The Final Rehearsal

At the end of rehearsals today, a wave of delight and excitement carried over the company. The play was ready. The characters were real, the story cohesive, the emotion powerful and the initial spark that had drawn all of us into Glyn’s play had been fanned over the last 2 ½ weeks into a piece of theatre ready for an audience. Today’s work was as intense as it was productive, the final shades being added to the scenes and the practicalities of the new elements incorporated into the text. The actors now have a weekend off as we move into theatre503 for the get-in and technical work.
There were many thankyous and anticipatory giggles at the end of the day, as we prepared ourselves for the final steps into the production of Mimi And The Stalker. My own opinions of the piece have been altered dramatically over the rehearsal process, and my enjoyment of the experience is greatly due to Michael encouraging my creative input in the construction of the play. We have to switch our minds towards the technical focus for a few days (design and production meetings have been occurring regularly in the last week) before pushing the piece into its first preview on Tuesday night. Four days to go until the first members of the public see our work, and we could not be happier with what we have…

Enter the Writer

Glyn Maxwell joined us for the day of rehearsals today, and the results were startling. The actors have reached a point where their understanding of the characters rivals his, whilst moments he viewed saw him chuckling or moved by the choices they were making. We have still been having problems with the interpretation of the final beats of the play, and posed these to Glyn. To our delight, he suggested a revision of the conclusion, inspired by the creative choices and pathways uncovered by Michael and the company in the rehearsal room. I have never seen a writer so generous in his attitude towards the text with regard to performance, nor one so elegant in his expression of his intentions. The practical challenge of this decision, however, is that we go into our final day of rehearsal not entirely sure of how the play will resolve itself. The anxiety of this is greatly overwhelmed by the thrill of begin able to finally complete our work on the piece in a way that satisfies the journey of the characters. Five days till the first preview, 24hours until the end of rehearsals…

Portugese chefs

We’ve spent the last two days face with the challenge of some of the final moments of the play, which take place on the edge of a cliff. The physicality of these scenes, combined with the limited space, the poetic echoes in the language and the need for resolution in the narrative are proving very tricky to balance (pun sort of intended). Our work on these scenes had to reach the goal of a run for the production team today, attended by many of those present at the first meet-and-greet, for whom this run will inform the production decisions made for the final performance, as well as providing the first audience response to the work we’ve been doing. The actors were understandably a little off-put by the number of people in our tiny rehearsal room – my task of performing the sections of dialogue recorded was also somewhat affected by the pressure of being watched by everyone – and were not helped by a collective of rioutous and jabbering Portugese chefs in the alleyway adjacent to the rehearsal room. These distractions aside, the piece seemed to work brilliantly, and the reponse from all of the spectators was overwhelmingly positive. This has served as something of a first hurdle in the final sprint into production, and has imbued the work in the rehearsal room with a sense of purpose and determination we were just beginning to lack. Six days to go till first preview…

The Weekend - bring me it...

End of the week, and things have begun to come together. Scenes are working, knots are being smoothed out and enthusiasm for the coming week is high. The other side of this is the creeping feeling of delirium in the small rehearsal room after the hours and hours we have spent in here. Things are starting to become funny when they have absolutely no reason to, moments that have nothing to do with the humour of the play make us collapse into laughter… A particular favourite are the lines that are written to be interrupted, but a brief loss of focus means the actor has to carry on talking, without the text to guide them. This has led to some wonderfully incongruous topics in scenes where the tension runs high – similar to a story about a badger getting killed that Michael used as an example in a note at the beginning of the week, and has become something of a running joke when things stop making sense… We all need the day off tomorrow to try and clear our heads before what promises to be a packed and intense final week of rehearsals…

One Week On

After a week of investigating the text and beginning to wander through the play in chronological order – the piece jumps from the early nineties to present day throughout – we began the process of standing up each scene in its order of the play today. Already, the practicalties and intricacies of staging Glyn’s text are seeming overwhelming: the number of costume changes required, the specificity of space on a relatively small playing area, the shifts in time and mental cohesion within the character of Mimi and the props required for the story to make sense. Aside from the task of keeping up with all the physical elements and how they might gel together in performance, the central revelation amongst all of this is the task Marianne has undertaken in playing the part. She is on-stage throughout, thrown from one time period to another, all the while leaping from a playing a confident and utterly beguiling 18-year old to a delusion and reclusive woman fifteen years later. Marianne is a brave actress, jumping headfirst into scenes and constantly challenging herself to better her last go at a moment. Her task seems daunting now, but the hope is that Michael’s careful direction, the support of Guy and Dom, and her own skill as a performer will guide her into the final performance.

One Day In..

One day in, and suddenly the need to allocate some of the rehearsal time to the production elements arose. As part of the design, an enormous photograph of Marianne as Mimi will cover the back wall of the stage, complimented by a head-to-toe portrait around a window (the crucial narrative element) stage left. In order to get these pieces ready in time for the show, the photographs had to be taken today, causing a break in the rehearsing and investigating of the text. Adding to the oddness of the day was a caterpillar cake, bought by the stage manager Ellie in honour of Dom’s birthday, who plays Fleet in the play. We couldn’t find a knife anywhere in the building, so after many attempts to behead the caterpillar with the end of a plastic spoon, Dom took charge and marched the cake into the café next door – the home of the cheapest coffees in Kings Cross, and something of a major resource for our rehearsals – and waited as the owner dissected his cake with a ridiculously large, lethal blade.
Giggles began as soon as the first photograph was taken… We were sharing a studio with another company having press shots taken, and their centrepiece was a rather intriguing suitcase with lifelike human legs sticking out of either end. The cast were required to pose in character, before chatting to another casually as the photographer circled them. Very soon, the effort to ignore the bizarre surroundings (combined with too much sugary cake) resulted in a hysterical trio of actors, whose efforts to maintain professionalism only served to heighten their state. This actually proved to be a highly valuable session, not just for obtaining the images needed, but more importantly in giving the actors a chance to bond outside of the work in the rehearsal room. After a bit of fresh air, we returned to the table in the rehearsal room, and dived back in to the complexities and joys of Glyn’s play.

The first day

The first day – actors cast and production team assembled, and we gather at The Poor School in Kings Cross for 2 ½ weeks of rehearsals on Glyn Maxwell’s new play, Mimi And The Stalker. Within the first few minutes, it was already apparent that the actors in the company were completely unique in their working styles, a quality that was sure to help their portrayal of characters whose differences define their relationships. The unifying factor for everyone in the room was the excitement felt towards working on such a lyrical and insipired script – Glyn’s first in prose from what I’ve gathered – and in the initial read-through, the language and skilful use of writing technique enthralled everyone. The trick, as Michael pointed out, was to find a method of giving life to to the lyricism without causing the storytelling or clarity of events to suffer. We began a systematic breakdown of the abstracts within the piece, and found parallels between the narrative and our modern world to aid us. The play focuses on an 18-year old girl who becomes a Hollywood star by being cast as Shakespeare’s Juliet in a new film. It wasn’t hard to find links to celebrities such as Kiera Knightley, Natalie Portman and, of course, Claire Danes – and by discussing their responses to the bright spotlight of fame, we started our journey of understanding Mimi’s.
Scheduled within our text-based first day was a production meet-and-greet, where the passion and dedication of all involved was made immeditately apparent – everyone from Tim and Paul, the artistic directors of theatre503, to Mr. Maxwell himself, expressed their excitement and commitment to making this production as successful as possible. The degree of work necessary was never ignored in the speeches and subsequent conversations, nor was the challenge of putting together such a complex and challenging play within a limited time frame and a fringe environment, but I couldn’t help but notice everyone left the room smiling with anticipation at the project’s future…