own instincts or those of the actors, and indeed, chairs and tables swap positions frequently to see if it adds anything to the performance or stage picture. Soutra’s design has allowed for this flexibility, and one of the things that develops during rehearsals is the vocabulary of the stage - that is, what certain positions mean. What does it mean to be inside the square? Or outside? Or walking the line? Is the square the bedsit, or an arena, a hotspot in which the most violent antagonisms play out? Answers to these questions are through trial and error, and everyone contributes.
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| From LBIA Rehearsals |
The rest of the first week consists of reading a section of the play and pulling it apart, piece by piece. As assistant director I have to look up references and quotations in the text that we don’t know, or research historical facts that have some bearing on the play - I find myself looking up everything from Lytton Strachey, TS Eliot, Max Miller, Flanagan and Allen, the Suez Crisis, the Archbishops of Canterbury, and 1950s newspapers, to the introduction into Britain of the teabag. Some of this information is playable, some not, but it all contributes to the evocation of an era. And of course understanding the language is paramount - especially with regard to Jimmy, whose use of language has a virtuoso quality. He speaks in long, tumbling sentences, often with high rhetoric, in what Osborne himself referred to as ‘arias’, and has a real ear for the cadences of different types of speech - the political, the religious, music-hall. This all has to be broken down and examined, so that it can be strung together with fluency and clarity - and simply learning that number of lines is no mean feat. In addition to the language and text work, the actors share their memories of their ‘most boring Sunday’, and each one conjures up vivid, and often highly amusing, childhood memories of Sundays that stretched on for hours, quiet, and painfully subdued. This helps us all understand the situation right at the start of the play - the idea of the everlasting, unbroken tedium that can envelop a Sunday - and the idle conversation, speculation, teasing, and needling that can result. The actors are not on their feet until Friday afternoon, and we make the tentative first steps towards staging.
Hannah Benoy, the deputy stage manager (DSM), is in charge of the rehearsal room, and together with Rachel Rowlinson, the assistant stage manager (ASM), has marked out the dimensions on of the stage in coloured tape on the rehearsal room floor. This gives the actors not only a sense of the size of the actual stage, but also the position of various useful architectural details, such as doors and windows. In addition, because this is a touring production, they have marked the width of the narrowest stage on tour. Part of my job is to see the production into each touring venue, and having an early indication of what moves/objects will be affected by moving from the wide stage at Northern Stage to smaller venues is incredibly useful. Hannah also notes down all the moves the actors make in a scene, making endless rough notes until - after many weeks - the final sequence settles. She is also ‘on the book’, meaning the actors can always turn to her with the traditional cry of ‘line!’ if they ever forget their words in rehearsal.
The stage is now marked out, but the furniture is not fixed. We are using a selection of rehearsal furniture, that gradually gets swapped for the real thing as an when they are found or made. Erica wants the position of furniture to be very flexible for the first few weeks, so that it doesn’t inhibit her own instincts or those of the actors, and indeed, chairs and tables swap positions frequently to see if it adds anything to the performance or stage picture. Soutra’s design has allowed for this flexibility, and one of the things that develops during rehearsals is the vocabulary of the stage - that is, what certain positions mean. What does it mean to be inside the square? Or outside? Or walking the line? Is the square the bedsit, or an arena, a hotspot in which the most violent antagonisms play out? Answers to these questions are through trial and error, and everyone contributes.
Labels: Look Back in Anger, Rehearsal Diary
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