1 - Hugs

Alex suggested we rehearse by jumping around in the chronology, so that we look at the moments individually first without the temptation to play the previous circumstances or make assumptions about emotion etc. With this in mind we started at thew end of the play...

2 - Epilogue

Colin was asked to read the last speech with judicious use of three pause or, more accurately, a hiatus, a pause and a silence.

Then the speech in his own words.

The Louis' antithesis game. Using hands to mark antithetical words/thoughts/concepts and to clearly place each separate thought in a sepearate space around him. A very technical exercise but one that creates great clarity and detail, and brings out the arguemnt in the speech very clearly. I noted how effective the antithesis was when found in the text, something that made me want to bear it in mind more consciously in the future.

Then, before each paragraph, Colin was given a new context in which to deliver the speech by one of us watching. They were:

1 - The first time he has spoken to the group after 10 weeks of group therapy sessions
2 - A best man's speech
3 - A political rally
4 - As an Army Commander addressing troops behind enemy lines, at night
5 - As Tim Carroll after a bad show. Colin was very good. (TC doesn't read these blogs, right?)

Text change - last line 'Fear and confusion at my place in this (not an) increasingly bizarre world.'

3 - PG. 46 - 49 (Where Ghandi and Mark discover what Tom has been accused of)

We ran the scene without obstructions, with the actors getting busted any time they failed to make the line about the other person, to make the other person)s) change in someway. Given the nature of Tom's long description of the day of the August bombings in this section it was particularly hard.

Notes: - On reading the quotes from Tom's notepaper. 'We are not interested in hearing a simulation of reading, or of hearing you show us the emotional reaction you have to what you are reading, the shock, disgust, anger or whatever. Do something with each of the words, even the numbers, to the person you are talking to.'

AH - Concentrate on the argument in each line. If you can deconstruct the argument of the other person you can win and are safe, and they are dead or in gaol. Use your lines to create an arguemnt, or destroy the argument of your opponent. Find the argument in the scene.

4 - PG1 - 5 The Opening

A general note form AH after some eight-way, two-way mirror chat. 'Let's not discuss the idea/problem of the mirrors, let's just explore and see what happens.' I'd second this, if there any clarity or dramaturgical problems, either in the way they are described or set up in the text or the way we are playing them direct to the audience on all four sides we will know this for sure and play around with it in the in-house showings later. For now there are two-way mirrors around the stage, and when we address the police we think are behind them we look and talk directly to the audience.

Same exercise, busting.

Trying to rid ourselves of signalling our character, the situation or our judgement of the other person overtly at the start of the play. Instead just playing each line and each moment for what it is in itself. Therefore Mark was busted for appearing a smug wanker, and the Policeman for playing 'see how hacked off I am' until mentioned in the text. We went further with this, AH enjoing the actors not to play anything other than the surface level of what they are saying, not to play the 'previous circumstances,' not even to assume there are any. This sounds naive - consciously trying to be more superficial? But then I thought about it and reallised that this is a misunderstanding. If you are to say to someone 'I hate you' or 'I want to hit you' to play only the surface level of that requires a very deep connection. You must mean what you say after all. So what is meant by trying to play the surface level is stripping away all the 'cleverness', and all the 'storytelling' we may normally impose. It is an injunction against irony, against sarcasm, against underplaying. It means that Mark must mean 'Whatever you want officer' and thus try, in that moment, to genuinely help the Policeman. Layers of subtext and situation, ideas such as 'he's being sarcastic, he's stringing him along' come from the audience's interpretation of this action. This made the scene a lot more exciting. The actors have immense power as storytellers, sometimes too much. In the opening, for example, the actor playing Mark can play that he is leading the policeman on, that he's really a protester dressed as a policeman, that he doesn't want to be helpful at all and the actor playing the policeman can play that he knows all this. And we in the audience can get it. We can get it despite the fact they are both dressed identically, and we don't know any previous circumstances prior to the Policeman's entrance at the top of the play. But that's a little dull. It was much more exciting for them to just play each of the lines, stripping away what Colin decribed as layers of actor's cleverness, which allowed the scene to have multiple possibilties and far more excitement for the audience. I found myself wondering who was who, whether they were both police, whether they were doing the interview together or for training or if a policeman had been arrested, as well as thinking that Mark was being sarcastic and smug - in fact I felt that even stronger at times without Tristan playing it because saying 'Philosophically?' as a genuine question is in one interpretation even more smug and sarcastic than saying it with a sarcy tone of voice.

On a similar note Alex asked Colin to strip away all the layers of business, in fact any stage direction not mentioned in the text. That's not to say he could not walk or sit or move in relationship to Tristan, just not to play with the tape recorder or look for a plug socket or play witht he chairs etc. In this way in our first looks at the scenes the building block is in the relationship, in the text and the drama of what is happening. On top of this further activity, in order to accomplish a task or to have an affect on the other person, can be added in as a kind of obstruction or dual task later. But we start with what's there, simply and honestly, moment by moment, without imposing ideas, interpretations, judgements or characteristics onto the text.

Text change - pg 5 Policeman There's a little room back there where we can see and hear everything that's going on (Cut, 'in here').
Some discussion here of whether 'a little room' reads when the mirrors are all around them. We decided to leave it for now, as once we've seen it on its feet I may change this to clarify it and possibly extend the 'audience=police=complicity' idea further.

5 - pg 21-23 Mohammed Hasa

Another tricky moment that includes Mark's description of the Battle of Birmingham. The task being to find how it is an argument, how to put it on to Gandhi and do something to him with it. The starting place I thought being something in Gandhi's previous line 'I don't read the newspapers.'

One thing I noticed and liked here was Jethro and Damian's awareness of the outside audience, and the choice at times to play some lines at them even though they were not marked as asides. When and how often we do this will be a matter of personal judegment in performance, but it is an option I reckon we should explore thoroughly in rehearsal. It throws up the question though, are we using it to affect the person we are talking to outside, or the person we are talking to in the scene? Anyway, some nice moments of this, in particular I remember Jethro looking at Alex for 'in their infinite wisdom' when telling Damian of the brutal police tactics he witnesses.