A sudden realisation
September 17, 2012
If you'd have offered me a part in an RSC production four months ago I would have accepted it before you could say 'first folio'.
Floor-sweeper, coffee-maker, or Romeo in a world-wide tour, I wouldn't have cared. Four months ago it was all a bit of a dream. Something to aspire to as you watch the professionals, wide eyed and open mouthed (you, not them) from your seat in the Courtyard Theatre.
But four months is a long time and all of a sudden it's a reality. I'm in the cast of Pericles with the RSC. Wow.
After weeks of group auditions, call-backs and boot camps, the rehearsal process is finally in full swing but it's not until recently that the whole thing has fully hit me.
I received an email from an old school friend congratulating me on being cast as Lysimachus and saying how amazing it will be to watch me on the same stage as he watched Sir Patrick Stewart and David Tennant. I hadn't even thought about the footsteps I'll be following in.
My initial reaction is no doubt not publishable for such a well-respected website but loosely translated it was something along the lines of, 'good Lord, he's right you know. This is actually quite a big thing.'
We're now past that stage that every cast must go through, of sneakily listening in on other people's conversations because you can't for the life in you remember what any of them are called.
For some reason I concentrate so much on pronouncing my own name correctly (hardly difficult when it's only two syllables) that I completely forget to listen to what the other person is called.
Thankfully my memory didn't fail me for too long and thanks to some fairly crazy name games concocted by our directors, James and Jamie, we're all now well acquainted as an ensemble and I couldn't have asked for a better bunch of people to share the journey with. A first, tentative step into the world of (almost) professional theatre.
As well as the cast, everything else is becoming pretty familiar too; the caffeine kick from the mandatory pre-rehearsal espresso, the temperature of the Arden Street rehearsal rooms (either a sauna or a morgue), and on the journey from Birmingham, the sight of every single village train station in the West Midlands where apparently three fields and a tree are enough to warrant a platform.
At the moment I wouldn't swap these familiarities with anything else. I'm loving my time working on Pericles and just from taking part in the first run through (with scripts, thankfully) I can tell what an amazing production this has the potential to be. Roll on the next rehearsal!
by Nathan Hawthorne
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