Week Seven: Notre Dame, Indiana/Chicago, Illinois
By Kaffe Keating

“O time, thou must untangle this, not I. It is too hard a knot for me to untie.”
– Viola, Act 2 Scene 2.

I feel like I haven’t written one of these in ages. Time does indeed fly when you’re having fun, but simultaneously I think it’s true that time stretches when you fill it with stimuli; the more you do the longer things seem to last. And this week feels like it’s taken ages.

Monday brought our first proper visit to Washington Hall, the theatre on campus where we’ll do our first three performances of the show to a full audience. God, we need it. We’re now long past the point where we know the show well enough to no longer be surprised by the gags, and therefore we’ve stopped laughing audibly at them. It’s probably just as well; when your priority becomes making the other actors in the company laugh, you’re heading for trouble.

You might think it’s more tiring performing to a full audience than an empty house; that speaking your lines to nothing but the golden seat number plaques blinking back at you requires less focus and effort than when there are actually people sitting in the seats watching, but the reverse is actually true. When there’s an audience in the room your energy is going somewhere, it’s being absorbed and bounced back at you – when theatre is live it’s, well, live. Performing to an empty space is like shouting into a hole. Producers like full houses because that means lots of money from ticket sales; actors like full houses because we have more people to talk to.

And we will soon! We open on Wednesday. But the show is currently running long. We’re performing the play completely uncut. Unlike a lot of other Shakespeare plays (cough, Hamlet, cough), Twelfth Night is short enough that you can do the whole thing without everyone having to sit there for 4 hours, but we’re still taking longer than we need to. We need to shave off about 5 minutes from each half. Maybe doesn’t sound like much, but it makes a difference.

I always think it’s more about how long a play feels than how long it actually is. I’ve watched three-hour epics with two intervals that have breezed by and fifteen minute shorts which have lasted eons. Time does not fly at all when you’re watching something boring. However, cutting fat is always good. If time isn’t being spent on something interesting then it shouldn’t be being spent at all.

There are two ways to shave a show: speed up, or cut. Cutting at this stage would be seriously tricky, not only would we need to basically relearn our lines, but the timings we’ve worked out for set-pieces and quick changes would be totally thrown off. So speed it is then: thinking on the line, driving through longer sections of text, and not dropping props or forgetting that, actually, you are in this scene and everyone’s waiting for your entrance while you sit, staring at them from the back.

Not only is this our first week of performances, but our first week of classes too. And the first class that Al, Katherine and I are going to be running is not going to be on the Notre Dame campus or indeed for Notre Dame students. Instead, our workshop will be held at the Westville Correctional Facility, Medium Security Wing.

Many of the students on the program at Westville have transferred there specifically to take this course. They are required to have at least 2 years before their release date in order to take part, giving them time to get the qualifications required to get their bachelors’ degree. Ricky Klee, one of the teachers on the program, picks us up from our hotel and drives us out to the facility. He tells us some pretty astounding statistics. Of all the people who enter Westville, 30% will usually return. Of the people on this program however, that number drops to 3%. “The power of education,” Ricky says, as he walks us across the forecourt between the medium and minimum security wings.

We’ve left all our belongings in the car, bringing only our ID, one unopened bottle of water each, and a few sheets with some Shakespeare text on for the workshop. The students have been working through Twelfth Night, and later on will be performing sections of it themselves. The ones we’ll be working with today are only in the first two weeks of their course, and don’t know each other that well yet, so we’ve decided to spend the first half of the workshop on ensemble exercises and games – the sort you’d play in the first week of rehearsal to get a company spirit forming.

I’m nervous. We all are. We’ve been told that the students are really excited to meet us. That, normally, the only people who come in to talk to them are coming from a relatively fundamentalist religious perspective so this is a breath of fresh air for them. But still, it’s impossible to know what to expect.

But the nerves dissipate within minutes. They’re so up for it, so willing to join in, to play the stupid games we ask them to. They’re exactly what you want from a group of people to teach.

The focus is incredibly impressive. There’s a game I like to play which requires everyone in the circle to complete a simple task in sequence, but working together as a group. As the group gets better at each sequence, you add more sequences until everyone is walking around, throwing balls to each other, calling out each other’s names. It requires a real zen-like focus from everyone involved and this group picked it up faster than most companies of professional actors I’ve worked with.

Katherine led a game of Grandmother’s footsteps, when everyone tries to get hold of an item being guarded by ‘Grandma’. When she’s turned away, you can move but if she turns back and you’re not standing dead still, she’ll send you back to the start. One student, William (who must have been about six-foot-three), performed what can only be described as a swan dive, sliding across the floor to grab hold of Katherine’s scarf before she had time to turn around and spot him. Commitment you’d rarely get in a rehearsal room full of actors in week one who are still digesting their breakfast.

After the workshop, we said goodbye to the students and left the way we came in. That sound that you’ve got in your head of a prison door slamming? Yes, that one. The one you’ve heard on TV. It sounds exactly like that, and it pleases the ear a lot more when you’re on your way out. After hearing Ricky’s statistics and getting to work with the students themselves, I’m hopeful that most of the men we met today will only have to hear that sound one more time.

We tech the show. Technical rehearsals are usually very long affairs, featuring lots of people sat in a dark room for hours on end trying to figure out how to get that piece of scenery on, or making sure that that lighting cue is coming at the right time. Everyone usually goes a bit mad in tech, but luckily, since this show all fits in a suitcase and we’ve got hardly any lighting cues, that side of things is relatively painless.

We treat the tech as a dress rehearsal, and run the show like we would if we had an audience in. Except, of course, we don’t. Yelling once more into the void. We run long again, we need to pick up the pace if we’re going to avoid having to cut.

It’s late and we’re tired, but we’ve got the theatre for a few more hours and we all want to make use of this time. The idea is floated to do a speed run of just the text. No umbrellas, no staging, just the five of us (and Sidney, our lovely and, sadly, temporary stage manager) sat in a circle on stage powering through the story as quickly, but also clearly, as we can.

It’s exactly what we needed. There have been two types of pausing going on: The first is when we feel like we need to take time over a moment for dramatic reasons. We almost always don’t, and these are eradicated with a vengeance. The second type of pause comes when we’re dodgy on our lines and we’re trying to pass it off as type one. These too, are run over and over until they’re tight.

We open to a lovely audience. They’re warm, friendly, and up for joining us on our slightly mad trip through Illyria. Immediately we breathe a sigh of relief as a company, there’s someone to talk to! And the show goes down a treat. Especially the carriage. Those horses have escaped the knacker’s yard for good. And we’ve shaved off the time we needed to! If you don’t count the additional couple of minutes for audience laughter, which I don’t…

This weekend Notre Dame are playing at home, so the entire campus is ramping up to go fully
football crazy. We perform our last performance at Washington Hall, say fond goodbyes to the
wonderful Notre Dame team, and pack up our case to hit the road again for a weekend off in
Chicago.

What a city. We’re blessed with uncharacteristically wonderful weather – supposedly their summer has been a bit of a washout, we can sympathise – and we explore as much as we can. The big bean in Millennium Park, a river cruise with an incredibly thorough tour guide, cocktails on top of a skyscraper and real Chicago blues, played live. Also, Chicago has a beach – who knew?

We were only there for two days, but blimey did we squeeze a lot in. Time flew, but it does feel like there was a lot of it.

Now we’re flying again too, from Chicago down to Austin, where the tour really begins. We’ve left our home in Indiana and are venturing out on our own; just the five of us, a suitcase full of umbrellas and a couple of imaginary horses.

Week Six: Notre Dame, Indiana
By Kaffe Keating

“What country, friends, is this?”
– Viola, Act 1 Scene 2.

We are, ostensibly, in America. We all met at Heathrow, put the suitcase with our show in it onto a plane, and flew it to the other side of the world. I’m certain that this definitely happened, but I still don’t quite feel like we’ve landed yet.

Don’t get me wrong, we’ve been made to feel very welcome. As I write this I’m wearing one of the extraordinarily comfortable Notre Dame jumpers, which our brilliant Company Manager Deb had very kindly left waiting to welcome us in our hotel rooms on the day we arrived. It’s been lovely meeting the Notre Dame team and finally putting email addresses to faces.

It’s more to do with the fact that we’ve basically picked up this fun, silly, and progressively bizarre bubble the five of us have been bouncing around in while making this show, and simply plonked it down somewhere else.

Despite being almost 4,000 miles away from London, our daily routine hasn’t really changed that much: get up, shower, eat breakfast, go to rehearsal, play foursquare, muck around with a four-hundred year old play for a bit, go to the pub, go to bed, repeat. Except breakfast is waffles which you cook yourself in a waffle iron (I, erm, struggled slightly with this…) and the pub isn’t really a pub but an Irish themed bar where everyone who works there wears matching uniforms, and all the veggie options come with extra chicken if you want. And instead of getting the tube to rehearsals, we all pile in to the BIGGEST CAR I HAVE EVER SEEN, drive through the beautiful Notre Dame campus to our space in Washington Hall, and then spend twenty minutes trying to park the thing.

The car is a perfect metaphor for what’s really struck me as one of the differences between the US and UK, by the way: similar, but everything is bigger and if something can be automatic, it is. Apart from the waffle iron. For that, you’re on your own. Here’s me trying to figure it out. If you don’t know, the waffles are definitely not supposed to be burnt to the top of the iron like that…

Despite these new experiences however, the full realisation that I am actually here continues to elude me. I’m sure there will be a moment, maybe next week when there should be a bit more time to breathe, when something will finally drop in and I’ll suddenly find myself yelling “The Star Spangled Banner” in the middle of a 7/11.

Rehearsals have continued to be fun, interesting, and tricky. It’s a bit like putting up a tent in a
rainstorm; as soon as it feels like one section is pulled tight and pegged down, something else we’ve neglected starts flapping about wildly in the wind. We’re definitely making good progress though, and the show is at the stages where it requires its final bits of finessing. We performed the show for our American associates (still a relatively nerve-wracking experience, but with generally less scribbling than the London associates’ showing) and, again, received a hunk of useful notes afterwards.

Something we hadn’t even considered was what Scott Jackson, our resident AFTLS guru, referred to as the ‘atmosphere’ of each scene. What are the sights, smells, sounds of each place? What’s just happened there? What might be about to happen? Is there danger? These aren’t things that need to be made clear to an audience necessarily – they’re not something you as an actor can actually play most of the time – but they are vital when attempting to make sure that everyone on stage feels like they’re in the same place. Not just physically, but mentally and emotionally too. In a regular production, this stuff is usually all decided for you ahead of time by the designer and director, but with this work we need to find the varying atmospheres of the many parts of Illyria which the play visits ourselves.

‘So, where actually are we then?’ That’s a question we’re asking ourselves both in and out of the rehearsal room for the next few days. Hopefully by opening night next week, we’ll have a clearer idea.

Week Five: 27th to 30th of August
By Kaffe Keating

“Get your rocks off, get your rocks off, honey.”
– Primal Scream, Rocks

Pressure is an interesting element when it comes to being creative. Depending on the situation, it can all get a bit sink or swim. It can serve as a catalyst, pushing you on to the next idea until something actually works or it can create a wall around you, stopping you from being able to move freely and blinkering you into a singular focus.

It’s the final week of rehearsals in London. We definitely have a show. It exists. You can start doing it at the beginning and it will eventually finish. So that’s good. But at the end of this week we have the ‘Associates’ Showing’ when previous members of AFTLS productions from years gone by come to see what we’ve done. They’ll be giving us notes, which are doubtlessly going to be helpful, but also present the worrying prospect that we’ll be told that everything we’ve been working so hard on is just a bit pants.

It’s a funny way of working, without a director. In the absence of a true, full-time outside eye, we can never be completely sure that something works. That an audience will understand the goal a character is trying to achieve, or that using this prop will make sense as that item, or that that particular gag is actually funny. Of course, even in a traditional production (although saying that, in old Billy Shakes’ day they only worked with actor-directors, so this method is arguably more traditional than most) you can’t ever be truly sure until you have an audience. It’s just that if some grand concept doesn’t work it’s not the actors’ fault; it’s the director’s. No such luxury this time.

My training as an actor focused on continually offering ideas and possibilities to the director, giving them an infinite number of toys to play with. If they didn’t like something you did, no matter, you just do something else. Offer, offer, offer. We were taught to not focus too much on what other actors were doing, to make sure that you were bringing everything you could to a rehearsal room. ‘Trust the director’ was the golden rule. It’s not your job as an actor to decide how the story is told, how an audience should be receiving something; that way madness and demonstration and needless emoting lies. Your job is to serve the writing as well as you can, to remember your lines and avoid bumping into the furniture where possible.

But in this process I am the director. As is everyone else. We all think the horse and carriage works really well now (that’s the party line, at least), we all think that umbrellas with the metal handles extended will read as swords. Of course we do, we made them. But now all those things I’d been trained for years to stop worrying about – ‘Will the audience like the show, the ideas, me?’ – are now beginning to creep into minds.

As the days until the showing evaporate into the mist, I’m reminded (probably inappropriately, you be the judge) of a character in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Spoiler alert, but if you haven’t read it then stop reading this immediately and go and pick up a copy. Giles Corey, who has been accused of witchcraft, is having a confession literally pressed out of him with rocks being added to a board that’s been placed on top of his body. Instead of a confession, all he says to his captors is ‘More weight’ until the end. Now, I’m not saying I now know how he felt or anything, but with each day it feels like we’re being pressed under a little more weight than before.

Then Thursday rolls around. Showtime. Costumes on, props checked, instruments tuned. In troop our audience, some very friendly faces who know exactly how we’re feeling and have generously given up their afternoon to help us out. They do all have notepads though. Totally understandable, notes are the entire reason they’re here, but I just hadn’t predicted the notepads…

We do the show. It’s good! It happens. As always it’s a brilliant opportunity to really see where the creases are, what needs tightening; the things that have been working for a while now are completely taken for granted in my brain, whereas the things that aren’t blare like air horns. We get to the end. It’s quicker again than the last run, and there’s still minutes and minutes to be shaved off yet. Our audience thanks us and retreat downstairs with Jen and Jack, our TA’s and guiding lights, to consolidate their notes.

We’re not really sure what to do. Peel off the sweat-sodden costumes. Play a bit of foursquare. Have a cup of tea. Wait for the white smoke meeting that’s happening downstairs to be over. Finally Jen and Jack return, and reveal that the response is really positive! We’re taken through the associates’ notes in turn. Some really, really helpful stuff. One note that really sticks in my memory is the question of when the ‘ping of love’ happens for each of the characters. Beautifully put, and a helpful, interesting thing to consider that we hadn’t even thought about before.

Friday is the final day of rehearsal in London. We’re going to work through some bits and then get the showcase packed (please, Jove, let it weigh less than 23 kilograms). We start working and we’re suddenly solving things left, right and centre. Ideas are popping into our heads from nowhere, long standing issues are being solved in minutes, breakthroughs are happening all over the shop.

With the pressure lifted, with the rocks removed, we’re able to breathe again. It’s now becoming clear how the prospect of showing our work to outside eyes had been affecting us, like when you only notice the air conditioning was on at all after it’s been turned off.

We have our final home-cooked lunch from the lovely Frances (I’ll miss those, and her!) and troop upstairs to pack the case. Thankfully, everything fits! And we’re just under the weight limit. With a collective sigh of relief, we take up the tape that’s been marking our playing space and foursquare court (R.I.P) and pack the room away. It now looks just the same as it did on our first day, ready for the next company of five to start their rehearsals. And also for the people who do Tai Chi on Tuesday evenings.

Now we have suitcases of our own to pack. One day to buy accordion gig-bags, make last ditch attempts to find people to sub-let our rooms, and to say final goodbyes to friends and family. Then we fly on Sunday.

Next stop, Indiana!

Week Four: 19th to 24th of August
By Kaffe Keating

“Optimism is more practical.”
Poster in the street, Brixton

‘This isn’t going to work,’ I whinge.

‘Don’t worry about it, just keep going,’ come the supportive cries from the row of chairs behind me where the rest of the company looks on, helpless. Katherine, who plays Viola and Sebastian, is trying to get my attention but I wave her off. I need to solve this.

My coat is refusing to do what I want it to do. A far cry from what I imagined when I was whipping it around my head like a trainee magician in the TK Maxx down the road.

We’re running the whole show today and we’re almost at the end. It’s Saturday afternoon, the weather is beautiful outside (finally, it’s been raining non-stop for the last week and a half) and I’m in a sweltering rehearsal room trying to play three different characters all at the same time. Who are all having a conversation with each other. With nothing to differentiate them but a raincoat and some silly voices.

This is how Act V of the play opens, with a conversation featuring Fabian, Feste and Orisno; my three characters. It’s now being fondly referred to by the other company members as ‘The Kaffe Show.’ Currently, ‘The Kaffe Show’ is looking like it’s going to open to some luke-cold reviews and close soon after press night.

The first problem is that I just can’t get the changes quick enough. Feste wears the coat like a coat; arms through the sleeves. He’s currently having a conversation with Orsino, who wears the coat inside out over his left shoulder, like a Venetian cape. The lining on the inside is this really cool paisley – it looks good and it suits his character. Fabian, however, wears the coat like an apron (I’ve decided he’s a workman, the text gives you absolutely no clues about his character so you’ve got free rein there really) with the sleeves tied together behind my back.

As you might be able to imagine, switching from one of these to another, swiftly enough to avoid completely killing the pace of the scene, has its challenges.

‘Keep it simple,’ we were told, ‘Don’t overcomplicate things’. It was good advice, and I thought I’d followed it. I made the discovery early on that I needed to have the things that denoted all of my characters permanently on my person; otherwise I ran the risk of leaving bits of myself strewn across the stage. My characters talk to each other a lot, especially in the mad final act where all the loose ends are tied up.

The second problem is that my brain is now running on fumes. This week, everything has stepped up and the Designer/Stage Manager/Costume Supervisor roles have risen to join the already slightly taxing Actor/Director ones.

We still need to buy quite a few things, and also we need to sort a load of the music, and the fancy dress shop I was planning on going to won’t be open tomorrow, and I’m too hot, and I’m flopping around in a straightjacket of my own creation while trying to bleat out Shakespeare in an Irish accent.

I get through it. We get to the end of the run. And we’ve shaved about twenty minutes in total from our last attempt, a running time which will inevitably continue to diminish as the show gets tighter, and when we don’t have to spend ages watching me fighting with a coat.

I feel like I’m now in the part of the process which an old teacher of mine used to call ‘The Sainsbury’s Dip’. For any non-British readers, Sainsbury’s is a supermarket – so the ‘Walmart Dip’, if you will. It’s the phenomenon that occurs when you’re equidistant from the excitement and freshness of the first day of rehearsals and the nerves and adrenalin of the first performance. When you’re knackered and thinking: ‘maybe I should pack this all in and go and work in Sainsbury’s’. Now this is not to say that there’s anything wrong with working in Sainsbury’s of course, just that it would certainly be somewhere where you’d be able to go to work safe in the knowledge that you’re not going to throttle yourself with your own jacket.

But the point is that it’s a dip. It’s a low point, but from here things can only go up.

‘Week four is the hardest,’ I was told. Well we’ve done week four and we’ve basically got a show! There’s some stuff we need to buy, some mechanics we need to oil, some songs we need to figure out – but the shape is there.

Just as we were packing up for the weekend, Katherine came up to me with her own jacket in her hands. I don’t why she’s brought it with her today, it’s boiling outside. Then again, you can never be too careful with British weather.

‘Look.’ She has her arm in one of the sleeves, the side facing me, and her other arm is free. She then spins around to face the other direction, cleverly turning the coat inside-out as she does so, but keeping her arm in the sleeve. It’s Feste to Orsino, but the quick version. I hadn’t even thought of that as a possibility until now. This is what she was trying to show me earlier when I was too busy to listen.

It’s really easy to think that you’re completely responsible for your own problems; that just because they’re your problems, you need to be the one who solves them. ‘I got myself into this coat, and I need to get myself out of it.’ But actually, if you allow other people to help, people who can see the problem from the outside, you’re far more likely to find a solution.

I spotted this while we were walking to the pub for a well-earned pint in the sun after Saturday’s rehearsal. It’s a good thing to be reminded of every so often.

Week Three: 12th to 16th of August
By Kaffe Keating

“If music be the food of love, play on…”
– Orsino, Act 1 Scene 1

You know when you have a kid in your family who you don’t see that often? Maybe only two or three times a year? And when you do see them it’s always a shock because they’ve somehow become about a foot taller than you remember? It’s a perfectly normal thing for humans to do, but we never fail to find it impressive. ‘My, how you’ve grown!’ you say, pinching a pudgy cheek between your fingers, ‘When did they get so tall?’ you ask, once the comparatively giant child has escaped your grasp. But their parents don’t seem to have noticed much of a change – save a general awareness that none of their clothes seem to fit them anymore…

I’m starting to realise that this is one of the differences between being an actor and a
director or stage manager during rehearsals. Usually, actors rock up when we’re called -Guardian in one hand and coffee in the other – rehearse our scenes, chat about the play for a bit and then disappear off again when we’re not needed, supposedly to sit and learn lines somewhere. That’s not us being lazy mind you, just having a specific time when we’re on the clock.

Later on in rehearsals, there’s this lovely moment when we get to experience what everyone else has been working on, seeing parts of the story we’re not an active part of telling being brought to life, which until now we’d only read in the script or heard in the read-through. Then during technical rehearsals we finally get to see the set, our finished costumes, the lighting and sound design, and all the props which have been bled over with detail. You step into this world that previously only existed in your imagination and the designer’s miniature model box. You’re the uncle or aunt, standing slack-jawed at the sight of your nephew who is now six foot seven and no longer remotely interested in Legos.

For directors and stage management, however, it’s a different story. They’re the parents. They’ve been there since the beginning; for every new idea, every problem, every averted disaster. The set and costumes and props and lighting, which the actors are standing gawking at as if they’ve appeared out of nowhere, have been meticulously discussed in endless production meetings, often before the actors have even been cast. These members of the team see the production take shape slowly and gradually, like a sculptor chipping away at a piece of marble, not getting to see snapshots that show the progress that has been made, but watching the entire process play out in real time.

With Claire joining us full time this week, we’ve got the whole gang together at last! It’s
been really lovely, finally being able to figure out how exactly we’re going to function as a company of five. We’ve begun working through the play again from the top, going over previous work with a higher bar having been set for what we’ll decide we’re happy with. Scenes – and ideas within scenes – which clear that bar are kept and worked on in more detail, and those that don’t are scrapped and replaced.

The beginning of the play (‘If music be the food of love…’ etc.) seems so long ago that I
couldn’t even remember what we’d done. The old idea of Orsino playing the music himself (which I was helpfully reminded of) ended up getting chucked and we figured out something much better and, importantly, simpler.

We’re not actually taking the play to San Francisco itself, but this process makes me think of the urban legend about the people who are tasked with painting the Golden Gate Bridge; they start at one side and the thing is so massive that, by the time they’re finished, the side where they began needs a new coat of paint.

However, some parts of the play leapt back into our brains with pleasantly surprising ease; the sequence for the box-tree scene (feat. umbrellas) had percolated quite nicely, as had most of the slightly more choreographed sections, which was a relief. We set ourselves the slightly ambitious task of getting to the end of the play (and maybe even squeezing in another run) before the end of the week, but by Friday afternoon it became clear that we needed to beat a tactical retreat. The combination of five days’ worth of built-up brain-fatigue and the energy expelled digesting the very tasty (but also very huge) lunch which Frances, who looks after the rehearsal space, had kindly cooked for us had left us in a bit of a fog.

Happily though – after a quick chat about costume and, of course, umbrellas – we rounded out the week with a jam session which might form the basis of our opening and closing numbers. Harmonicas, shaky eggs, a guitar, a ukulele, a bunch of tone bells we found in the show case, a kid’s-sized accordion, and five actors all stood in a semi-circle who have figured out how to play together.

Then we cracked open a bottle of Cava and played some eighties music on the warm-up speaker.