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…