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.

Week Two: 5th to 9th of August
By Kaffe Keating

“This is a practice as full of labour as a wise man’s art, for folly that he wisely shows is fit…”
– Viola, Act 3 Scene 1

Restrictions are interesting. It can be frustrating, not being able to fully realise everything that pings into your imagination. ‘They wouldn’t have to worry about this in a normal production!’ you cry. ‘If we had a budget, we’d be fine!’ you wail. ‘If only we had an extra week to do this!’ you whinge to no-one in particular.

It’s the same on every show, but these perceived roadblocks can be looked at in two ways. You can either stop dead on the road you’re on, flummoxed, or continue walking, leaving the path of least resistance and heading into the forest the road would have cut through, the unknown.

It’s week two of rehearsals and we’ve been joined by a guest star Olivia/Maria. We won’t have Claire full-time until week three, due to some commitments she’d made prior to valiantly jumping into the role, so standing in has been the wonderful Jen Higham. Jen’s been on three tours, one of which was a previous production of Twelfth Night, so she’s been an invaluable presence in the room. A prime example of something that initially might seem like a restriction on our process which has immediately become a massive bonus. We began working through the scenes which feature Olivia and Maria, which we’d had to skip last week, and finally the play has started to stitch itself together in front of us.

Umbrellas have become more and more valuable as toys to play with; forming trees to hide behind, swords to ‘fight’ with, and at one point the wheels for a horse and carriage. (I really like the horses but I’m definitely their most vocal advocate – only time can tell if they’ll end up in the glue factory…).

The umbrellas are a prime example of necessity birthing invention. Since we’ve got to fit everything – props, costume, anything remotely resembling a set – into one suitcase, we’re quite limited in what we can use. We need things that are compact, versatile and which can offer lots of different images. As a result we’ve been forced to be really imaginative with what we have and the results are incredibly joyful.

It does make you wonder about big budget theatre, and how having a huge amount of technical capability and money to spend can actually scupper creativity. ‘We need Olivia to enter in a horse and carriage’ – okay, well, let’s just get one. ‘We need some swords’ – bang, there they are. ‘We’re actually bringing in a real box-tree from Hampton Court’. When you’ve got everything at your disposal, there is no need for imaginative solutions to problems and the muscle will inevitably atrophy. This is not to say that all big budget theatre is devoid of creativity — far from it — but in my opinion theatre which enjoys a hefty financial backing is at its most successful when it retains the spirit of whatever it is that forces an actor to turn an umbrella into a toothbrush in front of your eyes.

Since we now have an Olivia/Maria in the room, we’ve been able to look at two scenes in the play which are particularly tricky and long. Act 3, Scene 4 isn’t so much one scene as a collection of about seventeen which all run into each other, and Act 5, Scene 1 is just a mammoth where all the loose ends (or almost all of them at least) are tied up and all the mistaken identities are revealed. These scenes took an entire day each to work through and roughly set, and left everyone pretty knackered in the old brain department.

Our method of working, which continues to serve us well, of muddling through a scene in its entirety once, then again, then again – each time shaping and moulding a bit more – was a bit more grueling with these longer scenes, as it takes ages to get to the stage where everyone can go ‘Whey, we did it!’. However, brain-soupefying as the two and a half days we spent on these scenes were, I feel like we’ve developed some hard-earned stamina which we will surely make use of going forward.

The week rounded out with a stagger-through. You need to walk before you can run, and you need to stagger before you can walk. And stagger we did; props were in the wrong place, people were in the wrong scenes, I definitely said some lines which weren’t anything close to Shakespeare and one of the umbrellas flew from its telescopic handle and across the rehearsal room during one particularly enthusiastic unsheathing of a sword, thankfully no-one was impaled.

But that’s fine. The point of a stagger through is to be rubbish and to have happened. And happen it did. We have a play. It’s messy and mad and surely doesn’t remotely resemble what it will eventually look like when it emerges, undoubtedly resplendent of course, from its chrysalis in Notre Dame. It’s currently a fuzzy, weird looking caterpillar.

But that’s exactly what it’s supposed to be.

Week One: 29th of July to 3rd August
By Kaffe Keating

“I will not give my part in this sport for a pension of thousands to be paid from the Sophy.”
Fabian, Act 2 Scene 5.

One of the best lessons I’ve learnt about acting, especially in theatre, is to approach it like it’s a game. Maybe even a sport, depending on the show.

Games have rules, and some have more than others. Football (or maybe soccer depending on where you’re from) is a sport with relatively few rules, at least compared to rugby; which if you don’t know has bloody loads. Both are great fun to watch and to play and the joy comes from the fact that the players are forced create things within the boundaries of the rules of the game they’re playing. It’s not much fun to watch people playing a game where you don’t know the rules – I’m looking at you, cricket – and equally a game without rules at all, without form, is no fun for anyone. That’s just some people standing around in a field.

Not unlike the feeling on the first day of rehearsals when your task is to create a performance of Twelfth Night without a director…

Luckily, we’ve been provided with a few rules to get us going.

First things first, there are only five of us. The dramatis personae (or ‘cast list’ if you’re not as fancy as me) for Twelfth Night features at least eighteen speaking parts. Thankfully the roles we’ll be playing have been decided already, sparing us from having to fight to the death over who gets to say all the famous bits. Inevitably, there are points where two or even three of one actor’s characters are on stage at the same time, having a full-blown conversation with each other. So there’s that.

We are also required to mark out our playing space, our pitch or court, where we’ll tell the story. The auditoria we’ll be playing once we arrive in the States will vary in size and shape and so we need to maintain a level of consistency. Pitch sizes need to be standardised, after all. When an actor is not in the scene, they’re sat on a chair outside of this space, but still in full view of the audience. So no retreating to the dressing room for a cup of tea and the crossword between soliloquies…

Our props and our costume must all fit into a suitcase. Which will have a weight allowance. That means simplicity and clarity is the name of the game and the doublets, hoes and ruffs will need to be left at home where they belong.

Finally, and most importantly, we’ve got the words of the play. This is what we’re here to serve. Our job is to dig down into what’s written here and bring up what we’ve found to show an audience.

So that’s the beginning of a game then. That’s something to start with.

Unfortunately, the week began with some sad news. Anna Wright, who was set to play our Olivia and Maria, and who had lent those characters such energy and gusto in the read-through back in June, has had to pull out of the show due to health reasons. She’ll be sadly missed but her heroic replacement, seasoned AFTLS veteran Claire Redcliffe, has joined our team as a super sub.

This first week has been all about testing out rules for the game we’re all going to play together. Are they fun? Are they clear? Will an audience be able to learn them quickly enough?

After some slight tentativeness (it’s hard when you’re used to having a director set the tone and tell you what to do), we crack on with the first scene.

Just to see what happens. You know, no pressure. Just try something. ‘Fail better’ and all that.

If you don’t know, Twelfth Night begins with one of those lines that would make it onto a Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits album, no question: ‘If music be the food of love, play on’. Maybe in a slight panic, I offer the possibility that Orsino himself is the one playing the music and grab a guitar to hide behind. I mean, he’s talking about music, right? This yields a suggestion that maybe Orsino fancies himself as a bit of a songwriter himself and that the men of his court, Curio and Valentine, have been corralled into his band. It’s a mad choice, and one that may not survive, but it led to more ideas later on – which is what rehearsal is all about.

We carry on in this fashion, working our way scene by scene through the play, eventually falling into a rhythm with each other.

First, we’d just have a crack at the scene on its feet, with no real idea of performance or worrying too much about an audience. Just hearing it. Seeing what it does. Checking what bit of you it tickles. If you’re in the scene, you’re an actor; if you’re not, you’re a director. The directors would give the actors notes and then we’d try the scene again.

It was like starting with a lump of clay and moulding it a little each time to see what kind of pot it might end up looking like. There’s every chance that you’ll get so far with one design and then chuck it out before it even makes it to the kiln, but the time invested in becoming a better potter is valuable nonetheless.

It’s full on, jumping between roles like this: being an actor one minute, a director the next, then switching to view things as a designer, then as a stage manager and in my case, as the person who made a big statement on the first day by showing up with a guitar under his arm, a composer. ‘Composer’. Honestly. Katherine Newman, our Viola and Sebastian, managed to capture a candid moment where I was ‘recovering my energy,’ shall we say.

But then went on to prove herself that a bit of a lull can happen to the best of us…

We crack on on Monday, figuring out the rules to our game – testing them, improving them, and making sure they’re actually fun.

Can’t wait.