Enter the dancers

Late night meeting with Ivan.  The cast is getting bigger (10 seems to be the latest estimate) but this may change. We’re looking at the possibility of adding a movement director and some dancers. There are obvious opportunities for a bit of pagan ceremonial, we thought.  But after a glass of wine or two it began to seem there was hardly a scene that wouldn’t benefit from a scary corps de ballet. Having sobered up I’m less sure.  We’re going to explore – provided of course, we can find a way of funding the extra bodies.

A Recce

Some pictures from a visit the Hush House with Ivan, designer Rosie Alabaster and Eastern Angles’s Production Manager Steve Cooney.

The Hush House Tunnel photo: Rosie Alabaster

Steve (L) standing at the end of the long tunnel designed to take the exhaust fumes from the jet engines on test.

Wantisden Church photo: Rosie Alabaster

(Below)  Wantisden church.V

Church interior photo:Rosie Alabaster

Two tonsured monks on top of the tower at Wantisden: photo:Rosie Alabaster

Visitors book Wantisden. Note the date.

Design Ideas

Rosie Alabaster has produced a proposal as a starting point for the production design. It’s full of good ideas.  She’s suggested the audience makes its way through an exhibition area as they arrive. This will be set out with cases holding archaeological artefacts from the period covered by the play. Among them could be items that actually appear on stage.  Then she wants to use Charlie’s van to be parked outside with more exhibits inside. Ivan thinks the van could tour in the months prior to the production to advertise the show.

At a brief meeting this morning with Ivan I discovered we’re reverting to the idea of BR as a site specific piece.  Doing the whole run in the Hush House presents some problems. First we have to get the audience to travel. And in order to do this we have to convince them  it’s not just a piece about Bentwaters but a piece about people’s relationship with the past. One consequence of abandoning the touring idea is that we could end up with a bigger cast which in turn means less doubling.

The First Workshop

Three days at the Sir John Mills Theatre in Ipswich working on Bentwater Roads. Things started well on Monday and ended in tears late on Wednesday afternoon.

We were lucky with the cast. Nadia Morgan and Richard Sandells who were both in The Anatomist, Agnes Lillis who has worked for Eastern Angles before, Tony Scannell, familiar to most of the human race from his time in The Bill, and new to me, Tim Allsop , Mawgan Gyles, and Madelena Bobone.  The one complication was that Nadia was working with the National on a production of Macbeth where she was playing eight different roles and all before lunch. She then jumped on a train, headed for Suffolk and with barely time to take her coat off plunged into Charlie’s difficult life. Ivan had devised a schedule that would deal with this but left us at the mercy of National Express. In the end it worked out fine.

Nadia and Tony (photo Mawgan Gyles)

We had four narrative strands to work with. We took each of the historical ones on successive mornings and worked on Charlie’s contemporary story – by far the largest – in the afternoons. The plan was to finally put it all together in front of a small invited audience for a rough and ready script-in-hand walk-through to close the workshop.

The first extraordinary moment came right at the beginning when Richard strode on as a Priest from pre-Christian times.  Speeches that I had lived with on paper for something like six years were suddenly here standing on their own feet. Other plays had been written an performed in the interim. The awareness slowly dawned that at long last Bentwater Roads was really going to happen.

Richard is a good actor to have in a workshop – full of ideas,  invariably carefully thought through and considered. By coffee break he’d changed the character of the Priest who was much stronger as a result.

Over the next few days as we worked through the early stories it became clear that they would stand up on their own.  I’d never seen them like this, taken out of the larger structure, and it was a relief to find myself caught up as they unfolded. The test of course would come when we tried to put them all together. My real fear was the better we made individual stories the more they would assert their independence and the harder it would be to run them alongside one another.

By the time Wednesday arrived we were ahead of ourselves and had the luxury of a technical walk-through to try to sort out all the overlapping hand-overs between different scenes and different periods and to make sure we were on top of the doubling. It meant that at any one time the stage space could be occupied by a cold war American pilot, a medieval mason, and a girl from the 4th century hunting rabbits. It all began to look like asking for trouble.

Richard (photo Mawgan Gyles)

After lunch the trains delivered Nadia as we’d hoped and we gathered our small audience of guinea pigs – Eastern Angles office and technical staff, Rosie Alabaster who’d agreed to design the piece, and Roger Eno who was going to do the music. Then everyone took a deep breath and we began.

We’d seen some fine performances in the workshop but of course something happens when you put even a modest audience in front of good actors. By the time we’d segued into the modern story by way of the sacred pool of the Bent Waters,  a road trip, and an estate agent it felt as if something special was happening. I began by watching the audience trying to divine whether they were staying with the narrative as it unfolded but I soon became caught up in what was happening on stage and forgot to look.

Nadia was extraordinary – tough, vulnerable, angry and utterly believable. Richard brought an intensity to what he was doing that was frightening at times. Tony effortlessly created a wry middle aged writer, a Colonel in the USAF, and a medieval master carpenter. Agnes slipped from the restraint of the middle ages to a self-obsessed actress, and back further in time to a mother offering her daughter for a sacrificial rite. Madalena, Mawgan and Tim brought a whole gallery of characters to life.  By the time we reached the final scene emotional confrontation between Nadia and Richard there were real tears on stage, and I was struggling to hold them back myself. Roger had no such problem. He turned to me, glasses in one hand tissue in the other, and delivered his final verdict. That did it for me he said.

We’ve got a play.

Mawgan

Meeting with the Artistic Director (3)

Curried mushrooms on sourdough toast. Sauvignon blanc. Clementines. Coffee.

Good session today as we started preparing the ground for next month’s workshop.  We’ve started to think about ways of differentiating the four time periods and  how to deal with the doubling. So far we have 21 speaking parts (and a dead rabbit).  We’re looking at a cast of 7 and have already started a wish list of actors we’d like to work with  or have worked with before.  One of the things that became apparent very quickly was the need to get a designer on board early. We’re hoping to get Rosie Alabaster who has worked with Eastern Angles several times and designed The Anatomist for us.

One of Rosie's designs for The Anatomist

We also want to seed the story in advance of the production using the web. We’re planning a series of videos that might work in a number of different ways. There could be video diaries kept by characters who appear in the play popping up on You Tube (with links from various websites like Eastern Angles own and this one). In this way would could get to know something about the characters and what they were doing in the time leading up to the action of the play proper. It would also give us a wonderful moment when someone we had got to know on video suddenly appeared on stage in front of us. Another possibility is using one of the characters – an amateur historian – to explore some of the historical background and perhaps take us round some of the significant landmarks that will be central to the action.  These are rather like bonus features on a dvd – not essential to an understanding of the play but for anyone who’s interested a way of extending the reach of BR beyond the two-hour span of the performance.  But there’s another way we can use video too.  One of the characters in the sixties narrative has a mental breakdown. We see very little of him in the play, though he’s central to the story.  We are going to uncover some scratchy Super-8 footage he took of the people and places around him. This will give us an entirely new – and sometimes distorting lens – through which to view the action. This is footage we can use in the production.

We’re looking at spring/summer 2010. So it’s a little early to kill the rabbit just yet.

Workshop

The first workshops for Bentwater Roads have been scheduled for the week beginning 23rd March. We’re soon going to be able to see what we’ve got…

The Workshop

We were hoping to have a week to workshop BR some time during January.  Unfortuately time has been squeezed and we’ve had to cancel. It’s been rescheduled for March. One major decision has been made. It is no longer a site specific show and will tour some of the large scale venues on Eastern Angles Tythe Barn Tour. Spring next year looks probable. We’re still intending to end up at Bentwaters for the big finale and Ivan has suggested we do something special to mark the occasion.  Given the extra Arts Council funding I’ve suggested a fly-past. Half a dozen jets should do, swooping low over the Hush House and peeling away into the setting sun.  A strange noise came out of his throat when I mentioned this…

Meeting with the Artistic Director (2)

Ivan’s just been (pizza, salad, strawberries, pain au chocolat, sauvingnon blanc, espresso). After a re-reading of the script ahead of the meeting we’d both arrived at the conclusion that the ending needed more attention.  It’s ok but a bit hurried. Ivan thinks that rather than tinker with the script it would make sense to try some of it out. He’s thinking of a large cast, possibly 12.

And he’s had a good idea. We workshop the individual stories on different days so that the cast knows their own bit. And then we bring them all together and run it. So the actors only find out what’s going on when they take part on the final day. The autumn looks a possibility. If we could make this work the first run would be so exciting we could probably sell tickets. Can’t wait.

A draft

Well, I was right. Almost. We have a draft we could take into rehearsals. The ending has fallen into place and as usual with these things the solution had been staring me in the face. Someone had been missing from the resolution of the story and the moment I introduced her the thing made sense. It also gave me the opportunity to add a layer of complexity to her character. There are odd lines I want to change and a bit of overwriting that needs to come out but I’m going to resist the temptation to tackle these now. It may be some time before we actually find a slot for this play – Ivan thinks it might even be spring of 2010 – so I want to leave some fine tuning that will give me a chance to re-aquaint myself with the piece for the run-in. Or at least that’s my feeling today. Ivan is in rehearsal at the moment and I won’t send this version until he’s finished. So between now and then I may not resist after all.

It’s taken a while, and it’s been a bumpy ride. But we have a play.

Keeping in touch

Phone call from Ivan on Wednesday sounding very positive about the revised draft.  It had been so long since I put the thing aside I spent an enjoyable 15 minutes reacquainting myself with the story as we talked. He kept mentioning scenes I’d entirely forgotten.  Some of them sounded quite good.  We agreed – inevitably – that we still hadn’t found an ending. And he still doesn’t entirely buy the reaction of my pilot in one of the key confrontations of the 1950s story.  Nevertheless we’ve convinced ourselves that we have a good piece on our hands if we can just find the funding and the opportunity to put it on.

And then later, just as I was allowing myself a short siesta, I came up with an idea which might just be the perfect ending. I must explore it a little this weekend.