The Diary of the New Girl.

Monday was a bank holiday in the U.K.- so an enforced 3 day weekend, which, to be honest, we all needed. It’s hard enough to learn one part in a Shakespeare play, but we’re all playing 3-5 parts each, and although we are all pretty much off book, we’re too busy making the thing during the day and too busy doing life (washing, eating sleeping) in the evenings to have time to go back over anything, so the extra day meant we all came in on Tuesday having rested, gone over any decisions we’d made last week, and having revisited the text, raring to go again.

This week has been a lot of going over the scenes for a second, more detailed time. Making sure what we’re saying makes sense to us, and to anyone listening. Deciding relationships between characters, objectives and intentions. Carefully combing through our combined craft toolkit to discover the best blocking for story telling, whilst also keeping it feeling free and flexible. About 30 minutes is spent on how best to mime carrying a pile of logs. I love my job. 

The week passes in a blink of an eye and by Friday we have a minor panic about being at the end of week three, but we talk about it. Sharing that we all feel similarly enormously helps, and we reassure each other that we are in fact making good progress. We try on some costume pieces, wondering if that shirt looks too beachy, or those shoes are too heavy (I’ve never had more respect for costume designers) and talk about hat colours and styles until none of us quite frankly want to see a hat ever again. Terrifyingly, we know we need to revisit act one scene one, the dreaded storm, that we have all been putting off, knowing it will be a big challenge. “Why a challenge?” you might ask. The answer is multi fold – the storm opens the whole play, I can’t remember which of my cast mates poetically put it that ‘if we get them here, we’ve got them’; start with a bang and audiences can immediately be in the palm of your hand, the ball is in the air (the challenge is then to keep it there for the whole play). There are only 5 of us, no set and minimal props, so we have to rely on imagination and audience suspending their disbelief. It’s a famous scene, and the title of the play is ‘The Tempest’, the pressure seems almost too much.

We dive in, plunging into idea after idea, and gradually something begins to come together… we keep changing and trying and choreographing until we create a ship, sea, storm & shipwreck with nothing more than a rope and ourselves. We finesse and add detail and practise until we collapse, tired but very satisfied and that big scary thing is now not very big and not very scary. We are eating the elephant. And we are eating a lot of chocolate biscuits. 

Pub, pizza, sleep & back in for a Saturday rehearsal to work on a couple of moments we’ve not had time for yet this week. We are patient and kind to each other, knowing we’ll only have one day off before week 4, but still manage to wade through a lot of work, and keeping the work we do at a high standard. Next week will no doubt bring more fear, more success, more hats, more elephants, and more biscuits.