Changing plays, rooms and characters
December 14, 2011
Thursday 8 December 2011
I won't be able to keep this pace up, but while I'm sitting in the severely constipated Jubilee line today waiting for the train to move I thought I'd bring you a bit more up to date with the process.
The RSC don't normally rehearse three plays at once as we are now. Last season, for instance, we rehearsed Cardenio and The City Madam together in Clapham, and didn't touch the Dream and Marat until we got to Stratford.
The two plays we rehearsed in Clapham had two different directors and some of the ensemble had parts only in one of them. So both plays could be rehearsed every day. Actors who were in both those plays, like me, could find themselves changing plays, rooms and characters more than once in a single day!
We've spent a few weeks on The Tempest and Twelfth Night and today will be starting The Comedy of Errors and won't come back to the other two plays until January, till when we will have to keep them alive in our heads.
On Tuesday we ran the two plays we've been working on so that we can get an idea of the shape of the plays and the journey which our characters go in within them - a little hesitantly, though, because most of us are a long way from being completely 'off the book'.
This is Ali, our DSM (Deputy Stage Manager). She runs 'the book' - the precious bible for the play.
She keeps notes of the blocking (moves), yells out prompts, annotates and marks all the cues, keeps notes on all decisions made in the day that affect other departments, and a hundred other things. Real multi-tasking. A job most usually done by a woman. Funny, that.
(The What Country Friends is This? plays are; The Tempest, Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors, and are part of the RSC's World Shakespeare Festival)
by Nick Day
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