Week 2 –(Days 6 – 11)
We’ve made lots of progress with the play this week and it’s taking a great shape. On Monday we started working from the beginning of Act 2, but skipped over the blocking of Natasha’s transformation sequence until Wednesday, although we did chat through it with the cast. We worked a bit of comedy into Carnalachie and Dorbie fumbling around in the dark before their entrance in order to provide a bit of light relief from the heaviness of Act 1 but we’ll have to keep looking at this as rehearsals go on because we don’t want it to be too slapstick. A reference to a ‘onesie’, which was cut last week, has been put back into the script so that this piece of dialogue has a stronger reference to ‘future’.
On Tuesday we went back over some the blocking that we worked with yesterday to consolidate it and play with a few other options. Then we continued working on with Act 2. We started to become conscious that we haven’t been using the stairs all that much in the blocking up to now and, as using them will provide some interesting levels on stage, we started to factor them into the scenes a bit more. The movements in the second half of this Act are quite complicated in terms of making sense of the text making the various different conversations within the group work. This meant that we had to work through each page of the script quite slowly but we ended the day with a basic shape that makes sense for us to come back to on Wednesday. As a company we tried to get to grips with what the stylised look of the play would be exactly and now all have a good idea of this to take forward into next week when we start looking at the play again from the top in more detail.
Wednesday saw us consolidating and tidying up the blocking for Act 2 before we loosely choreographed Natasha’s transformation sequence at the end of Act 1. This allowed us to then run Act 1 & 2 together in full without stopping so we could get an idea what the running time would roughly be and, more importantly at this point, see what it looked like altogether and if there were any parts of the basic blocking that needed to be reworked. Everyone felt the run went really well for the first time we had done it and that it was looking good. We spent the rest of the afternoon working the scene where Doctor MacGillivery gets a bit of a party going. As Sylvester can play the spoons we had been looking for a place to work this into the play and, having found the perfect moment, we went back to choreograph and block this scene properly to some rehearsal music.
On Thursday we started working with the blocking of Act 3, which was slightly less complicated than the previous Acts as there are less instances with all the cast on stage at the same time. Saying this however, there’s more coming and going on stage and, as we aren’t changing the set to a bedroom for this Act as is scripted, it meant that some of the stage directions were no longer practical, meaning we either had to change them slightly or cut some of them. John joined us for rehearsals too and made a few more minor cuts and tweaks to Act 3 as he was watching it and we were working on it.
After playing with a few more blocking options for parts of Act 3 on Friday, we were able to run the whole Act straight through to get a sense on it as a whole. As we need to establish that Act 3 is set in the early hours of the morning we decided that Olive and Renee should be wearing their night things, covered by a shawl type item, in order to help visually establish this for the audience. Not only this, but it would make more sense for these two characters not to be dressed at this time in their own home.
For the last few hours on Friday we were able to start blocking Act 4 and managed to get quite a way through it. So that we could finish the week having blocked the entire play we had a rehearsal on Saturday afternoon this week where we blocked the remainder of Act 4 and looked at the movements for the set change into this Act. Again, as we did with Natasha’s transformation sequence earlier in the week, we loosely marked it and worked out who could move which items of the set from a practical point of view (which cast members are available and don’t have a costume change, who can physically life things etc.). We will be able to look at this in more detail later on but for now it allows us to run Acts 3 and 4 together to look at the fluidity of it.
All in all we are in good shape for the middle of the rehearsal period and, now that we’ve blocked the entire play, we can really see the character and relationship arcs growing throughout the play. Getting to the end of the play this week has allowed us to see clear time passing between each Act and be able to compare the character dynamics in the very beginning of the play to how they are left at the very end.
