Tech Tock

This week we've been concentrating on technical matters.  The off-site rehearsals last weekend showed that the actors have mastered the material and now only need to gain confidence of working on the stage, with props and costume, under lights to bring the play up to the highest level.

Last Sunday we erected the staging and rostra for the seats; worked out a final seating plan (hooray, we do have room for all the tickets we sold!); and put the lighting bars up.

During the week, I worked out a way of hanging wallpaper in the room, despite not being allowed to hang things on the walls, and carpeted the stage and worked with Martin, our super lighting designer, to hang the lamps which will create the right atmosphere.

I've also been working with Clare, who's running sound, to come up with a plot to enhance the action.

Last night we had a first tech rehearsal (see picture) at which we had the majority of the props and took time to stop at crucial points to work out any glitches in the action.

These rehearsals are always a little frustrating as it means five days without a proper "performance", because the work we need to do fragments the action.  But it also gives the actors and crew the confidence to know exeactly what they are doing when it comes to running the play, allowing the actors to do their job of portraying ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances without having to worry about where they will be putting their tea-cups!

There are now only 4 days to go until we put the show in front of a real, live, breathing, paying audience of human beings.  Then we find out if it's any good!

The Home Stretch

We're into the home stretch.  11 days to the first performance in front of our society's members.  12 days until the first public performance.  A set to build and decorate.  Props to source and find homes for (when not needed on stage).  Lighting to rig and plot.  Sound to plot (I've already done the hard work and chosen the pieces I want).

Luckily I've got a great team helping out with all this.

The actors put their books down three weeks ago, and since then there have been good times and bad times.  Overall, rehearsals have all been positive, with something new learned and confidence built (I think.  I hope) by the end of each session.

That's not to say there haven't been crises of confidence at times in between.  Both actors have a huge amount of lines to remember and (happily for me) are both determined to get them 100% right.  But that also means that they do tend to get flustered and rush at things on the occasions that they can't remember a line properly.  And rushing and flustering are not good states of mind for remembering lines.  So we've concentrated on taking things slow and steady in places when these dips in confidence happen.  As well as concentrating on rehearsing uncertain sections more often.

The flipside to this is that, looking back, one sees a huge improvement, week-on-week.  With just over a week to go before we throw the show to the public, I'm confident we're going to be in great shape.  In fact, we rehearsed half-a-dozen of the more tricky scenes this week, and the improvement since the previous rehearsal was tangible.

We've got two rehearsals away from the performance space this week at which we will concentrate on running each act.  Then next week, on the actual stage, with the actual furniture, we'll start running the whole play.  With luck and a following wind, we'll have 4 or 5 run-throughs before the dress rehearsal.

If we're not ready now, we will be by next weekend!

In my last post, I posed myself some questions.  Am I closer to answering them...?

• Where the hell am I going to get a butterfly collection from? 
  
  The Rector of Braishfield (just north of Romsey), the Rev Canon Steve Pittis, is a butterfly collector and has kindly lent us a couple of cases of butterflies.  Perfect!
• Where will I get the bed, bedside table and other furniture from?
  
  All sourced by cast, or in the RAODS furniture store.  Apart from the bed, which I found in a Freecycle ad.
• Will the furniture all fit in the performance space?
  
  Just about.  I think.  As long as the space is as large as I have been assuming it is!
• Will the props all fit in the performance space?
  
  Yes.  Now that we've cut down on some of the props!
• Will there be any room left for actors and audience?
  
  Actors - Yes.  Audience - Yes.  Crew... Hmmm... Not sure.  Which might be a challenge for lighting and sound!
• Will one person be able to operate sound and projections?
  
  Yes!  Hooray!
• Will my idea for projecting pictures, captions and video actually work?
  
  It's now only 1 projector (not two) and we''ll be using 3 pieces of video.  So I need to find a way to project that reliably and without the audience seeing the PC controls...  I'm investigating ScreenMonkey.  We'll see if it works with my laptop this weekend.

I've also remembered that I promised the RAODS youth group that they'd be able to come and watch a rehearsal when we were close to being finished.  We've got to try and choose a piece that's appropriate to an audience of under-16s...  Tricky to do with this play.

Books Down!

We're now around halfway through the rehearsal period and we've hit the point that the actors dread.  Books down!  The highlighted date on the rehearsal schedule when the actors have to let go of their scripts and work without the security blanket of the words there in their hands.

In amateur theatre it's always later than you would hope it to be.  Unlike the pros, we all have day jobs to be getting on with, so we are unable to rehearse for 35 hours per week, so people aren't forced to be as familiar with the script as they could be.

The first couple of rehearsals without their books are inevitably slow, shambling and frustrating.  Actors and director will be tempted to think that progress has stopped and we are going backwards, but that's certainly not the case.  It's just an am-dram rite of passage that has to be overcome.

Certainly in The Collector we have made excellent progress in the past 4 or 5 weeks.  From the hesitant readthrough I wrote about in my last post, we have explored myriad aspects of the characters' personalities, aims and ambitions.  We have learned what drives them and what stops them achieving their aims.  We have choreographed fight sequences and had discussions about the technicalities of how to tie-up and gag someone.  And we've had to start thinking about how we get various props on and off stage naturally and gracefully.

That work will continue for the rest of the rehearsal period.  Doubtless we will change our minds about some of the decisions we have made, and other requirements of the play, previously unseen, will make themselves clear.

Additionally, this week we start looking at the technical departments of the production.  Ideally this would have been started with a pre-production meeting before rehearsals started.  I'm a stickler for this sort of preparation usually, but for one reason and another I wasn't able to get around to it.  So now I have to meet with my lighting, sound and props department heads (that is, heads of a department of one!) to discuss what I need from them in the next 4 or 5 weeks. 

I don't really have any worries about the actors at this stage - I know that they will get over the "books down" hump - but I've yet to get together with the tech team and I'm sure that the questions they will ask me on Wednesday night will bring a fresh set of challenges and decisions which will need to be made.

So - for no reason other than the fact that I can look back on this with 20:20 hindsight - here's what I have to worry about at the moment:

• Where the hell am I going to get a butterfly collection from?  If anyone has one - let me know!
• Where will I get the bed, bedside table and other furniture from?
• Will the furniture all fit in the performance space?
• Will the props all fit in the performance space?
• Will there be any room left for actors and audience?
• Will one person be able to operate sound and projections?
• Will my idea for projecting pictures, captions and video actually work?

Of course, there's still a while to go yet and I've got lots of wonderful people backing me up and helping me, so I do need to learn to delegate, stop micro-managing and stop worrying.

And They're Off!

After a couple of weeks back and forward getting the rehearsal schedule sorted - and avoiding other rehearsals and productions in the theatre - I finally got the schedule set in stone.  Not literally - in reality it's set in silicon bits and cloud server memory.

And so, last night, the intrepid cast (both of them!) and their director (me!) sat down at a secret location (an actor's living room!) to talk about the script and record a readthrough.

I was pleased at the level to which my actors have been reading and learning so far.  Already they have many questions about their characters, actions, strategies and objectives which challenged my knowledge of the play (in a very good way) and promised a very exciting and fruitful ongoing rehearsal process.

The readthrough served several purposes:  It was the first time I got to hear my chosen cast reading the entire play; it was a chance for them both to hear the lines they've been playing with over the past couple of weeks in context with their playing partner; it allowed them to experiment with tone and delivery at an early stage; and finally, it was an opportunity to record the whole play for later download or burning to CD, in order to assist with learning lines.

This was also an opportunity for me to listen closely to the play and makes notes about various aspects of the production we hadn't yet thought about and which we discussed after the reading.  Clegg's clothes and hairstyle; Miranda's dresses; how to hit someone over the head with a vase; cigarette smoking and swearing; nudity and naughty photos!  I have to stress that we decided there would be no nudity and no naughty photos - though my intention is to make the audience think they've seen something that they haven't seen in reality.

Our next rehearsal is on Sunday (memo: record the football!) and it's the first of many in the Green Room studio space where we'll perform in February.  The first opportunity to get parts of the play on its feet in the actual venue.  This is a luxury I'm not used to.  My previous group never got to use the performance venue until the get-in day, just before the public got to see the show.  Getting used to the room and space and making it our own over a 10 week rehearsal period is a great privilege.

Not that we'll be doing too much movement at first.  This is such a wordy and emotionally packed play that we'll spend a while reading and exploring the text before we think about moving it around.  That said, there are a couple of tricky 'action' sequences that we will look at early on, just so we can get a handle on where we will go with them later.

We've started.  Now it starts getting exciting!

Auditions

I wasn't sure how many people were going to turn up to audition for the two parts that were available. 

Two ladies came to the read-through, and a third had said she was unable to make the read-through, but would be auditioning, so I knew that I would have a decent choice of female actors (known as "actresses" in the "business", I believe!) to choose from.

But we saw no male actors (aka "actors"!) at the read-through, and a mail-out for interested people was not as successful as we'd hoped.

On the night, however, we had five ladies and three men come along to audition.

We started off playing some fairly silly games (the human knot, primal scream and tag photograph), to get everyone moving, engaged, comfortable and warmed-up.

I'd given everyone notice of the audition pieces the week before.  Three monologues for each character, and one dialogue between both characters.  I left it up to the actors to decide which monologues to do, or if they wanted me to tell them which one to perform.

I won't go into huge detail about individual performances here, as that would be unfair to the people who didn't get cast.  Suffice to say that I was very impressed at the level of preparation that everyone put into their audition pieces and they all showed a great understanding of the characters and the thought processes which the characters were going through during the pieces.

Usually at an audition, there are a couple of people who are obviously unsuitable for the part and they don't change your mind when they read the lines.  But this time round I could easily have found a justifiable reason for casting any of the auditionees in their respective parts. 

That made it a very hard decision.

But in the end, I was able to cast Miranda (Jennifer Hampton) and Frederick (Mat Robinson) as they both managed to embody their versions of the characters more completely than the other candidates.

Now I've got my actors I have to firm up the rehearsal schedule and then in a month (actually, 3 weeks!) time we start rehearsing.

Pre-Production

I guess that to the 'public', the task of casting the actors and starting rehearsals is the beginning of the production process, but it actually starts a long time before.

In the case of The Collector, the process started well over a year ago, in mid-2011, when I submitted a handful of scripts to the Artistic Director's script-reading committee to consider for inclusion in the 2013 programme.

At first, none of those plays were accepted.  Instead, the Feb 2013 green room show was going to be Harold Pinter's Betrayal, and I was asked whether I would like to direct it.  I jumped at the chance!

After re-reading the play a couple of times and starting to think how I would stage it, in June we heard that we'd been refused a licence to perform Betrayal.  Normally this is because a professional company is going to revive (luvvie-speak for "do a production of") the play.

After this setback, the choice of plays was revisited and the committee plumped for my earlier suggestion of The Collector.

Once I had the go-ahead, my pre-production tasks began, in around June this year.  We scheduled tentative read-through, audition and rehearsal dates (to be confirmed once all prior productions were scheduled).  Enough scripts were ordered for everyone involved in the production - this is a very small cast and crew, so seven scripts should be enough.

From that point, I started reading and re-reading the script in earnest, making notes on the character traits of the two protagonists and thinking about how we would configure the Green Room venue to best stage the play.  In this latter task, the input of experienced RAODS members such as the chairman, Neil, and my producer, Helen, was invaluable.

For my birthday, in August, I got a copy of Katie Mitchell's book The Director's Craft, and I've spent some (but not enough) time working through the directing method which Ms Mitchell uses.  Maybe more on that another time.

In early September we designed the graphic to be used on the posters and flyers, with the invaluable assistance of the Plaza's graphic design team.  You can see the result on the right of this blog.

In October, the read-through and auditions were advertised in the company's newsletter.

By this time, I realised that there was plenty of paperwork to be getting on with.  People attending the read-through would need sheets of information about the play: to tell them when the auditions were taking place; notes on the characters; how the auditions are to work; when rehearsals take place, etc, etc.

Last week we had the read-through.  This was quite disappointing, in that only 2 ladies turned-up to read, and no men!  So the past week has been taken up with frantic emails, phone-calls and Facebook updates, to find out whether anyone was actually interested in auditioning.

The auditions are tomorrow evening.  We will soon find out how successful our last-minute efforts have been...

Collecting

Romsey Amateur Operatic and Dramatic Society, who run the Plaza Theatre in Romsey have chosen The Collector as their first Green Room production of 2013, and I am directing it.

In the past I've blogged about the directing process.  It's probably not that educational for anyone else but, looking back at my previous efforts, it's a good way to remember the great fun we've had on previous productions.

So, around we go again.

The Collector is a play by Mark Healy, based upon John Fowles' novel about a young man, Frederick Clegg, who becomes obsessed with, and kidnaps, an art student, Miranda Grey.  It explores their changing relationship and Miranda's efforts to escape and to persuade Frederick to set her free.

The book was made into a film, starring Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar, in the late-60s.