Peter Pan Rehearsal Diary Part 1

By Kat Downing (Assistant Director)

The first day of rehearsals there are many new faces. With a large cast and a large number of the company from Northern Stage everyone has time to introduce themselves. Erica Whyman, (the director) talks to the cast and company about Peter Pan and her vision. Designer Neil Murray shows the imaginative model box and explains our journey into Neverland. It is clear to see the whole cast and company are very excited and some seem a little anxious.

As the day unfolds we have an experimental read through of the script. Stephen Sharkey has adapted J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan and turned it into what is now our script. Having the information from Stephen about how he see’s different parts of the script is very helpful. It allows the actors to understand the importance of how Stephen intended it. Also having Stephen in rehearsals allows him to see what works and what doesn’t with his writing. What tweaks may need to be made in order for the script to flow. The actors ask many questions to Stephen about how he intended the words which they are saying and his vision on the piece.

Throughout the week the cast experiment with different voices, styles and physicalitys. It is great to observe how many different ways the actors can creatively experiment. Through the week the characters start to take shape and it is clear to see the journey into Neverland is really beginning. Liv Lorent (the choreographer) works with the actors to show them what their bodies can achieve. With the help of some of the cast being primarily dancers the whole cast are put through their paces physically.

Not only are the actors aware of the physical aspects of themselves but it is soon becoming clear that with the stage being very different to the usual Stage 1 that every part of their bodies is going to be important. Realising the challenges of the staging is very important for the actors as everything must be delivered equally to all audience members so they can share in the imagination and experience of the play.

As a cast there are always different views on a scene or a line, in the rehearsal room Erica encourages the actors to explore all the different meanings until they find what is right for them. With Peter Pan being such a well known story it is important the whole team has the same vision about what this production is trying to achieve.

After some creative workshops with Erica in which the cast improvise being Lost Boys, pirates, red Indians and even make a Neverland art gallery, it becomes clear that characters are starting to form and develop. Another important part of the rehearsal process is ensuring the relationships between the characters are formed and clear to an audience. This is achieved by working with characters such as Peter and Wendy letting them develop their own unique relationship.

As we enter the next week of rehearsals it becomes clear that the characters and relationships are now developing. This is where it is important for the actors to put this into practice by doing different experimental versions of each of the scenes. Erica and Liv also use rehearsal time in the second week to place choreographed numbers into the right part of the script. It is important to see how the whole show will flow and that the routines fit with the context of the scene.

Throughout the second week the actors are still experimenting but some parts of the script are beginning to form. The actors work closely with Erica and each other to ensure the tone of the piece is right and that the audience will be able to delve into the imagination of Neverland. With the cleverly designed set by designer Neil Murray the actors also need to remember that in Neverland anything is possible. Throughout the rehearsal process Erica and the cast have discussed their own imaginative views of Neverland in order to set each scene. This is important as the cast now feel some ownership towards the space and that they are able to relate imaginatively to what is happening around them.

As the script starts to take shape the journey into Neverland becomes more and more exciting realising new ideas all the time. It is true to say throughout rehearsals the cast and team have in the back of their minds the important selling point of the show, Peter Pan as you have never seen it before.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

LBIA: Rehearsal gallery

At the moment we're writing up the first part of the rehearsal diary for Look Back in Anger, but to keep you occupied in the meantime here's a slideshow taken straight from the rehearsal rooms in Byker. You can go to the main gallery to see them all at a higher resolution.

Don John rehearsal blog pt 5

With the kind permission of Kneehigh Theatre, we're reproducing Carl Grose's rehearsal blog. This is the final part of five. Don John is on at Northern Stage from the 27 - 31 January.



Week Five

So here we are. The last official week of rehearsal. And I’m secretly obsessing about trying to get across that my character Alan is a milkman.

I’ve been in this room too long.

Perhaps we all have.

After the end of this week, we’ll move into the Courtyard Theatre for tech, previews and the madness of press night. But until then, we still have a few precious days in our lovely, windowless hall to run the show through as many times as we can.

Throughout rehearsals we’ve plotted, plodded and pranced our way through the story bit by bit, exploring scenes as stand-alone moments. Now comes the really exciting part when you stick it all together to see how (or if!) it floats! And it seems to float rather well. When I say this, I mean we got through it, which is no mean feat when piecing a show together. However, I could find no moment to convey I was a milkman, and time is running out.

We have an added bonus of having the sublime Mr Tristan Sturrock here with us (stay in your seats, ladies!). Tris is, of course, fresh from Kneehigh’s West End hit Brief Encounter, and was Tristan in Tristan & Yseult. He’s worked with the company for years, and was one of those Kneehigh performers I watched as a kid that made theatre seem truly magic. He’s to take over as Don John for a few weeks in the spring whilst Gisli takes his own show, Metamorphosis, out to foreign climes.

Tris is here to watch a run-through and get a taste of the show in preparation for rehearsals in January but, as is the Kneehigh way, it’s suggested he have a go at being Don John in another run we do. He plays it brilliantly considering he hasn’t a clue what’s going on. There’s something delightful in having the dark and dirty Don John look at you with a far-away haunted look, and then say: “What happens now?” Us actors mutter surreal instructions to him mid-scene like, “Now take my knickers off.” Or: “Now you punch this bin bag three times then break my ankle.” Or: “Now we have sex on the wedding cake.” Tris nods. “Oh, right.” He’s happy to oblige.

Come the end of the week, the space is tidied, costumes packed up, props are piled high. There’s a sad stack of strange items that came with us from the first week at the Barns that never found their way into the show. There, amongst the detritus, I see a rusty holder with six empty milk bottles. I experience an epiphany - the overall narrative structure of Don John won’t really be bettered by the fact that I am (or I’m not) a milkman.

The bottles wilt like a half-dozen X-Factor rejects as they realise they won’t be playing the RSC’s Courtyard Theatre this season.

Sorry fellas. I tried. But that’s show business.

Don John rehearsal blog pt 4

With the kind permission of Kneehigh Theatre, we're reproducing Carl Grose's rehearsal blog. This is the fourth part of five. Don John is on at Northern Stage from the 27 - 31 January.

Week Four

Craig Johnson is an idiot.

There. I said it.

Actually, that’s not as harsh as it sounds. In fact, where I come from, this is perhaps the highest praise I can give him (and believe me, I’ve tried to give less). I don’t mean that Craig is a dunderhead or a pratt or a pranny or a brainless, gibbering nincompoop. No, no. I mean that he is an idiot in the finest, and most theatrical sense.

Right now, I’m sitting out front, watching him bust some moves in the rehearsal room. He plays Derek the vicar – a man who preaches to an empty church, and who cannot reach out and touch his poor wife, Anna. Anna (played by fantastic Icelandic actress Nina Dogg Filippusdottir) stands beside her father’s body and mourns. She has had a dark dalliance with our anti-hero Don John and demands her ineffectual husband act on her behalf. Craig hollers into the air, “Ohh! I’m going to do… something!” Craig then leaps into the air (sort of), and rolls clumsily across the floor. Action-movie style, he tries to crawl under a chair but gets his head caught. He then tries kicking the door open. It doesn’t budge. So he has to open it by hand, and then bolt out into the darkness to find his man. It’s heartbreaking, pathetic and hilarious all at the same time.

Being an idiot is what is partly required of us as performers in Kneehigh. It does not essentially mean being randomly stupid. It means allowing yourself to be foolish and naughty and free when rehearsing, in the hope that you might hit upon something truthful in the telling of the story – although, if honest, the stupidity does tend to infectiously take over. The director has to rein us in a little (scratch that – a lot). But when it hums, and this self-imposed playfulness is unbound, we sometimes reveal our most human flaws - ridiculousness is celebrated. That’s the idea, anyway.

I’ve gone all worthy. Enough of that! Want some more examples of sublime unrestrained foolishness at work?

Gisli Orn Gardarsson wears a floral dress and skips gaily about the room, singing a sickly sweet wooing song whilst trying to seduce Emily from Cscape. She’s not having any of it. Mike Shepherd’s character Nobby takes my character Alan out on an impromptu stag-do, ties me up, puts a pair of women’s pants on my head, rubber gloves on my feet and a funnel down the front of my trousers. Patrycja Kujawska plays Zerlina the Polish cleaner. She dances about a seedy hotel room with her vacuum whilst dusting and reading a book – it’s sassy and very funny. We’re practising the songs. Dom Lawton (singer extraordinaire) looks to me and says proudly, “I’m going to sing like an otter!” And by God, he does.

What a bunch of idiots.

Don John rehearsal blog pt 3

With the kind permission of Kneehigh Theatre, we're reproducing Carl Grose's rehearsal blog. This is the third part of five. Don John is on at Northern Stage from the 27 - 31 January.

Week Three

Monday. We arrive in Stratford. We get settled into our “digs” – theatre jargon for “the room you’re going to be living in for the next two months”. We, the company, go to toast our arrival at The Dirty Duck, which is a famous pub situated on the Waterside right between the Courtyard and The Swan theatres. It is exactly 13 seconds from my door. Perfect positioning! Everyone is revved-up. Another treat is that the fabulous Cornish dance company Cscape have joined us. They will be the chorus of females on Don John’s legendary list! It’s great to have them on board, and have the team grow so elegantly. En masse, and excited, much ale is quaffed. We make an exception (it is our first night in Stratford, after all), but promises are made that it won’t be like this every night… (ahem…)

Tuesday. Work begins in earnest in the RSC rehearsal space at the top of town. It couldn’t be more different from the Barn. It’s brightly lit, windowless, and huge. Emma exchanges running on the cliffs for extreme yoga. All new levels of pain are discovered. The Cscape girls’ presence also means that a number of dance sequences in the show have gone up a gear. It becomes apparent that this is going to be “a sweaty one” (actually, they always are, but so far, this one’s really sweaty!). Seeing as it is our first day of rehearsal, and acclimatising to the new space has been a little disorienting, we decide to unwind from the day by heading to The Dirty Duck for one or two. Or three.

Wednesday. We plough through the songs again, and familiarise ourselves with the start of the show. Emma now starts to layer in detail, and it gets exciting. At lunchtime we have a meet-and-greet with the RSC team. Everyone is really nice, and we feel very welcome. They asked us here before, with our version of Cymbeline. Guess they liked it! In the afternoon, we start to play around with Vicki Mortimer’s looming, rusty, but wily set. I don’t want to give much away, but we all get a taste of the “wow factor”. Everyone agrees it’s cool as ice. Everyone also agrees that tonight should be a night off from the pub as it’s Stu Barker’s birthday tomorrow. However, we still somehow end up at The Duck. It’s hard to resist when it’s only 13 seconds away from your door… and the extreme yoga is working wonders, so…

Thursday. Music maestro Stu Barker’s birthday. He gets a chocolate cake, a Flight Of The Concords DVD and a stylophone (picture a sort of shrieking calculator activated by a small wand). The man couldn’t be happier. He suggests the ever-so-slightly annoying instrument be in the show. Emma says absolutely not. We rehearse into the evening then go for an Indian meal. We decide to crown the evening with a quick drink in The (yeh, you guessed it) Duck…

Friday. My character, Alan, gets electrocuted attempting to fix a dodgy festoon for his wedding. We do the scene a number of times, and I end up pinballing off the set, dancing The Robot and almost dying from a heart-attack (told you it was “sweaty”). The scene has next-to-no narrative function. At the moment it’s way too long. It may get cut, but it was great fun to make it. I’ll let you know if it survives. Hey! Was that the end of Week Three already? Blimey! Look out! Here’s comes Week Four!

Quick!

Duck!

Don John rehearsal blog pt 2

With the kind permission of Kneehigh Theatre, we're reproducing Carl Grose's rehearsal blog. This is the second part of five. Don John is on at Northern Stage from the 27 - 31 January.

Week Two

Mary Woodvine’s six month old baby, Morgan, watches us rehearse from the balcony. We’re pretending to be electrocuted, we’re being “erotic” with vacuum cleaners, we’re getting tied up in Christmas fairy lights and attempting to choreograph a dance whilst sitting on chairs. I wonder what must the boy thinks?

We’ve been charging our way through the first half of the story. Emma likes to work bold, broad and fast, to put a shape on things, refining the details later. Meeting the characters last week was great, but seeing them interact with each other is even better. We learn who they are, what they want for themselves, and from others. They come alive now. And it’s kinda thrilling to watch.

We’ve taken to calling Anna Maria Murphy the Word Witch. This may sound a bit cruel, but I’ve checked it out with her, and I think she likes it. Why Word Witch? Well, she often sits perched high above us on the darkened balcony, her face eerily lit up by her laptop glow. She watches the scenes, and at Emma’s behest writes new song lyrics or poetry, conjuring words as if by magic. She also wears a long black writing cloak, too. Get the picture? Word Witch! There’s also a conspiracy theory afoot that the Word Witch uses her powers to help her team win at volley-ball, cursing the other team, and stripping victory off them at the last moment.

Damn you, Word Witch!

Thursday ends with a rough showing of what we’ve done so far - a sketchbook as Emma calls it. It’s for the production team, and some friends from Battersea Arts Centre where we’ll be performing the show next year. It’s rough but it goes down well. Feels nice to perform already. But we shouldn’t get complacent. Maddy, a journalist from The Guardian, is also there. She’s writing a piece on the company and the new show. She watches us play ping-pong and get slightly over-excited at our production manager’s amazing card tricks. Like baby Morgan, I wonder what she thinks.

Sadly, this is our final week in Cornwall. On the last day, we take our last deep gulps of precious Cornish air on the cliff, and listen to the navy practice blowing things up off the coast. Ominous man-made thunder-claps coming from misty dots on the horizon. Next week we re-locate to the home of the bard, Stratford-Upon-Avon. We’re going to the RSC, where rehearsal will continue. And where the show will open. It’s all a bit exciting, really. Not for the first time this week, I wonder: What will they think?

And I can’t help but smile.

Don John rehearsal blog pt 1

With the kind permission of Kneehigh Theatre, we're reproducing Carl Grose's rehearsal blog. This is the first part of five. Don John is on at Northern Stage from the 27 - 31 January.

Week One

Rehearsing a Kneehigh show can be many things, but it is always surprising. My first surprise came on Day One when I arrived at The Barn in Gorran Haven eager to start work, only to be told I was not to play the title role of Don John (the world’s greatest lover) as I had initially presumed. The part, I discovered, had gone to an ugly Icelandic actor. With all the professionalism I could muster, I refrained from causing a scene (the poor Nord’s country is bankrupt – he needs all the work he can get!), and accepted the role of Alan (a character I couldn’t quite recall from Mozart’s opera). Our director, Emma Rice, seeing my fragile actor’s pride somewhat cracked, came close and soothed me with words of reassurance: “You’ll probably be wearing a mullet wig.” A mullet wig? There is hope for the production yet…

Actually, I’m just pulling your leg. I knew I was going to play Alan. But it is true that rehearsing a new Kneehigh show is full of surprises. And yes, I may get to wear a mullet wig. And yes, the Icelandic guy playing Don John is very ugly.*

So. What happened in the first week of rehearsals?

It’s all a bit of a blur but it went something like this:

We discussed the story of Don Giovanni or Don Juan or Casanova (or, as he is in this show, Don John). We dipped and skipped through Anna Maria Murphy’s gorgeous poetry. We had a close call with a herd of sinister, theatre-loving cows who might well have never been there at all! We got all nostalgic talking about Corona lemonade, The Clash and The Incredible Hulk (the show is set in Britain in 1978). We took each other’s weight, and found some balance on the cliff. We winced and strained to hit the right notes on Stu Barker’s fantastic harmonies (long way to go yet). We dressed up and met the characters of our story (in low light - with a 70s soundtrack). We lit a fire, set off some fireworks, and endured a seemingly never-ending Beatles medley. We picked our jaws off the floor after some pretty awesome Polish violin playing. We tussled with the minutiae of the rules of Volley-Ball. We (or rather, I) tried to survive a sweaty day long Tango lesson (still scarred from that one). We got to know each other, and sample the world we where about to enter for the next five months.

There’s lots to do. But as our director Emma says: “Every day, in every way…”

* He’s not really. He’s a seven foot tall, ex-gymnast with matinee idol looks. But I’ll cut him down to size over the course of the tour.