Sunday 19 February 2012

The melancholy stage

The above is slightly unfair, but at the moment our Twelfth Night rehearsals are overwhelmed by mournful cast members clustering around stairwells and muttering lines.  In extreme cases, we grab other cast members and retreat to the kitchen, making each other suffer the agony of "no, it's not 'thy' that time, it's 'you'".  We are, in short, at the stage when we are agonisingly close to knowing it.

What this means in practice is that scenes run like lightning right up to the point when a particular word or phrase eludes us.  Then tooth grinding, wails, head bashing and swearing ensue.  Alternatively, we have to suffer the sterephonic effect of our highly efficient prompt stating the line slowly and carefully for us to repeat wrongly.  Many times.

Next step is to bash it all into shape with runs so the sequence becomes clear and the story gets told.  We finish the scene by scene grind this week and move on to running whole acts.  In theory this should make it all sink in.

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