Week Eight: Austin, Texas
By Kaffe Keating

“But shall we make the welkin dance indeed?”
– Sir Toby Belch, Act 2 Scene 3

It’s always tempting to want to think of a piece of work as ‘finished’. When you’ve been slaving away on something for a long time, and you’ve got it to a place where it could conceivably be considered complete, you understandably feel the urge to lean back and put your feet up to think upon a job well done. Or a job done, at least.

This is definitely true with making plays. The marker for when a play is truly up and running is what’s known as ‘Press Night’. The clue’s in the name: it’s the evening when reviewers show up to critique what you’ve done and then write their opinions down in newspapers and blogs. After a show is ‘pressed’, it’s considered to be a finished product. Literally pressed, like the final stage of an assembly line.

It’s not exactly conducive to good theatre, this idea. Unlike film and television, you don’t end up with a finished product at the end of the process that can be repeated over and over and which will always be exactly the same. You don’t have a final draft of a novel, or a finished painting. A piece of theatre is much more transient. Sure, the same things will happen each time – Romeo will always meet Juliet, Konstantin will always give Nina a seagull, Malvolio will always get his tights on – but the way these things happen will, inevitably, always be different. Not just from production to production, but performance to performance. It’s alive, and changing, and each moment only exists then, in that instant. To decide that a piece of theatre is ‘finished’ is an oxymoron that just leads to the life slowly seeping out of the show, like a helium balloon quietly making its way back to earth.

The air hits us with a thwack as we step off the plane. Texas. We’ll be here for the next two weeks; we’ll leave this massive state from San Antonio in a fortnight’s time, but first: Austin. The mind begins to boggle when looking out of the car window on the way to campus and realising we’re still in the same country. The distance we’ve just travelled is about the same as London to Rome, but the flags adorning the poles outside each rest stop haven’t changed. There is another flag next to the more recognisable Star Spangled Banner which has made an appearance, though.

“We used to be our own country,” says James in what I can now joyfully identify as a real-life Texas drawl. He’s one of the faculty members at the University, who also runs the Shakespeare program at Winedale, a converted theatre barn out in the country where we’ll be performing at the end of the week. “Texas is definitely identifies very clearly as its own state.” The Texas flag is one of the most recognisable state flags in the US, the single star against a blue background with the single red and white stripe. If you were to zoom in to the right bit of the US flag, you’d end up with the Texan one; definitely part of something bigger, but also standing out on its own.

The campus at UT is beautiful. Orbiting around a central tower, the style of the buildings feels much more Mediterranean than in our previous campus. While Notre Dame, with its Irish influence, felt like it was responding much more to Trinity College in Dublin or even Oxford’s dreaming spires, the Austin campus brings to mind Italian, Renaissance architecture. It makes sense, I guess; it’s much hotter down here, and if you’re going to ape a style, choose one with a climate that suits where you are.

We’re coming to the end of this week’s Faculty Meeting, where we meet all of the professors whose classes we’ll be visiting to chat through what bizarre things we’ll be getting their students to do, when there’s an announcement. Two students will be performing a section of Twelfth Night for us. They’ll be doing the scene when Olivia first falls for Cesario, not realising that he is in fact Viola dressed as a boy. In honour of the play’s foray into gender, Austin (“Whey, and we’re in Austin!” Poor guy must get that all the time…) is playing Olivia, and Zoe is playing Cesario. It’s great, and a very fun surprise for us to watch a scene we’ve heard so many times now being played out with different voices, and with a different take. They’re both alumni of the Winedale program we’ve been hearing so much about.

We tech the show on campus, adjusting to a new space. To new faces too. Heather, who is in charge of all of our lighting cues needs a little more help than we’re used to, but through no fault of her own. ‘I can’t hear anything back here!’ she tells us. We’re performing in a concert hall rather than a traditional theatre space, so the lighting options are more geared towards musical recitals than plays, and are thus much more basic. Also the wings are soundproofed; great if you want a piano concerto which is uninterrupted by offstage noise, not so great when the person operating the lights can’t hear any of the cues. Luckily we don’t have many, partly because the whole point of the show is that it doesn’t rely hugely on tech, and also that we knew we’d be visiting some venues where options would be limited. This is what’s so great about this kind of show, you can do it pretty much anywhere.

We’re able to re-jig the cues so that Heather can figure out when she needs to make changes based on what she can see on the fuzzy monitor showing a live feed of the stage. The only other issue is that she’s not able to hold the soundproof doors open and reach the little lighting pad at the same time. The only point where this could be an issue is at the end of the first half, when Katherine is left on stage after the rest of us have whooped our way off after gulling Malvolio in the box tree scene. Someone will need remember to hold the door open for her to leave the stage while Heather brings the house lights up.

‘I’ll do it.’ I say, I’ll definitely remember to do that. Definitely.

I don’t, of course, and the interval for our opening night in Austin begins with Katherine desperately clawing her way off the stage as the heavy soundproof door swings shut in front of her.

The show has grown a fair bit over the past couple of weeks. It’s good; it’s becoming its own living being with a bit of a mind of its own. It does, however, like an apple tree that’s growing a bit beyond its trunk, need a bit of pruning. This is totally normal, and something a director would be keeping an eye on at this stage in a play’s life-cycle. But obviously this is a job we need to do ourselves. It’s still something we’re figuring out, how to give each other notes now that we’re no longer in the bubble of the rehearsal room. Since we’re all on stage the whole time, all notes need to be logged mentally as we can’t exactly sit at the back of the stage with a notepad. You’ll be sitting in the pub when suddenly something will jog someone’s memory, and you’ll find yourself receiving extremely detailed advice about how to make that gag with the hat work.

Our final performance was not on campus, but at the Winedale Historical Center. It’s a barn which has been converted into a beautiful, semi-outdoor theatre where, every summer, a bunch of students put on productions of Shakespeare plays. Because it gets so hot in the midsummer days, they rehearse in the early morning and retreat into the air-conditioned out buildings when the Sun is at its height. We have no such luxury, however, as we scramble around in the barn-turned-theatre at two in the afternoon, trying to figure out how to morph our show, the one we’ve only really just learned how to do, into a totally different space for the evening’s performance. ‘Be careful of the beams,’ we’re warned by Liz, another one of the UT faculty who’s directed here a lot, ‘This summer was a big one for concussions…’

The whole day is incredibly special from beginning to end. A highlight for all of us was watching the Winedale Outreach Players, who must have been aged between nine and twelve and led by the inspirational Clayton Stormberger, performing some selected scenes from Twelfth Night.

‘Oh that’s sweet isn’t it? Kids doing Shakespeare…’ I think to myself as I sit down to watch them perform in a shaded space in front of the barn. They give us a run for our money. The quality is truly excellent, and the joy that these young actors are clearly revelling in as they speak these words written by someone from the other side of the world, four hundred years before they were born, is contagious. It spills into our own rendition of the play, and the kids join us at the end to take a bow.

We end the evening on our backs, staring up at the stars in an unpolluted night-sky with coyotes calling in the distance. I have never felt more like a real-life cowboy.

Aside from the show and our classes, we’ve stolen time to head out into Austin itself. It’s really very cool. We were treated to a trip out to The Broken Spoke, a Texan dance hall where women in dresses spin to the sound of a pedal steel guitar and literally everyone’s wearing Stetsons. We took a trip down Rainey Street, Heather driving through downtown with the five of us in the back of her pick-up, where a bunch of houses have been opened up and converted into bars. On our last evening in Austin we waited with the crowds who gathered on top of and under Congress Avenue Bridge, which a colony of bats have made their home and which all take off to feed at once in a swarm as dusk descends, like a scene from Batman Begins. We rounded out our time at The Continental Club, the five of us and Clayton all dancing in a circle like maniacs to some of the best live music I’ve ever heard.

I’m sad to leave this wonderful city, and the wonderful people who’ve welcomed us here. But our Texan journey continues, to the home of the Alamo itself: San Antonio.