Rehearsing comedy. Oh dear.
January 5, 2012
See, you do something spontaneous and your watching colleagues laugh. Aaagh, fatal! Who could resist the temptation to repeat what one did the next time you run the scene.
But it's like trying to repeat a brilliant shot you played in a game of football - your feet will never be in exactly the same place again, the ball will be coming at you in a different way at a different speed.
It's highly likely that your attempt to reproduce that magically funny moment for your watching fellows, who have seen it once now anyway, will produce a lesser laugh, or (feel the pain) no laugh at all. And you are condemned to do this scene again and again and again before you ever get it onto the stage in front of a fresh and real audience. It begins to feel more and more sterile. And you try not to feel more and more desperate.
There's an old adage that 'if it gets a laugh in rehearsal it will as sure as hell go for nothing on the night.' It's not always exactly true, but there is certainly a lesson there.
Oh goodness it's a tricky trade this, because we have to strive to be freshly part of a newly unfolding story each time we do it spontaneously responding to what is delivered to us; but at the same time this is teamwork in which our fellow players will be expecting the timing and 'passing' to be what you have practiced and what they have become reliant upon. I'm not sure that I could really explain how to do this job. I've been trying to do it for forty years and am still confounded in rehearsal by the need for a balance of spontaneity and reliability.
One thing is for sure: rehearsals are for getting it wrong; that is the best way to find out what is right.
(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
| 2 comments
Share this