Look Back in Anger: Rehearsal Diary pt 3
Oliver Baird, the assistant director on Look Back in Anger has been keeping a diary during rehearsals for the show. This is the final part of three. Look Back in Anger opens on Fri 6 March.
In the second week, the fight director Paul Benzing comes in to plan the various pushes, slaps, and wrestlings that punctuate the play, so the actors can safely build them into the ongoing rehearsals. One scene involves Jimmy (Bill Ward) pushing Cliff (Rob Storr) into an ironing board, causing the the board to topple over and the iron to fly off, burning Alison’s (Nia Gwynne) arm in the process. Paul is careful, precise, and patient, and in breaking each sequence down move by move quickly put the actors at ease. This is crucial when later he has to persuade Laura Howard, playing Helena, that it’s quite okay to slap Bill in the face, provided she does it as he has taught her. Laura, however, is too kind-hearted to find this easy, and Paul simply stands there encouraging her to slap him over and over again until she loses some of her reserve. By week four, however, the slap is looking pretty mean indeed.
Erica also asked Gary Kitchen, from the Newcastle-based improvisation group The Suggestibles, to come in one afternoon, and take the actors (and Erica and myself) through a number of improvising exercises. This was mainly to open up the possibilities for the Flanagan-and-Allen style number that Jimmy and Cliff perform to and with Helena in Act 3, given Gary’s experience of improvising musical numbers. The exercises were brilliant at changing the energy in the room, showing us how to stop thinking and just do or say things, and most importantly how to be acutely aware of what everyone around you is doing. It was hard work, but very amusing, and somehow we ended with an improvised story involving a bird in a jar talking to Brad Pitt. The imagination is a strange and worrying thing.
As rehearsals progress, consistent staging starts to emerge, and the actors experiment with - at first - the rehearsal costumes, which finds Rob Storr taking a particular delight in a mustard-yellow woolen cardigan, and then later, some of the actual costumes themselves. The men are all sent off to the barber’s for their 1950s haircuts, which are thankfully not as extreme as I imagined they might be - but then I haven’t seen them with the addition of Brylcreem yet.
As the broad brushstrokes of the scenes emerge, Erica starts to focus the actors on more and more detail, to find the right changes in thought, the right variations in tone, and the right objectives and motivations. The play, through its astonishingly rich language, is constantly shifting as the characters change their minds, listen, and speak, and the challenge for all the actors is to accurately reflect that. Questions constantly arise that affect this - does Jimmy actively try to seduce Helena? If so, when does he start? What are Colonel Redfern’s feelings about Jimmy? To what extent does Cliff stand up to Jimmy? Erica keeps asking those questions, and asking the actors to try out different motivations, so that the characters’ very human complexities and uncertainties become clear.
More than anything we are discovering that the play is really a tragedy, albeit a very modern one in terms of the tragic flaw, and that in rehearsals we have had to deal with its grand scale and small lives at the same time. In the last week of rehearsals, as we run scenes, acts, and the whole play over and over, we are finding that the detailed work has been paying off. And as we move from the rehearsal room to the theatre, and Charles Balfour continues his work on the lighting design, and construction put the finishing touches to the set, it is exciting to anticipate the first preview performance, what that shot of adrenaline will do, and to think that an audience is finally going to see what we have watched unfold in a bare and occasionally freezing rehearsal room for five weeks.
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| From LBIA Rehearsals |
In the second week, the fight director Paul Benzing comes in to plan the various pushes, slaps, and wrestlings that punctuate the play, so the actors can safely build them into the ongoing rehearsals. One scene involves Jimmy (Bill Ward) pushing Cliff (Rob Storr) into an ironing board, causing the the board to topple over and the iron to fly off, burning Alison’s (Nia Gwynne) arm in the process. Paul is careful, precise, and patient, and in breaking each sequence down move by move quickly put the actors at ease. This is crucial when later he has to persuade Laura Howard, playing Helena, that it’s quite okay to slap Bill in the face, provided she does it as he has taught her. Laura, however, is too kind-hearted to find this easy, and Paul simply stands there encouraging her to slap him over and over again until she loses some of her reserve. By week four, however, the slap is looking pretty mean indeed.
Erica also asked Gary Kitchen, from the Newcastle-based improvisation group The Suggestibles, to come in one afternoon, and take the actors (and Erica and myself) through a number of improvising exercises. This was mainly to open up the possibilities for the Flanagan-and-Allen style number that Jimmy and Cliff perform to and with Helena in Act 3, given Gary’s experience of improvising musical numbers. The exercises were brilliant at changing the energy in the room, showing us how to stop thinking and just do or say things, and most importantly how to be acutely aware of what everyone around you is doing. It was hard work, but very amusing, and somehow we ended with an improvised story involving a bird in a jar talking to Brad Pitt. The imagination is a strange and worrying thing.
As rehearsals progress, consistent staging starts to emerge, and the actors experiment with - at first - the rehearsal costumes, which finds Rob Storr taking a particular delight in a mustard-yellow woolen cardigan, and then later, some of the actual costumes themselves. The men are all sent off to the barber’s for their 1950s haircuts, which are thankfully not as extreme as I imagined they might be - but then I haven’t seen them with the addition of Brylcreem yet.
As the broad brushstrokes of the scenes emerge, Erica starts to focus the actors on more and more detail, to find the right changes in thought, the right variations in tone, and the right objectives and motivations. The play, through its astonishingly rich language, is constantly shifting as the characters change their minds, listen, and speak, and the challenge for all the actors is to accurately reflect that. Questions constantly arise that affect this - does Jimmy actively try to seduce Helena? If so, when does he start? What are Colonel Redfern’s feelings about Jimmy? To what extent does Cliff stand up to Jimmy? Erica keeps asking those questions, and asking the actors to try out different motivations, so that the characters’ very human complexities and uncertainties become clear.
More than anything we are discovering that the play is really a tragedy, albeit a very modern one in terms of the tragic flaw, and that in rehearsals we have had to deal with its grand scale and small lives at the same time. In the last week of rehearsals, as we run scenes, acts, and the whole play over and over, we are finding that the detailed work has been paying off. And as we move from the rehearsal room to the theatre, and Charles Balfour continues his work on the lighting design, and construction put the finishing touches to the set, it is exciting to anticipate the first preview performance, what that shot of adrenaline will do, and to think that an audience is finally going to see what we have watched unfold in a bare and occasionally freezing rehearsal room for five weeks.
Labels: Look Back in Anger, Rehearsal Diary
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