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.