Extras

Day 2

We start with a physical warm-up. Massage, then concentrating on back stretches, finishing with loads of sit-ups. I say loads but they are the minimum we will do as we always set a smallish target and increase each day. It has been a while since I have done any intense exercise so even these hurt.

It is great to start the day like this though. If we were to start with the text then I am not sure we would ever get the energy to get out of our chairs and be physical.

We set the performers some simple rolling exercises but they prove problematic at first. This does not set off alarm bells with us but it does remind us that it is easy to take certain skills for granted when you get used to working with dancers in the rehearsal room. We just break things down a bit more and from there progress is swift. In fact the results inspire some more ideas for physical scenes and myself and Steven chat about where they would sit perfectly with the text. But still I have that voice in my head saying, ‘Hold back. Hold back. It is too soon.’ I am really aware of it this time. I am sure that it was never like this on other shows. It is possible that the ambitious plans and subsequent pragmatic revisions for Market Boy have had a profound effect. I hope it is a new wisdom and not some protective conservatism.

But saying that, I still get too excited and probably push the exercise too far. Not to the point where anyone would protest but possibly to that place where the performers are taking in so much new information that newly discovered techniques are starting to unravel. Thinking positively, it would be very exciting for me to come out of this process having learnt how to balance this impulse to push forward with a practical understanding of how much new information you can realistically expect your performers to retain.

The afternoon was spent taking chronological sections of the text and mining for meaning and possibilities. I thoroughly enjoy this type of analytical observation. So much so that I am desperate not to sully it by allowing it to become analytical naval gazing. It must always move the process forward and it is never to be hijacked by an individual’s process or to become a think tank for the self- justification of the actor/director. In these sessions I constantly discover that I have learnt things, that we have accumulated an understanding of writing, human nature and stage craft. This seems obvious but my point is, you do not go around all day reminding yourself of all the things you know or have learnt. It is these sessions that allow you to be surprised by the thoughts, convictions and opinions that you find yourself coming out with. And you sometimes find that you sound like you know what you are talking about. Ultimately you may find that you DO know what you are talking about. And this is thrilling! To be able to sit in a room with respected practitioners, internationally renowned writers like Mark Ravenhill and be able to guide and nurture a performer’s journey through a text is extremely satisfying. (Although I have to admit it was a lot easier before Mark came into the room. I am now very aware of not trying to speak for him. I am also suddenly totally aware that I am running the risk of him saying, ‘Well, actually, that is not what I meant at all.’ To be honest I am desperate for him to feel the same confidence in me as I feel in him. I think the difference, and where the paranoia lurks, is in the fact that a playwright’s work is often done in private, crafted somewhat and then presented to the people who will challenge it and take it forward. I have seen and read his work and I have developed a trust based on this. Even though he has seen our work he has never seen us work –actually in the process of working – and this, by contrast, feels like tightrope walking naked.)

Mark offered some cuts this afternoon. They were all good. Some involved the bracketing of sections that were good but were probably just in the wrong place. He also suggests rewriting a crucial section near the end. This is an exciting suggestion as it means he has developed an even keener understanding of his work and is now beginning to hone the text. Not just fixing what is broken but really starting to polish the words.

I think everyone is happy. The physicality is certainly challenging some. Tomorrow may bring sore limbs and aching backs and it will be fascinating to see how people respond to this. I used to live on this addiction to lactic acid. But it is definitely not everyone’s cup of tea. Again the trick will be finding a balance where you can protect, nurture, as well as drive on. This not a race though. The voice says, ‘Hold back. Hold back.

Day 3 (soft physicality day)

I missed the morning session. I spoke to Steven mid-morning and he said that everyone came in today with aching backs and stiff limbs and that he led them through gentle stretches and massages. It looks like the physical rehearsal plan is making sense already.

When I get to the afternoon session I am surprised at just how stiff and sore everyone is. Tomorrow will be interesting, when we try to get those muscles moving again.

Generally it appears that today was much like the first two days. Mark’s rewrites worked well and the cast read them equally well. We also moved further into the text looking at things in detail and always trying to open up possibilities. That is the intention but it is very hard not to nail things down, state your opinion with utter conviction and give line readings for some sections. No actor appreciates you performing the lines for them with the expectation that they are then to copy you. Even though this is a golden rule I still find I have to resist doing just that at times. I have not so far, though, but I have bitten my tongue a few times.

This process of looking at the text in such detail so early on is fraught with danger I think. The performance style we are aiming for can appear at complete odds with the performance instinct of some of the cast and this is potentially wearing, frustrating and can lead to a crisis of confidence. There are always loads of questions from one performer, full of doubt and insecurity. But I think this is good. After each question the performer does seem to be strengthened and the problem clarified. With another I am starting to fear that there is a slight tone of frustration in the questions. This becomes a little more alarming when the questions start to dry up and their look becomes insular. This also becomes a moment of weakness for me. I start to question the process. ‘Are we crushing the performer under this performance style? Is it too much too soon? Do they go home at night and tell their friends about this domineering approach? Do they think we have simply got it wrong?’

All of this crosses my mind as I clock the performer’s insular moment. A moment that could just as easily be about how his legs ache from the warm-up, how she must remember to buy bread on the way home. I guess there is insecurity flying all round this room but I know it does nobody any good to let performers see it in my eyes. Despite these wobbles, and they will become much, much worse than this, I must remain open yet openly confident.

One of the interesting things that struck me today during a read-through was that these words are the words that made it into the edit (of the imaginary documentary and of the text of Mark Ravenhill). The information they carry must have earned its place over the edited material so let’s hear their worth. Why have these details been included at the expense of something else? Show us! Give the text a bit of drive!

This was because the read-through started off at a turgid pace and was, luckily, thankfully, interrupted by someone’s phone going off. This allowed us to give some notes and start again.

I just got the impression that the performers imagined themselves talking to a room full of people. Quite legitimately of course, this being theatre, but we have stressed how we want the characters to imagine they are talking to an interviewer and are being filmed. It is a totally different relationship. The impulse of the actor in front of the crowd is to take these lines of nostalgia, lean back in an imaginary leather chair and give an essentially theatrical performance. I stressed that I think they need to lean forward, push things forward, keeping things fascinating so that these words do not end up on the cutting room floor. To look into the lens with an imperative that suggests (or screams), ‘Do you understand? Because I need you to understand this!’

Another thing that struck me was the lack of specificity in the reading. This is not a criticism of the performers. Just a recognition of the stage we are at and how much further we need to go to successfully tell the story. It occurred to me that this is a text that addresses the central, absent character only as ‘she’. It is also about the ‘Group’. Within that the characters recount and express opinions while making a clear choice to use either ‘we’ or ‘I’. There are times they are talking from within the Group. Why is this? Is is subconscious? Is it a place of safety? Of defiance? Of unity? And then there are times when they choose to speak as individuals, using ‘I’ or referring to ‘my work’. Again, why? What makes them kick themselves free of the Group at this moment? The reading tended to skip over all of these seemingly insignificant moments so I decided to flag that up and introduce these moments as opportunities. The cast were asked to look at the first page and consider exactly what motivated the choice of ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘us’, ‘they’, etc. I think this will help present characters who alternately revel in and recoil from their outrageous actions. I think it is this ‘colour’ to the storytelling that allows us to really get into the heads of these people. We must see the struggle and delight within for us to understand why they have to tell us about this.

Again, I have to remain calm and not get frustrated. It is brilliant watching performers develop. It is amazing to see them take you to places that you have not thought possible. And that takes time. At the moment I have to be satisfied that we, as directors, may be taking them to places they had not thought possible. We have, after all, been thinking, tasting and smelling this show for quite a while now. And for the actors, like the reader of a diary, day 3 definitely means day 3.

(By the way, I am thinking about trying to find that Complicité rehearsal diary. I guess there is no harm in having a look!)

Day 4

I had to miss the warm-up again but when I arrived the performers were doing their handstand exercises (a core strength exercise where you maintain a handstand against the wall, aiming for a minute and then increasing each time). They seem to have bought into the need for setting new standards each day and charting personal progress.

The rest of the morning the cast are set a task where they must create a physical contact duet. They are told to start from an extremely simple place, namely, considering the words ‘round,’ ‘by’ and ‘through’, and then finding their way round, by and through their partner. Again the exercise throws up how far we have to go but still shows pleasing progress by the end.

The afternoon is taken up by text work again. This is crucial but Steven and I are becoming increasingly aware that we have not got anything up on its feet yet. This is fine, we are sure, but still ... it would be nice to have something to show by the end of the week.

Day 5

Back to the sit-ups. I think we will all feel it at the weekend.

Compelled by a desire to get closer to making some work I set some energetic choreography with the performers, involving crashing to the floor, picking yourself up, doing it again, hitting counts in music, etc. All brave, challenging stuff. It struck me it was time to introduce the performers to the floor, to an element of risk and the techniques to keep yourself safe.

It is basically two bars of eight with a move on each count. This tests the ability to hear the count and the discipline to stick to it. It is also quite exhausting once you repeat it a few times. And this presents a fascinating moment ... How will they deal with the sweat? The heat? The burning thighs? The bruised knees? To move forward we need them to embrace this as part of the process, to indulge in it, to perversely enjoy it! Luckily, I think they do. Mostly. We shall see.

The choreography started out as a task but it turned out to be pretty effective. It might be worth returning to this and developing it. It certainly has all the pain and self-loathing of the text. It is punishment but it is also a search for empathy (something consistently and outwardly missing from the characters) as they crash their own bodies around the floor/swimming pool.

Later in the morning we get out the seats/bench (a moving row of seats on castors, forming part of the set) and ask the performers to just play with them. Sometimes all four, sometimes in twos, threes, but all the time not thinking about character and story. We need the performers to feel comfortable with the set. To own it. While we do not have the whole set in the rehearsal room, we do have these seats and the hospital bed. It is a great opportunity to play with them and see what the performers come up with outside the limiting environments of the set and the confines of proper context.

This exercise presents some interesting images and we then revisit them and try others. There is a lot of potential in this. It strikes us that this is the characters bored in the hospital, the room constantly changing showing the passing of time while the characters move around oblivious to each other. They sit down, they are then lowered to the floor where they are instantly comfortable suggesting they have been there for ages. They pace around, frustrated. They ‘collide’ with another and are tumbled to the bench where they sit, at peace, as if there for hours.

We are going to return to it on Monday and see whether we can crack off a scratch scene based on this. But there is an ulterior motive for this! We are meeting a representative of the Sydney Opera House on Monday about a possible run there next year and we are very keen to take this show. She is coming into rehearsals to meet us and to see some work in progress and, basically, there isn’t any! So Monday morning might be a furious assault on some physical scenes based on the floor exercise and the seats exercise. It could, of course, be a plan that backfires spectacularly if we show her some half-baked piece of physical nonsense so we are going to have to give it a bit of thought over the weekend.

The afternoon is dominated by a read-through of the whole text and it is here that my fears of this week being an unproductive week are completely demolished. The read-through is a massive leap forward in terms of clarity, energy and character, and is very heartening. It is a complete vindication of the approach, of tackling the text in such detail and guiding the performers through the necessary performance style. This in itself could have been reductive and interfering but it was essential that we all started off from the same place with this text. The positive results from this read-through will allow myself and Steven to relax with the knowledge that the cast have a clear understanding of the intended style of the production and can now start to find their feet from within this.

So a very positive week. Although none of this helps us with the lady from Sydney!

Day 6 (week 2)

We start Monday morning with a read-through of the whole script again as Mark has some more rewrites. Again the read-through starts fairly poorly, with a turgid pace but I am sure this will be addressed by the performers and is not a script issue. Once the performers are a few pages in they are really flying and the pace is terrific. Mark’s edits and rewrites have offered a more economical and leaner script and shaves almost ten minutes off the running time. There is a shock though.

The ending has changed. Now the artist shouts back at the group and accuses them of being bitter non-entities etc. This has a liberating effect on the group.

While I agree with the words she says I just don’t feel comfortable at the moment with her saying them. It seems just too ... I don’t know. I am not sure I believe that she can summon the strength and control to give such a measured response. Mark says that this is what the group have been waiting for ... her to say these words. I respond that I do not believe that they are waiting for this information from her voice. I believe that they are wanting to see it from her face, from a look. The face that only offers an absent smile. She speaks elsewhere in the text but nowhere else does she stop being ‘absent’. I suggested that it is still presented like she has said all of the above to the group but it transpires that this is what they gleaned from her look at the end, when she finds them burning the photos.

Two things strike me as I write this. One, it is a very strange thing to disagree with a writer about what his characters would do or would want! It does make you ask yourself ’with what authority do I say this?’

Secondly, it is equally strange writing this to ‘you’ (I mean, who are you?) while giving away endings and referring to things that may not make it into a final performed script. I am basically talking about things that, by the time you read this or watch pool (no water), may no longer exist.

***

The meeting with the programmer from Sydney goes well. We do not present anything but she sits and watches us working with the cast. I think this is a much more honest and satisfying outcome.

We recap the physical work started on Friday and start to crank up the pace. The performers respond well but are starting to pick up battle scars. We will be getting them knee pads for the rehearsal but it is crucial that they do not begin to rely on them for two reasons – one, because they will not be able to wear them in performance, and two, knee pads can give a false sense of confidence and performers can become slightly reckless, slamming down on the pads, trusting them to absorb the impact. It can mean that safe techniques can become sloppy. An extreme example of this can be found in a comparison between injuries sustained playing rugby and American football. In rugby, where players are relatively unprotected but are aware of self-preservation techniques, injuries are common but often small. American football, where players are covered in protective clothing, often has the more serious injuries. It is about being aware and ready for the possibilities that will help keep you safe and not relying on something else.

In the afternoon we start work on some weight transference techniques. Quite simple stuff but useful as a starting point because we want the performers to take these techniques onto the set (the bed, the seats). The task is fairly open and may not lead directly to a scene in the show but it does allow the performers to get ‘hands on’ with each other and create a string of fluid material. And the results are very interesting. They probably belong in another show but the exercise has served its purpose and the performers are clearly more confident and thrilled to have achieved this quality of contact work.

Steven then takes them off and sets them a devising task involving clicking your fingers on counts in bars of eight. He teaches the first eight as an example and then asks them to create their own. Again the results are brilliant. I hope the performers are getting a constructive thrill out of this and not having pangs of frustration that we are not getting the script ‘up on its feet’. It has crossed my mind that we must launch into the text tomorrow but I am not entirely convinced that we are ready. I am not sure what the sign of being ready is but I think it is important to have a cast who are ready to fly when the time is right rather than find that we are slowly stumbling through the text with Steven and myself having to ‘spoon-feed’ the physicality. We will see how we get on tomorrow.

And I will see how Mark responds to my comments about the ending.

Day 7 (on the way in to work)

I had another read of the new ending. It makes me feel nervous. I have a feeling of ascending panic. This is a real test of my diplomacy and of my commitment to collaborating (and compromise?). It is a personal can of worms. I do not know what to do next. I feel just as strongly about it as I did yesterday but I don’t know if that counts for anything. I have to wait to see if Mark sees it my way at all. And I will have to keep reading and see whether my initial reaction was just knee jerk. I may even grow to love this new ending! Who knows?

Day 7 (proper)

In addition to the stomach exercises today, Steven led the cast through some fairly tough aerobic work. They all coped fantastically. They seem to enjoy the sweatiness of hard work. I managed to miss out on all this because our directors’ notes for the programme had to be finished and sent back to the office. It is a shame in lots of ways that these notes have to be written now, as early as day 7, as we are well aware that we are going to learn a lot about ourselves and our work through this rehearsal process. As it is we find ourselves trying to find a tone that is hopefully funny and gracious without being presumptuous and arrogant.

We started them off on an exercise to find ten fairly naturalistic sitting postures or moves while sat. They were to then set, remember these and turn them into a string of material. This is to be clearly defined and disciplined and possible to keep to the count of the music used. This is only to create a vocabulary, though, and a sense of disciplined movement. There is not necessarily an intention to use the movement in this way in the production. This is so that we can use a precise physical language underneath the opening sections of text. Physicality that can unite the characters while we are making every effort to separate them textually and vocally. It can suggest complicity and insincerity or awkwardness. It immediately can present a conflict between what the characters say and what they mean and this instantly makes them more interesting. This exercise proves tough for some but the results are uniformly good.

We try out a different exercise for the first time. We set up a camera in a small room and instruct the performers to enter one at a time and be interviewed. We also tell them that they are allowed to play and choose different levels of excitement about this interview. But what we subject them to is the pre-interview and during this we witness constant adjustments of chairs, clothes for light levels, sound checks and strange questions. All the time the camera is recording them, closing in and panning out.

We watch the recordings and it becomes fascinating how edgy they are and how difficult it is to achieve stillness when they have been knocked off guard by this strange situation. They display tiny twitches and insecurities, all written large on the TV screen. There is an unpredictable energy about the room and about these people. When later we attempt a semi-staged (seated) run-through of the first page the pace reaches a new low and that is when we refer the performers back to the video. That is what it was for – to combat this laid back, lazy, theatre raconteur delivery impulse that is afflicting us at the moment. We remind the performers that it is highly possible that the characters are not entirely at ease with the situation and it is this nervous energy that propels them on past tact and towards recklessness. Maybe they are disarmed by this situation.

***

Thinking again about the rewrites. It turns out that the cast have been thrown by them in a way that I had underestimated and this stiffens my resolve that they must be addressed. One performer states simply that she is a little lost now, she does not know where she is. This is a very important comment because while it is only the ending that has been radically changed, the structure of this piece is such that this changes everything. As the end is where the characters are now, what precedes is the story of what happened told from the safety of where they are now. This is a story retold in the present. We are not taken back to the events. We only experience them through four highly unreliable narrators. So of course if the end has changed it has effectively unpicked all the work we have done and we should start again. Normally it is the perfect note to not play the end while you are still moving towards it, to always live only in the moment but this is best served by linear, narrative theatre. What we have here is a little more complex. What happens at the end is the imperative to speak. It is also the reason to stop speaking, bring down the shutters, and run away into denial. It is a complex dilemma that the characters wrestle with constantly and it is the faint whiff of this that makes them fascinatingly unreliable. They effectively struggle with whether they want to tell the story and which version they want us to know, whether they are speaking for the Group, from the safety within the Group, or separating themselves from the Group. All of which is crucially linked to what actually happened with the pool and the artist.

With all of this going on in the actors’ minds it is understandable that any changes to the end can have a massive impact.

***

Is this what people want to read? Is this what was promised? Is this you inside the rehearsal room or just inside my head? Is this a fascinating insight into the ups and downs of rehearsal? Is that in itself enough? Is it the tricks, the processes that you want uncovered?

I still have not read the Complicité rehearsal diary and I reserve the right to make mistakes as I write this. I just don’t want to inflict navel gazing upon people who would rather feel like they were inside the rehearsal room.

But this cannot be objective. It is from the inside and surely there is worth in that? And I am also writing the resource pack which will be more practical. I want to plough on. Not exactly regardless but while I have the focus and the energy, I want to see this through, to see what develops.

Day 8 (soft physical day)

I take it easy with a stretching, massaging warm-up. We then work on some rolling work, interacting with chairs in our path. All this is building up to something we wanted to try out. Namely, an effect where the performers appear to roll uphill and into their chairs. As if the film had been reversed. It should look impossible.

Progress is slow and the results are only OK. It was worth trying and we may return to it. At least the performers have experienced the process and are aware of the effect desired now, even if this session did not provide completely inspiring results.

This afternoon started with an exercise focusing on the hospital bed. The performers were asked to approach with good intentions, with care and concern, and then recoil with fear, hatred, revulsion, etc. These were the inspirations. The performers were instructed to contain these bursts of contempt within eight counts of music and to set a few versions each. During the exercise one of the performers completely froze and could not think of anything. Feeling lost and unsure of the improvisation he just stood there and watched the other three wrestling with their feelings towards the imaginary being in the bed. This accident looked fantastic and offered an unconsidered depth to the situation. Here we had one of the four characters who did not respond to the situation in the same way, who observed the alternating emotions of his friends with a similar fascination and revulsion. This allows the possibility for the audience to wonder whether there was a judgement made in his mind. It makes the audience question the unity of the Group in that moment even though their text suggests they all felt the same. It also seemed right that it was this person’s character who witnessed this.

These kinds of accidents are a crucial part of the creative process. We have found that you must remain open to them. I think we may even partly rely on them and actively create situations and improvisations that will allow them to happen.

The rest of the afternoon is taken up with the performers all learning each other’s ten moves in the chair from yesterday. They are very fast at this, despite being tired and sore. Their speed and clarity allows us to workshop the moves a little. It becomes clear to us that this is the vocabulary that will see us through the first few pages but that not all of it belongs there. There are some moves that are screaming out to be placed elsewhere. And this is what happens when you instruct your cast on a simple brief and do not ask them to make up moves for a certain part of the show. Often when you do this you stifle their creativity and they only try to second-guess what you might want from them. This way round they can surprise you and offer more.

The exercise also points out to us that the choreography works better in separate chairs rather than the bench seat of the set. This means that we may be going into the production meeting tomorrow asking for some more chairs. This will obviously be a pain but I guess this is what these meetings are for.

***

No Mark Ravenhill in rehearsal today. I know he is very busy but I think we need to make contact with him. It is slightly awkward him not being around while there is some discomfort with the latest draft.

It makes me feel insecure about the text and my ability to guide anyone through it. But then today was a strange day. Progress was slow at times and I felt tired, uninspired and uninspiring. My lack of confidence led to inarticulacy. I want to enthuse the cast with ideas but I feel that I need to return to the text, have a session with Steven where we plot out the rehearsals and where we think our ideas could sit in the text.

Day 9

Today started with good news. Steven has spoken with Mark who says he agrees that all of the vitriol expressed at the end by the artist is actually gleaned from the look she gives the four characters. This is a massive relief. As Mark has been unavailable and will continue to be for the next couple of weeks, part of the stress was just a fear of it not being resolved quickly. Now it is a case of convincing the performers that everything is OK despite the fact that the script cannot change until Mark returns. Mark has suggested that if there are any lines that help make sense of the end section then we should place them in. As competent as we are I don’t think this is the type of thing that reassures performers but we are just going to have to convince them and make them feel secure about what they know about the text.

Today has been quite a demanding day. We have been going through the text of the opening scene and choreographing each gesture and adjustment of each character sitting in their chair. This is painstaking, meticulous work and there are moments when the performers’ brains appear to melt. It must be very hard and frustrating to persevere with this process without a clear idea of the overall effect. At first the performers appear to resist, to maintain and fight for their own naturalism and timing. Our job is to convince them of the artistic intention and how that requires a precision that will command and control the viewer’s focus. But our job is also to remind the performer that they still have a roll to play and skills to offer. They can easily feel like our puppets here but once this choreography (for that is what it is and when this is understood, everything is easier) becomes second nature and embedded in a deep physical memory then the details the performers want to offer can emerge.

After a very slow start progress picks up and they start delivering the choreography to a satisfactory standard. It will be a real test to see how they retain this though as I am sure we have not yet reached that physical memory stage.

Day 10

Another day of physical devising. Another day of setting things that might appear to have no relevance to the script. It does strike me when one of the performers tells a story of a nightmare rehearsal process due to an extremely selfish actor that we have been very lucky in our work so far. Our performers have been very generous, understanding and trusting and I know our processes must have been frustrating for some. Especially when we have lacked a clarity when describing a task. This task setting is, we feel, our way of liberating the performer from the demands of making the overall show. I guess some performers would feel alienated or even patronised by this

Day 11 (Tuesday after Bank Holiday)

I stay at home today and get stuck into the resource pack. It is a bit of a monster and takes a lot of time that I don’t really have so I have had to come out of rehearsals and focus purely on getting some of it out of the way. As today is a day of rail strikes it seemed to make sense rather than spend at least four hours travelling to rehearsals. In fact it could have been a lot more. So it has at least been productive. The downside is that the set was brought up from Plymouth at the weekend and is now in the rehearsal space and I have not seen it. Seeing it in model form does not really prepare you for standing in front of it for the first time. At the moment I am full of questions – ‘Will it work? Does it help us? Is it reminiscent of another set? Is it limiting? Intimidating?’

I spoke to Steven during the day as he and the performers had had the day to take it all in. All he could say was ‘It is big. It is BIG.’ He also added that the performers have appeared to have kicked up a gear. This may be due to the stage we are at (the start of week 3 of 5) but it may also be the invigorating effect of the set. It makes everything more real. It gives you surfaces to perform off, to jump off, to lean on, rather than performing in a void. This sounds like a petty point but it does make a difference.

As they had a good day yesterday, hopefully they will have things to show me. This will allow me to see the set instantly in context and allows me to settle back in and catch up. Four days away does seem like a long time.

Day 12 (yoga instructor leads the warm-up)

The set is big. VERY BIG. It is also strong and very useful. It is also not like any other set of ours. It is exactly what we asked for. A hybrid of swimming pool and hospital room.

***

The morning is filled recapping the moves, lifts and jumps found using the set, and creating new ones, putting strings of material together and then filming it. Progress is good but one of the performers is nursing an injury which means they are a little timid at the moment. Hopefully this will pass soon.

The moves explored are research into what type of vocabulary we can use near the end where the four characters go completely off the rails and burn the art. We are looking for a reckless abandon as opposed to the slightly mannered, nervous physicality of the opening sections. Working on this type of material must feel liberating for the performers even if they are picking up the odd scrapes and bruises from it.

There are times when it is painfully clear that we are not working with dancers. They are lacking the instinct, maybe. Certainly the technique is not there and this slows things down. It must have been exactly like this when we were setting out as a company and were frustrating choreographers like Steve Kirkham or T. C. Howard.

Our task here is to get to a place where an audience does not make the same observation about the training background of the performers as I have just made.

***

I ran a suggestion for a line at the end past Steven. It is a line that, I feel, accommodates the new text (the artist’s vitriol) but also makes clear that this information is a projection from one of (maybe all of) the characters. It is their understanding of the artist’s look and of their new relationship. He liked it and we are going to work with it. We might go to visit Mark tomorrow so we could always run it past him. Either way, knowing that we have some sort of bridging line there now makes me feel more comfortable and confident.

***

The afternoon involves a run-through of where we are up to so far. It is occasionally languid, especially at the start, but is exciting nonetheless. We give a note to find the excited affectation of the beginning and to fight this casual approach. It is a note we have said after every run. These are very intelligent and talented performers. The lure to play this text this way must be very strong but I still believe in our instincts.

We also instruct them to make some material that pulls their clothes around, grips at their own flesh, etc. They are to find eight moves. They do not have to fit them to music but they do have to teach them to a partner when they have found their string of moves. They are split into two pairs and teach each other their moves so that we have two groups doing a string of unison. We then ask them to think about the excitement of something naughty, the butterflies in the stomach, the desire to pee, the childish need to hold onto yourself. Let these inform the moves rather than some erotic notion. Then they had to focus their eyes on a fixed point and adjust their work if they had to. Once we had this we told them which section we were thinking about for these moves. (A section about taking your clothes off. Not the most inspired or abstract association but we wanted to avoid the moves being completely literal. If we had started with the words then there was a risk the moves may have been simple mimes of getting stripped. What we ended up with were two strings of material much more beautiful and intriguing.)

It has been great to use the set today. Also to move forward into the text. I have no idea of whether we are on schedule or not though. Steven and I are meeting tomorrow from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. to go through our ideas and how we see things progressing. I guess I will get a better idea from that.

The intention is that we have our meeting first. Then a production meeting. Then the performers come in at 2 p.m. but we work through to 10 p.m.

There is a calculated ploy here. We have found that there is a strange, dedicated excitement about working late, outside the norm. You get a different energy from people. It also creates a conducive environment to take things a little further, to explore some of the darker, riskier elements of the production. Hopefully we can exploit that again here. The rehearsal rooms are great on a day-to-day basis. They are clean and beautiful, with the most amazing light spilling in and changing the room constantly. It will be fascinating to find out how it feels with all that natural light taken away, with all the church workers and volunteers off home. It would be great to unearth the kind of stuff we might hold back from during the day!

***

(Having recently moved house, I have no idea where that Complicité rehearsal diary is. There are numerous boxes, all labelled, but none of them says ‘Complicité rehearsal diary’. While I am happy to continue doing this in my own way, part of me desperately wants to avoid getting to the end of this process and then wishing I had done it in a different way. That I have missed out something fundamental to your understanding and insight into our rehearsal process. But then maybe this is more of a genuine diary. I certainly do not want to compromise this aspect by writing revisions after the fact just because I liked what Complicité have done. But still, I am intrigued. I still want to know what the form is just to know whether that is what I am doing, whether that is what I want to embrace, or whether I would recoil from the style.)

Day 13

Steven and I have our meeting in the morning. It is extremely useful to do this. It is quickly clear that this is not just a chance to find out what we both have planned. It instantly becomes a session where we can spark up new ideas and solve the creative problems that are troubling the other. Problems that we may not even have considered until then. The success of this session means that we can now map out exactly what we feel we need to achieve over the next few days. It also means we can measure the actual progress on a session-by-session basis and are able to pick up the pace when needed.

***

The afternoon session starts with a warm-up that is initially designed to stretch but gradually turns into a more aerobic session. After a massage of aching muscles and an initial mini aerobic stretch I set some choreography with them. The intention here is to work fast, asking them to keep up as much as they can but to remind them that although they are learning moves they must not forget it is a stretch and must commit to every move as best and fully as they can. Once they have learnt this I start to crank up the pace of the execution. This results in a very sweaty session. I am not sure whether this approach was entirely successful though. Dancers tend to embrace the challenge to attain a quality in the moves in a very short time. This is their world and within this, failure is part of the process. A wrong turn or getting stuck is a moment of light relief, a bit of fun, for they know this confusion is temporary and an understandable part of getting something right. Actors, who may feel out of their comfort zone, can get frustrated by this approach. They appear to think they are expected to get things right straightaway, that they are disappointing if they are seen to be struggling through something. They can become unhappy and tetchy. Interestingly they probably have a very similar approach to the way the dancer tackles the new choreography. The dancer immerses themselves in the new ‘lines’, physically chews them around, gets a feel for them, before delivering anything they think is near the quality asked for. I guess the desire for the actor to get the choreography right first time is about not being unmasked for something you are not. The dancer has no fear that being seen to get a move wrong is going to make anyone think they are not a dancer. It is strange then that it is this aim for perfection and the frustration that it brings into the room that actually unmasks the actor as a non-dancer.

The evening session offers good progress. There is an interesting moment when we talk to the cast about our idea of a particular scene being delivered with the actors’ trousers down. They are taking their clothes off as the artist jumps into the empty pool. The sound of her landing on the concrete stops them in their tracks and they remain frozen, recounting the scene, with their trousers at their ankles.

We took the gentle approach and aired the idea, applying no pressure or demands but wanting them to think about it and give some feedback. It took them a while to respond.

To be quite honest, I was surprised by their responses. The girls immediately saw the theatrical potential of the scene. The boys’ minds were elsewhere. This, I expected. I think it is a completely different thing for a man to stand naked on stage than it is for a woman. We all know we are being looked at but while from certain angles you may see nothing of the woman a man knows he is being measured and compared.

What I found surprising was that this fear or nervousness came dressed up in some quite remarkable theatrical and practical concerns. One performer needed to be convinced of the scene’s artistic validity. Does the nakedness (and we did stress that it is more of a suggestion of nakedness. The trousers and pants go down but the shirt/top stays on and may well cover concerns) have anything to do with the story? Well the answer was alarmingly simple. So simple that the answer was quite difficult to give. The characters are ... skinny dipping? Skinny dipping!

Had the performer not noticed this, lost sight of this? I can’t help but think that the question came out wrongly. I think he had doubts over our intentions to use their nakedness. Maybe they were being set up to be laughed at? The boys had, after all, just snapped out of that faraway look in their eyes that possessed them when we first presented the idea. I have been naked on stage before. I know where they went in that middle distance moment.

Another ridiculous concern was expressed like this: ‘I have taken my trousers and pants off loads of times and I will never be able to get them off as quick as you want!’

But then it transpires that they too have been naked on stage before. And they say they have no problem with it. So it is about some kind of artistic validity. It cannot be about the moment in the play (skinny dipping?) so it must be about the directors. This does not worry me too much because I think they need to sleep on the idea, but I wonder if it eventually comes down to trust. (I also believe that we gave them a platform and probably encouraged these reservations because we were so careful with them. We might have made it more of a deal than it actually was.)

I just think they need some time before we can have a proper chat about real concerns.

***

There are several moments today when I think about the danger of making choreography and just throwing it at the text because that is what we do. We are a ‘physical’ theatre company. There is a fine line between the temptation to do this and the expectation that we should. There were some fantastic moments where we just let the performers and the text do the work. It was captivating and refreshing. And why not? These are very exciting performers and this is possibly the best script I have ever worked with.

Being a better ‘director’ rather than a physical theatre maker means knowing when to leave these moments alone. It may be just as physically considered but it is sometimes right to keep it just simple. The audience do not need any more. I have been in the rehearsal room where an actor created something beautiful with the text and the director then took it, choreographed it and effectively claimed it for his own. And in doing so he killed it.

Seeing that was a big moment for me. I never want to forget that. Sometimes less is more and this ongoing search for better and more complete integration of text and movement, as if there is some theatrical holy grail at the end of it, just pushes us into suffocating the work and not allowing the text, the actor and the audience to breathe. Surely it is only when all three of these are happy and breathing that truly alive theatre can exist?

***

We have been talking about a scene we want to create. It was a scene that emerged out of the development weeks at the National Theatre Studio and exists on the footage taken from a run-through of the work created.

The scene on the footage is almost exactly how we want it but we feel really strange showing it to our performers and effectively saying ‘this is how it is done’. How would they feel looking at other performers and just copying what they do? It feels disloyal to do this and any work we make with them, we would want them to have a genuine sense of ownership over it.

We decide to show them anyway, stating that we want them to use this to create their own version. While we are doing this we both have (and later confide having) the same brainwave. This reticence is stupid. We are not showing them someone else’s work. This is our work and we have the right to use as much or as little of it as we wish! This is not a workshop where the participants have paid to get as much as they can from it. We do not owe the performers. They would possibly not at all be affronted at being asked to learn something from the video. They probably looked at it straightaway and saw it as our work. We have been too democratic and have probably not served ourselves or the actors best by being so.

We run an exercise to allow the performers to create their own material so that we can make a new version but I feel we will probably end up using 90 percent of the old version. I feel that this has been a small revelation about growing up. Trying to please everybody all the time can sometimes please no-one. The performers may have been just as happy being told what to do. Sometimes that is what the rehearsal room and the director/performer relationship demands.

***

So did the evening session work? The jury is still out, I would say. We got the work done but the performers did not come into the afternoon session refreshed as they do in the morning sessions. The evening session was strange, partly due to the nudity discussions, but productive too. Through necessity and fascination, we need to do it again.

Day 14

I have had a shoulder problem for the last three months and for most of that time it was getting worse. It got to the point a week ago that I thought it was a ‘frozen shoulder’. Then it miraculously cleared up. Then a couple of days ago I started to get pain again. Today it is back with a vengeance. I cannot take part in the warm-up, or even offer advice on moves and physicality for the exercise Steven has them working on. I can’t even think about moving never mind get up and do some. I feel like I have been run over.

Luckily, Steven is on form and he leads them through some great work. Genuinely exciting and, in terms of the quality the performers achieve, light years away from where they started the rehearsals. If ever there was any question as to the benefits of working in this kind of partnership, then today emphatically answers that.

***

Our stage manager thinks she may have found a hospital bed for the production. We have been using a temporary bed so far while the design team have been researching and costing various hospital beds from specialist suppliers. Of course I have no idea when it actually occurred to anyone (it certainly did not to me) that we are rehearsing next to a hospital!

We popped in there to meet a woman who showed us the perfect bed and then suggested we could borrow it for the tour in return for a donation to the hospital. This is fantastic news and means we could start next week with the bed in place. (Saying that, we may need to negotiate some minor adjustments to it.)

We have a history of things like this happening to us. The answers to a lot of our problems have often existed right under our nose. I do not believe in fate but I am getting close to relying and budgeting on these little events coming along to save us, such is their consistency.

***

Talking to the designer today we are all of the opinion that the set needs something more. It is not quite working yet but I am loathe to stress too strong an opinion before it has been properly dressed, we are able to throw light on it, and we have a good idea of all the ways we are going to use it. The problem there is that by the time we have done all that it could be too late to do anything to the set. We talk through some ideas and decide to think about it over the weekend. The weekend came along at the perfect time. I do not expect to come in with many answers on Monday but it is possible that the designer could. Who knows, even I might have a blinding flash of inspiration! My point is the weekend took the pressure away because coming back in tomorrow and not being able to help each other with any enlightenment may have taken us a step or two towards panic or towards quick and uninspired solutions.

***

We had a run-through of where we are in the text so far. It came in at 25 minutes but should probably have been around 20. It is a heartening run despite this lack of pace. It is clear what areas work and where we need to rethink and spend more time. None of it is catastrophically wrong though.

I point out to the cast that there is a lot of work that we have done that has not appeared in the script yet. This is good news because it means that as we plough on through the script we are going to meet chunks we have already done, sections we are already familiar with. It will make us feel like things are slotting together and progress is speeding up.

For example there is a prolonged drunken, debauched party scene near the end that we have been working on a lot. The cast do not know this yet as we have only been working on the physical structure of the scene. To even call it a scene is misleading at this stage. Once we map out the physicality we can start to add the other ingredients the performers will have to accommodate – the text, the drunken swagger, the sexual abandon, the anger and exhilaration.

But there is no need to overload the cast with all this. If we told them they were drunk then there is the risk that they will only play drunk. If they are brilliant physical performers first and then told they are drunk, and then told they are angry, and then told they are horny, and then told they are frightened then you see how this complex performance is layered. All of this information at once could swamp the performer and limit their creativity.

***

The cast have been asking questions about where their performance is aimed. The earlier work we have been doing has been about sending the focus out to a camera/gentle inquisitor but they have identified correctly that this does not sit entirely well with the section we are going through at the moment. This section takes the audience right into the events being relayed and the performers have to be more in that moment. Earlier we had encouraged them to find ways of holding back from immersing themselves in the moments they are relaying. This is still right, though, as it sets the scene that we start in and return to. We need reminding that everything we see is the past being communicated from the present.

This is all part of finding the rhythm of the piece. It moves in and out like this a few times. There is no need to identify these moments to the performers as they will feel where they exist, where the text is making specific demands on them. And where they cannot feel this or miss it then we will help for it is actually a lot easier to see it from the outside. The performers have struggled at times to find this rhythm but I have tried to reassure them that it will come.

Identifying this change of rhythm and performance focus has helped us solve another dilemma today. During the run, when we reached the ‘Good Bed’ section, the sudden introduction of music seemed to grate. Indeed we had not quite worked out where we could use incidental music. Realising there is this in-out rhythm to the playing of the piece pointed us towards the way the music could operate. It could match and complement that dynamic, drawing us into the events the characters recreate.

Day 15 (Monday)

By the time I make it into rehearsals they are just finishing the warm-up. Childcare issues in the mornings mean that I am not getting there until 10.20 a.m. at best on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays but today was a bit of a nightmare and I get there just before 11 a.m.

When they start recapping the extended (drug-fuelled but they don’t know that yet) physical scene they are very sluggish despite being warm and seemingly fresh. This takes both myself and Steven aback. Brilliant as this cast are they are also an enigma at times. We realise eventually that they are struggling with the jump from warming your own body up to being able to manipulate and work with someone else’s body. We have either taken this for granted or miscalculated the difficulty in this. They are not dancers. This is not what they do every day. They have not even been doing it every day with us. We decide to take more care with that jump from warm-up into the work itself but specifically look at the cast doing a bit of contact work with each other as part of the warm-up.

***

There were times this morning that felt like wading through treacle. It was as if the cast could not break from a walk to a trot or a cantor, never mind to a run. You can put every stage in place to make the rehearsals as conducive as possible but sometimes tired bodies or tired minds just do not want to exert themselves. We had to put our foot down a little otherwise the day would have carried on at this interminable pace. We were sure this was just a case of getting over the hurdle of getting started. Once over that we were sure that they would feel more relaxed and energetic. So it turned out. After a terrible run of the scene we took it apart, cleaned it up and then put it back together but insisted that we start to move forward with it. We had been very gentle with them when we felt that they were out of their comfort zone but here we felt there was no excuse. The effect was the next run showed genuine glimpses of promise. The first thing I did was ask the cast if they had noticed this too. They said they did and as they did so they looked charged and ‘alive’ for the first time that day. Heartened by this we tidied it up some more, told the cast this was the last time they would be doing this for a while and that we had to nail it, and we ran it again. The result was great. Very exciting!

We think it is important to put a bit of stress on a scene from time to time. It is good to know that we have to move on, that we cannot spend all day on this. I am sure that this would not suit all directors or performers but I think it may also be reassuring to performers that the directors also have a schedule to stick to and an eye on the bigger picture.

With this in mind we both note that the time has come to be telling people what to do more. We have been through the confidence-building and exploration stages and need to be setting stuff and this is where the performers are looking towards us. That is not to say that they are not offering up material. They are doing this more than ever now they have an understanding of what we are aiming for but they are also very appreciative of being told what to do.

***

I have a quiet chat with one of the actors about some detail in her performance. It is thrilling to know that despite all the headwrecking physical stuff we are throwing at them they are still finding the time and inclination to think about their performance and their usual personal process. It has always been a fear of mine that this approach of ours could swamp those new to it but it was lovely to just sit and chat constructively within the simplest director/performer relationship. It is great that this approach can still sustain that detail to. I also fear sometimes that this physical theatre of ours will only offer broad brushstrokes even though we stand by its potential to do so much more. The work of the cast so far makes me very hopeful that this is not the case.

Day 16

Mark is back with us today. It would be great to show him the work we have done so far but responding to five missed calls on his mobile, one of our actors found out that his wife had just started having contractions. Off he went to be with her.

(I stepped in and while I have always fancied performing in this show I have to say I was RUBBISH. Reading from the script I lost all theatrical perspective and any sense of what would be right. It reminded me of the difficulty and frustration of directing from within. We used to do it all the time when we were performing but that was because we had no choice. It is clear (and incredibly obvious I suppose) that there is so much more to give from the outside. Our experience of being on the inside does give us a shared sensibility with the performers and a practical understanding of what we are asking them though.)

We are yet to hear whether he and his wife have had the baby and what this means for his availability. This was the risk we took because we wanted this performer and now we have to live with it.

It is different for everyone I am sure but the weeks after the birth of my daughter were all consuming. I also know an actor who heard his partner had the baby, went home to see her on the Friday and was back at work on the Monday! There are of course practical demands and considerations concerning the show but it is certainly not for us to make those demands (yet). The performer will be having his world turned upside down now and in amongst all this chaos a tiny part of him will be thinking about when he could and when he should return to rehearsals.

All of the above seems to suggest that this situation does not terrify me. Well I can assure you it does but it is partly of our own making. We just have to deal with it. But on the inside ... you don’t have to be stoic on the inside. This is terrifying!

But it will be good to have Mark back though ...

***

I led the group through a really sweaty warm-up, again using a set routine of choreography to stretch to and then push towards a more aerobic delivery. Having loosened the cast up I then spend the next hour icing my shoulder trying to stop it seizing up. It felt great during and immediately after the warm-up but while I sat and watched the others work it just became gripped again. This is very frustrating.

Not having one of our performers makes it impossible to work on some contact work and recap the big physical scene, so Steven takes over and they start work on adding some footwork to the section he has created (‘Select Delete’). This is usually where brains start melting and dripping out of ears but they remain focused and work at an incredible speed. It is such a shame that this process will have to be recapped when the missing performer returns. And it will not be easy for him. The focus will be on him and he will feel that he is holding us up (which of course is true!). It is not a nice place to be. I have been there and it is a real battle to stay positive and productive.

In the afternoon I want to work on a small section of text and movement but the cast seem to hit that post-lunch lull we have seen before. It feels like they are resisting me and this is all the more difficult as I only come to them with an idea I want them to engage with. I do not want to just tell them what to do here. I want them to meet me halfway but this doesn’t really happen. I find that my idea sounds a bit feeble now that I have voiced it. But then all it would have taken to sound strong was for someone to say, ‘yes’. But I get virtually nothing. This is worrying. I know that the idea lacked a real clarity but I thought I could bring that to them to help me with. I guess I was uninspiring and they were uninspired.

So why were they good with Steven and bad with me? Is it a clarity issue? Is this a trend that I have not noticed before now? The implications are devastating. If I have a lack of clarity it is when I feel nervous or lacking in confidence, then this idea will only lead to greater lack of clarity. It will be self-fulfilling.

We eventually get the scene up and running and it involves me simply choreographing their moves. Not the way I had planned it but it is done and it works. At the end of the session I thank them but I don’t really mean it. I am both frustrated at them and embarrassed if the reason why the session was so turgid was because they have no confidence in me as a director. I know they come to me for help with the text and for ideas but maybe when we are up on our feet they can see through me. That is what it feels like! And I know that sounds self-indulgent or like classic paranoia but it does have an effect on me and how I feel about the next time I am in front of them and presenting an idea.

I wonder if I come across as apologetic about my ideas. I have noticed that I tend to avoid eye contact and say, ‘This is not it but what if ...?’ I wonder how I would respond to someone who consistently dismisses their idea before sharing it.

***

I find out today that the Guardian and The Times are coming to review the show in Plymouth. I know that we said we would push for this out of respect for our co-producers (Drum Theatre Plymouth) but never imagined we would be so successful. It now feels so early to be having such important reviewers coming to see the show. I know the show improves massively while it is in Plymouth and by the time it has its London press night it is usually at its peak. There is so much to learn between its first nights in Plymouth and that press night in London but now the show gets evaluated and pronounced upon as soon as it is born. It puts a lot of pressure on us. It is the kind of information that you may not give to the performers until after the event if you think it will be detrimental to their confidence (or might lead them to overplaying).

***

Mark is having a look at the ending of the text tonight. I talked him through my suggestion and he said he will have a look and try to get something back to us tomorrow. At the end of the session a member of the cast asks about the ending again. It is clear that I have not been able to reassure them and they need to hear it from Mark, but to be honest I need to hear it from Mark too. They were expressing the correct fears and were also correct in nominating Mark as the only one who could allay them.

***

Myself and Steven have planned another meeting for the first session tomorrow. I think the timing is perfect as we have reached a section in the script that I have absolutely no idea what to do with. Steven admits that he is the same. Just admitting it and giving ourselves the space to solve it means that we will solve it, so I am confident about moving forward tomorrow.

Day 17

The meeting is good and we now have a plan and structure for the rest of the rehearsals. We have decided to work on the assumption that the absent actor will not be returning this week.

The day is not a very good one for me. I see the same pattern happen again. Steven leads them through some additions to a complex physical section and they are focused and energised and then when I take them through a new section they appear little more than glassy eyed and vapid! I was sure that the instructions were so simple that they could not fail to get it right but occasionally I was dumbfounded. I think I am completely unclear. Or the idea is rubbish and is just being sabotaged by a lack of commitment and application.

It made me think of a quote from Rufus Norris that appeared in a newspaper when we were making Market Boy. He said there were times when he thought he was a rubbish director. Knowing Rufus and watching him go through a difficult rehearsal process I truly believe there are moments when he thinks this. But does he believe this? Does it fade? Surely it must because he is a brilliant director. I find myself thinking the same thing but I do not feel I have had my moments of brilliance to allay my fears. This fear feels like it runs deep.

When I left tonight I felt down and exhausted. I found myself trying to work out whether we could survive financially if I gave it up and became a house husband. And then I bumped into Rufus Norris.

There he was walking towards our rehearsal room as I was walking away. He is at a similar stage with his show (Cabaret) and we joked that we should keep walking and swap over. While I laugh I have no desire to jump from the frying pan into the fire. It is not a change in scenery that I need. It is a change in me. I am just not sure of what I have to offer at the moment. And if I am not doing this what can I do? (My calculations have ruled out house husband.)

During our earlier meeting Steven and I talked about getting new experiences before we embark on a new show. Some kind of refreshing training experience. On my way home I am thinking more about this. It would be great to get some more experience with choreography, getting a taste for a whole new vocabulary. Steven stated how we have been living off the approach we were introduced to by Liam Steel and he is damn right. And that was six years ago. But how and where can I find this? And at the moment my body feels like a train wreck.

I think about the possibility of assisting another director. Shadowing on a project where I can offer help as well as observe new approaches. Working with Rufus may be a good example. An experience where I can think like a director rather than feeling inhibited by my role as movement director as it was with Market Boy. I don’t know. But the need is definitely there. It is important to log this so that, even if pool (no water) is a great success, I do not kid myself that everything is rosy only to get to the next project and find myself feeling like this again.

And a good night’s sleep would not go amiss. The commute can be up to two hours each way and we are doing some 12-hour rehearsal days at the moment. This, the childcare in the mornings and the DIY needed on the house at the weekend and the odd evening is wearing me out. Today I felt battered and unhealthy and I know I am not going to feel a whole lot better tomorrow. That does not make me long for work. It is not the kind of attitude that is going to inspire anyone else. And so the vicious circle continues.

***

Tomorrow I want to start with a section I will lead. I was going to guide them through a creative process with stages of discovery but now I decide to set the material myself and just teach them it. It is cleaner and clearer. That way I cannot get myself into a situation where I am apologising for asking them to do something just so that they have a sense of ownership over what they produce. For my own sanity I must just get stuck in.

***

I also realise that I have raised issues with the set that I have not informed you about. The fact is that there was no sudden flash of inspiration from anyone over the weekend so the situation is ongoing. It is not a problem as I have every confidence in Miriam Beuther. She seems very open and honest about the set. (Don’t get me wrong, the set is brilliant. I am only talking about the finishing touches. The fact that I can is a luxury I have Miriam and Plymouth Theatre Royal to thank for.)

Day 18

After a night spend trying to work out why my daughter won’t sleep and just wants to jump around our bed and then a morning where the alarm inexplicably goes off 45 minutes late despite being correctly set, I am now heading into work very late. This would be a disaster if I was directing on my own. But the truth must be that this would not happen. It just does not happen if you cannot let it happen. And because of that I feel like I am taking advantage of Steven somewhat. But then he is not writing a rehearsal diary, a resource pack and lives 15 minutes away from rehearsals.

Wow, that feeling of guilt didn’t last long!

***

I have not read through anything I have written. I promised myself this as I wanted a ‘voice’ to develop. I am aware that the voice is a little more whiny and depressed than I thought it would be but I cannot help that. Maybe this diary is more personal than expected but I have to stand by that. If this is an insight into the thoughts of one of the directors of pool (no water) then this kind of stuff is just as valid and I suppose useful in highlighting the highs and lows. I have always maintained that I did not want a rehearsal diary written by a detached observer. This, I am absolutely sure, has its advantages but I wanted to do something different. And because of that I cannot read this back before it is finished. I must let it become what it is going to be.

***

It was a good day today. We set our targets and we hit them. There was a point in the day, when, naturally, I was leading, that one of the performers appeared to lose the will to live. It did upset me but tonight I feel a bit more ambivalent about it. I am not throwing away all the things I have said – I still stand by them and want to do something about it – but I just thought there might be a number of other reasons why this performer is doing this at the moment. They are actually carrying a painful and worrying injury at the moment, they have hundreds of new instructions going through their head, etc. The point is I am not going to dwell on it at the moment. We had a good day and that is fine for now.

I was talking to Rufus last night and I said that the speed we were working at meant that we were doing Ed Wood directing, cracking off scenes and moving on with no real sense of whether they work or not. We will only get a sense tomorrow when we try to stagger through the whole show. We call it a stagger-through as opposed to a run-through as we are well aware that it is not anywhere near its ‘running’ speed and the phrase helps the performers relax knowing they are not under pressure to perform.

But what we then do is have the rest of the creative team and those who have a need to be there watch the stagger-through. And they are informed and understand exactly what a stagger-through is. What this will do, despite the negating of any pressure, is give the performers that crucial dynamic missing until now – the audience. Even though they are probably saying that they do not want an audience, this informal gathering will teach them so much in any moment where they can do any more than remember their lines and not bump into the set.

This should set them up well for the final week where their job will mostly be settling into what we have set. This was what we planned from a few weeks ago. It was not what we planned at the start. This is because we did not have the wherewithal to think up such a plan. It is an example of how important it is to try to acknowledge and consolidate what you learn and take this forward with you. All projects are different but I feel that if I went into the next project aspiring to this model then I would be in a much stronger position than from where I started this project.

***

All around us departments on this project are buzzing about, having meetings, organising and liaising with venues. It is such a far cry from the early shows where we would literally do everything. We were talking about this in our lunch break yesterday. I mentioned a time on tour years ago where myself and the producer/company stage manager had to raid the driver’s seat of our Transit van, putting our hands down the back and underneath it for any change that had fallen so that we could by some food. (We found enough for a loaf of bread and some processed cheese.) It seems absurd now that there is a small industry flitting around us.

Steven said he had always hated the phrase ‘suffering for your art’ but admits we must have really loved what we were doing, really believed in it, to have put ourselves through that for years. And this is good timing considering the way I have been feeling lately. I do love my job. I guess I just want to feel secure and be better at it.

Day 19

We spent the morning consolidating a lot of the work we have done while one of the performers has been absent. Steven works on the Select Delete scene and they are really charged and buzzing from this challenge. It is a headwrecker of a scene but they are getting better all the time.

We have a meeting with lighting designer Natasha Chivers at lunch. We go through the text highlighting moments and changes, shifts in moods and scenarios. It strikes me that I have such a trust in Natasha to bring a whole new creative element to the show. Strangely with this production I have less of an idea of the way things should be and can offer little guidance to her. When asked what we want we just say ‘have a play. Do what you want and we will use that as inspiration.’ I really believe that her input will open up new ways of presenting this work and we have an understanding that we can take this inspiration and adjust to what she can offer. We have a history of working this way with her and I hope her work will shake ours up rather than just complement it. She has such good appreciation that her input is another layer or language to help get the work across. Her job is not just to light what is there. Her work can be just as inspiring as the text and the music.

The missing actor returns for the afternoon, the proud and tired daddy of a beautiful 8 lb baby girl. He immediately slots back in. Hearing him say the words that I have been covering reminds me why we hire actors and why I should probably never act again.

After recapping and fitting him into some of what he has missed we start the run-through in front of the production team. And once again it starts off turgid, theatrical and just plain wrong. But this run is for memory, so slow is OK. And as far as that goes they were brilliant. But it is myself and Steven that struggle.

After the run everyone seems to just get on with their work, or stare blankly. I just felt depressed. It reminded me of a press night and I cannot stand them. I had to admit it out loud that I was struggling with this. Steven agreed and added that he just wanted to clear the room.

I never thought that I wanted anyone to say ‘well done’. It is the silence that leaves you so exposed. As it happens our producer came up to me and said that she thought it was in good shape etc. and that was of some relief. I told Steven this and he was stunned thinking that she had sat there horrified. Maybe she had and it had just taken her this amount of time to say anything! (Do you see how the paranoid mind twists and turn and tortures itself?)

The run does offer clarity though. It has to fizz along at a cracking pace. The characters have a story to tell and they want us to know but more importantly they need us to understand and that is where the energy comes from. That is the imperative. They could easily keep this story secret so they must have a need to tell it. They must also never take our understanding for granted. They must earn it and they must work harder when they sense that we are backing off from them.

The performers have to become clearer about where their focus is. There are moments of new, important information that are being lost or swallowed. This is only natural as clarity will come once they get a sense of the piece as a whole.

One of the realisations I had was that there was very little pain in the show. Admittedly we had not got to the big physical section at the end but this thought makes me think that the big physical scene needs to address this. The performers need to conjure, revel in the horrifying reality of the artist’s crash into the pool. There is a moment earlier where they are completely still, describing the accident and this will eventually fulfil this need, but I just get the sense that we need to see it somewhere. Not in a literal sense but in a cruel representative way. A scene where we see the drunken, drugged characters dancing around the flames of the photos, laughing, contorting and smashing their bodies as a final insult to the artist.

(I thought there would have been more of this type of physicality but it is harder to ask people to do this stuff. When we were performing we just didn’t think about it, we just did it. That may have been reckless but it has proved very difficult to ask this cast to go there. I feel less easy asking someone else than doing it myself.)

All of this has thrown up an interesting dilemma. How honest can I be? What if I go on to rubbish this show? Surely I cannot put this on the Internet if it is going to discourage people from seeing the show? I will not compromise this diary as this has been a fascinating process for me to find out what I think, never mind you finding out what I think. Hopefully there will be no need to suppress the publication of this diary and the show will open satisfactorily. That way there would have been no need to write anything that may compromise the marketing of the show. I will just have to see how both turn out.

Day 20

Today was educational. It was another long three-session day starting at 10 a.m. and finishing at 10 p.m. The first session was a tetchy affair with questions being raised that betrayed an insecurity and rising concern in the performers. They quite legitimately ask why they are being asked to do something but it is often done in quite a negative, untrusting way. It can feel very disrespectful to think that if there is a scene that is merely sketched in that that would be enough for us, that we would not return to it.

It is hard not to get angry but the questions are legitimate and must be addressed even though this session was clearly set up to get the missing performer up to speed. And this is another thing than wound me up. I felt the session was being hijacked by other people’s insecurities. But like I said, these had to be addressed.

Some of the concerns quite rightly highlighted the fact that we were working at such a pace last week that we probably never really explained things satisfactorily to the performers. A performer can always raise this in such a way so as not to completely dismiss the idea that they are being asked to carry out. Or they can jump all over it with steel toe caps. The latter approach showed a group of tired performers who probably had more of a negative experience with the run on Friday than I gave them credit for.

This tense experience actually offered us the opportunity to talk to them director to actor. It was actually very beneficial. Not only did it show some slightly unfortunate readings of the play but it also showed some wildly off-centre interpretations of our theatrical intention with this production. It was a startling, incredible moment when two actors asked whether they could look at the audience. Of course they could! How many times had we talked about direct address?

Well that is exactly what I had to think about. How many times have I actually made that explicit to the cast? Have I just been using the phrase in my own head, in this diary? Is it actually possible that there has been this misunderstanding all along? I still don’t know what to think. I am glad that it has been sorted and all the other questions raised were answered in an illuminating and inspiring way. It meant that the scenes that followed were of a standard that we have not seen yet. It was an exciting and vindicating end to the session.

It would be stupid not to take what you have just learnt with you into the next session so we were much more explicit and inclusive in the next and final sessions of the day. Both were very good sessions. The evening especially. We concentrated on the big physical scene and they produced two runs of a working version that were truly exciting. They were also asked to create within a very strict remit but they got it straightaway and delivered some great stuff.

Today has meant that we have had to reassess our schedule. This week will be much slower but much more thorough progress. The ‘missing performer’ is nearly back up to speed (apart from a head-melting sequence that he will have to take little chunks out of each day) and all are crying out for this approach. The knock-on effect is that the technical team will not be able to see the runs that we promised them but if we can progress like we did today then I am more than happy with that and we can hopefully produce a much more thorough run on Friday (if not before).

I had to work to be generous today. To bite my tongue and be generous to someone else’s process even though the day was set differently. This required a generosity that I have not possessed until now. It really was a revelation moment. My instinct was to go in aggressively and not pander to this ‘nonsense’ but I was wrong. There was another way. Suddenly the clouds lifted and I could see that. If I can remember that tomorrow then I will already be a better director.

***

Starting to make some progress with the education pack. I am at least beginning to tick things off. I still can’t find enough hours in the day though. The photographs of the cast are working well but I just need to get stuff to the designer as soon as possible so that he can start working on it. All demands are going to converge over the next couple of weeks and I must keep my head above water and stay equally committed to each project. I have to see this diary through.

Day 21

Today is the first day I have thought about not writing this diary. Mainly because I know it is going to be negative and whiny again. But here goes.

Steven worked with them this morning on ‘Select Delete’ and adjusting an earlier scene. We then recapped all the use of music in the show as Imogen Heap was coming in to have a look, give advice, etc. The cast were a little slack through this but again delivered some good work. They are effortlessly getting better. Actually ‘effortlessly’ is a complete fallacy. What I mean is these scenes are getting better and the performers are not yet giving their all.

The presentation to Imogen goes well and we spend the last 20 minutes looking at the revised ending which Mark delivered this morning.

I am still not sure that it totally succeeds and I think the cast feel this too. If not, they should because their main concern was that the old version suggests that they were in fact bad artists. This version is unequivocal on that matter.

I would like to clarify this and other matters with Mark. I am ready to be convinced. I just feel that to move forward we all need to be singing from the same hymn sheet.

When we read through this last section some of the performers become tetchy again. I have to bite my tongue as I am not sure whether some of their comments are constructive or obstructive, but if they feel that the end has not settled then it is stopping them from moving forward and doing their job and that must be frustrating. And maybe that frustration comes out as slight petulance aimed at us.

Maybe this is not the case. It was clear that we were all very tired at the end of today and maybe it was wrong to use those last 20 minutes. I would suggest that it is never worth starting something new at the end of the day when everyone is so tired but one of the actors requested it and I needed to hear the new text. In fact we all needed to hear it. I think the performers’ fear was that we are never going to complete this. This frustrates me and, as I have said before, I find it disrespectful. Of course we are going to address it. But I can appreciate how it feels for them and how they need this clarity now. The truth is we all do. And we need to work together to find it and not wind ourselves up thinking no-one else cares.

Day 22

Today could have been a pivotal day. Things came to a head when one of the performers pulled that tired, disrespectful face and Steven snapped. The result was a few minutes of awkwardness and then a much more focused and energetic late night session.

We addressed the end of the text and in the absence of Mark Ravenhill we tried out some cuts. We will run these by Mark tomorrow but we felt that we could not hold back any longer. We had to try it out tonight so that we could get a sense of our ideas for the ending. As it happens the cuts added a real clarity (in our opinion).

The performers were then reminded of the documentary style that we spoke about so extensively early in rehearsals. We identified a section at the end as being surplus to the real story that they wanted to tell, so we got them to play these lines as if they were comments thrown in because the camera was still rolling and the characters felt compelled to fill in the silence. The performers were also reminded that the characters desperately want to be understood and after the shock of their story, this is their last chance to prove that they are good, nice, normal people. The truth of these statements is down to the beholder. After all that has happened the new space given around the words and the different compulsion to speak presents utterly human and fragile characters still trying to live their lives years after this brutal episode.

The success of this scene was thrilling. It was a real lesson in letting the words do the work, of giving them room to breathe and in engaging the audience to tell the real story running underneath. It was also a very clear lesson and solution to a dilemma that had been plaguing us since the start of rehearsals.

Steven had been very keen on a tremendous blast of water knocking the characters off their feet at the end of the play. While I could see the merits of it as an image I could not see it working within this play. I just could not make it say anything that needed to be said at the end. I also could not imagine it being able to work practically, knowing how much pressure would be needed to send a sizeable volume of water across the stage. But as this is not my job I said nothing and waited for much more knowledgeable and resourceful people to prove me wrong. I also trusted Steven’s instinct for the need for the stage to redefine itself in such a way at the end. While I did not agree necessarily, I trusted his ability to get it right and mine to get it wrong.

After a while, and a few timid attempts to send water across stage, I managed to convince him that if water was the element that should make an appearance at the end of the show then maybe it should start with a drop, splashing on one of the characters and then grow into a rain that soaked them, flattening their hair and darkening their clothes while they try to convince us that everything is OK. And this is where we stood until tonight.

The run of the end tonight was so fragile and simple and moving that I could not see what more the rain could say. The scene was achieving exactly what I wanted purely with the natural inflections of the performers. It struck me that anything on top of this, be it water cannon or gradual downpour, would be crass and even immature! That is how it felt. More than this it seemed a distrust of the text and performers to be able carry the ending off. Maybe it could have been our moment of disrespect?

Now the scene does not have a big theatrical trick to win over the audience. That is simply wrong. It is now the opposite of theatricality. It is the point where there is no more to be said yet the audience are still here, the camera is still running. It is an awkward moment where the characters are wondering whether you think they are a bad person for telling you what they just have, where they are wondering whether they have been understood, whether they are allowed to leave. With this in mind the music carries on long after the last words, prolonging this air of uncertainty. We have instructed the performers that they can leave the stage during this or they can stay until the lights go out on them. It is their call based on how they feel and what their character ‘needs’ from the audience.

We also went back and tidied up some sections and ran the scene where they drop their trousers and stand frozen by the image of the artist injured in the pool. The performers were obviously nervous but it was the end of a good session and they were excited. Their fears of the scene bringing laughter have yet to be disproved but it was remarkable how strong they became, and so quickly. Again it was a thrilling scene.

Tonight was the first time Steven and I have left the rehearsal room buzzing about this production. Usually there are days that just lift you with the excitement and the belief you have in the idea that you are creating good work. This rehearsal has been a slog and we have had our first such day with only two days to go. But it may have made all the difference.

The last two days could still be fraught though. There is a lot to do and it could mean that we get to Friday’s run without the cast having revisited every section of the play. While this is a real possibility it is one we must fight all the way. Once we get down to Plymouth, production requirements mean that the actors’ notion of the play disperses and has to be put together on the actual stage. To make this possible they will need a memory of the complete show. We must promise to give them that.

Day 23

Today is energised by the palpable success of last night. Both myself and Steven cannot make it in for the start of the morning but the cast still turn up on time to do a line run. We then go through the physical scenes, tidying them up and giving the cast much needed practice. We reset some rubbish that we had set earlier and it is now less offensive but still not cracked. It feels clunky but I do not think inspiration will come until it is cruelly exposed in front of an audience. In the afternoon we show the last section of the show to Natasha Chivers as she will not be available for the full run-through tomorrow.

It is interesting having Mark in the room for the afternoon. There are moments when he gives performing notes, which is fine but it makes me realise that I am willing for the performers to go a little bit further through rehearsals before I give such detailed notes. I just feel they are a little too early to be given but as far as I know they are received with interest and grace. Maybe the performers want these notes but I feel they have not really got to the part where they need notes on the details of what they are offering. I feel they are only just beginning to understand this piece. That is what the thrill of last night was about. That is what the eagerness of this morning was about. Mark has not been here through the bad times. Maybe this is a good thing and means that he is not walking on eggshells like, quite possibly, we are. Maybe he can tell it like it is. Either way I feel a little awkward. Maybe because while he is being so opinionated there is always the potential to disagree with him. And how do you disagree with a writer about his work?

Well a moment arises that answers that question! During a conversation between the running of a section I state that there is a confusion in the writing that contradicts slightly what Mark has just said. He looks at the text, considers the idea and the implication and simply excises the offending lines and transplants them later, making perfect sense of them and enhancing the section they are moved to.

I think I have a prejudice or ignorance about writers. Because their work is often geared, whether consciously or subconsciously, towards the ego massage of print I always think that they will not be so open to have what they have considered, crafted and, finally, typed, open to suggestions. It is a lovely and powerful moment when he just acknowledges the impact of another’s point of view and adjusts his work. And it is not power to me. It is power to him. It is an act of confidence and understanding. If I were him I would have probably resisted for the sheer paranoid hell of it.

It is a similar case when we show him the end. We talk through the cuts we have made and he frowns and says, ‘Well, let’s see.’ And when he does see he is pleased. It is a moment of great relief.

***

The performers show the last section of the show and, because we are following rehearsals with a production meeting, a lot of the creative team get to see it. This is the ending that we found last night. An ending of real simplicity. And it is so rewarding when Natasha buys into it immediately and says it is amazing. And at the production meeting, when we inform them that we are cutting the idea of water at the end, Natasha says she ‘could not imagine it offering anything to the ending. It said it all.’ This is exactly the kind of approval we want to hear. It means that I am sitting on a train late at night, dying for the toilet with another 45 minutes of the journey to go, but still buzzing about the idea of going in tomorrow and finishing the job.

Day 24 (last day of rehearsal)

(On the way in to work)

I finally realise why Mark is so keen to give these performance notes. He is not available next week so he will not see the giant strides the performers will take in Plymouth. Of course he wants to see it as close to performance level as possible because it will be a few weeks before he is free to see the show. And in that time he will be wondering and worrying about his new work and completely unable to do anything about it.

***

Today we go through the remaining sections of the show before our final run at 4 p.m. All goes well but the cast sit in silence at the end. They are in that awkward limbo position where they are only saying the words, doing the moves, doing their job and have absolutely no sense of the show. They can take no confidence from the run. Only the fact that they made it through without the need for prompting.

This is a real shame but I recognise this from a more extreme version with Peepshow (an earlier Frantic Assembly show). The set was a cross section of a block of flats where the lives of the inhabitants went on with little knowledge of each other. It is the audience, as voyeurs, who can see everything as we get attracted by a couple putting their lights on and then distracted by the argument on the landing. When this show opened the audience reactions were superb but the cast were really unhappy. It was after a couple of weeks that we finally realised the obvious. The cast had never seen the show. They cannot see each other. Some scenes were in silence, some were movement and these only felt like gaps to the performer who could not see them. The show was directed, or conducted even, from the front to create this constantly moving view of urban lives. When we realised the frustrations this caused we sat the cast down in front of a video of the show and explained all. It was amazing what we had taken for granted that the performers had no idea about. All was fine from there on.

With this show and this cast I feel it is going to be a case of just getting it out in front of an audience. Still, I will keep my eye on them and will not hesitate in getting a video of the performance to them. I understand that such a video kills the performance and many performers would find that difficult to watch but this is so they can see the show. Many performers operate their own little processes from within the show but the time comes when they definitely have to see how the show exists around them and, most importantly, how the show exists for the audience.

Day 25 (on the way to Plymouth)

This is the interesting part. This is when it potentially lifts off or unravels. For the next day and a half the performers will be working without the set and we will be looking at sections in detail. This is where we have to really get our heads around this show. There is also the potential for paranoid navel gazing and hysteria. I wish I could reassure the cast. They just do not seem to respond to it. They are very reserved and not at all confident about the quality of the show. It is true that it has a long way to go and it is equally true that it is now a lot to do with their performance but I have a lot of faith in them. I am really excited to see where they take us. I guess that is it all round. They give nothing away but they are coiled, full of potential. That is just the right side of exciting and just far enough away from terrifying and annoying.

***

I am on a completely different schedule down here in Plymouth. I do not have the hour and a half each way from work to fit in all my writing. I managed to fit in quite a bit of work on the resource pack on the train on the way down but my discipline is going to be tested by this new regime. It is approaching 1 a.m. and I have been awake since 6.30. I have also had a few drinks with the other creatives in our shared flat. This is one of the joys of production week in Plymouth. The others are being welcomed like old friends by everyone from the stage door lady to the artistic director to the canteen lady. The downsides include not waking up to my little girl in the morning. I am really missing her and I have been away less than a day.

Anyway ...

Today has been a bit of a revelation. Not necessarily a good one.

We took the cast to the TR2 rehearsal rooms in Plymouth and went through sections of the show that needed work and could be worked on without the set. The cast respond positively to this session but there is still that aloofness. And this is where the revelation lies. It becomes apparent that Steven feels the same way about them. They are an intriguing bunch with their own unique dynamic. We have worked with them for over five weeks now and we do not know them much more than when we started. They are very reserved or have lost that generosity they once appeared to have. When we finish a detailed talk through the show I say that it has been useful and only then, almost grudgingly, does someone agree. I do not expect thanks and bouquets but I do expect some interaction and the lack of such is frustrating. Maybe we have been spoiled/blessed with a certain type of performer in the past but here we have four brilliant performers (and I really believe that) who I am convinced will deliver on stage but just do not give us that same level of interaction as other casts have given. We are not looking for them to be our friends but it seems that every other Frantic show has just worked out like that. And I miss it. Maybe it is a combination of them never having seen our work, reserving their trust, and having come through a casting agent. It just feels like we have not got as close to them as we would have thought. Now this is an interesting situation. Is this the future? Is this normal? Is this what the actors expect and what every other director gets? It is possible that our previous productions have created a cult of Frantic where everyone has felt close and part of something. The creative team apart this will not be the case here unless there is a great turnaround once the cast get the show in front of the public and it goes well.

Day 26

We start with a meet and greet with the Theatre Royal staff. After that I take the cast through the more complicated physical scenes to recap and consolidate. As most of these scenes are highly complex and to counts we have to do them every day. We also go through the brief slapping scene. We made this with one of the actors missing so he still has a bit of catching up to do. They do not all feel comfortable slapping each other. The girls can’t bring themselves to really go for it with each other but have no such problems whacking the boys. The boys are still not confident either. I stress that this is a scene where we are going to have to be generous to each other because things will go wrong. People will get slapped hard. It will hurt occasionally but it will only happen once a night. At the moment we might be rehearsing it 20 times a day. They seem to accept that they must bite their tongue and allow people a little slack. I also suggest that they should rehearse it every day on tour.

We then continue to go through the text in detail as we did last night. This was very useful but very slow. It is also very challenging as you are presenting the opportunity for all that has been set up to be unravelled. There are a couple of scary moments but the script is robust and generally what we have found so far stands up. We do not have long, though, as we have to head back to start the technical rehearsals.

I do not think I have ever been so badly prepared for a tech session. Normally I have a very strong idea about cues and effects but not here. Maybe it is a trust in what Natasha will offer. I hope this is OK for Natasha as it can be very frustrating working with people who cannot say what they want and can only respond to what you are presenting to them.

The set is looking good and certainly imposing in the small Drum Theatre. It is now that the actors emerge on stage in costume on the finished set and we start the tech that you really start to think, ‘Oh God, is this going to work?’ And, of course, this being only a tech the performers offer fairly lifeless delivery and shoddy movement but it feels like lifeless direction and shoddy choreography. We have to keep faith and see how it works in front of an audience.

We also hear that the run is pretty much sold out, that our directors’ seats have been sold and that we will have to sneak in and stand. There is no point complaining. This is great news and adds to the sense of event. It has been a few years since we have opened a show down here and we couldn’t have asked for a better situation.

Day 27

Mark Ravenhill has written an article for the Guardian from inside the rehearsal room. For us it is as much an insight into Mark himself. It reveals moments of insecurity as well as the confidence he invariably exudes. He also states how his confidence in us has grown as we have worked together.

Everyone needs to be appreciated. You sometimes don’t know how much until someone shows you a little kindness. We were very moved by Mark’s words as they offered us what we must always have craved but never dared take for granted. They gave us credibility as directors. I don’t need anything for Christmas now.

***

The lighting plotting sessions are going very slowly. It is much more difficult than I had imagined and the white set is causing problems. It is always upstaging the actors because it is always brighter than them. We are already in the position where we are going to have to cancel the first dress run as we will never be able to get through all that needs to be done by tomorrow night. This is usually the news that sends a wave of doubt through the cast. After all it only really affects them negatively. It means that the first proper performance comes along a lot quicker. They seem to take the bad news in their stride.

They have the morning off but they suggest that they meet up to continue through the text as we have been doing for the past few nights. Myself and Steven are not available for this but I fear that if one of us is not there then they could unravel all of the work we have put in. I feel we need to be there to guide and answer questions, to reassure and encourage. It will mean that one of us will have to miss the plotting session in the morning but it could be well worth it. I guess this betrays the fact that the actors really need this session and that we do not really trust them to have this session on their own. It is a good thing that they feel the previous sessions have been useful though. It makes me feel very positive about the outcome of the session tomorrow. It needs to be good as time is running out and before we know it they will be preparing to go on stage for the first preview and it will be all over to them. We can then only sit back and take notes from the experience. This of course is what we are all desperately waiting for as it all means nothing until you see what an audience gets from it.

Day 28

The meeting with the cast goes very well. It is so detailed and we run out of time and are still only halfway through. The discoveries we are making, and some of them are genuine new revelations at this late stage, are all good and exciting and it strikes me how much the cast needed this. I hope we can get through all of this even if it is not until press night (Monday – or day 30). There are points in the plotting tech where they get the chance to try these new findings out. Sometimes they work and at other times they seem adrift as they have not really come from anywhere or the stop-start nature of the session kills the energy of the scenes. There is nothing to worry about here. We just have to get to the point where we are performing a full show and can judge our mistakes from there. This time, more than any other for a Frantic show, I think our two previews before the press night will be invaluable and full of things we will probably spend the next two days changing.

As for the press night, we have managed to attract three national newspaper reviewers. This is great news but it also puts a pressure on that night’s show that we never thought we would have. Normally we gear the press coverage towards the London run but this time we have worked towards national press coverage for the Plymouth run in recognition of the support of Plymouth Theatre Royal. It is just that we did not expect to be so successful in courting this press coverage and now we are in the situation where we cannot tell our cast and crew about this as it could just send them over the edge. We are all pushing to the limit to get this show on tomorrow night and know there will be elements of it that will not be right. We will also be doing our best to have the show in the best possible shape for the press night but no-one needs to think that we are about to be judged on such a large scale on our third show (and only the fourth full run). But that is the ‘good’ news that we will have to judge and break sometime before the big night.

Day 29 (first preview)

I suppose the show goes very well. It is hard to say because I cannot stand first nights and press nights. I just want to hide as I am not ready to discuss the show. People want to give me support and congratulations but I am just not capable of engaging. I have to apologise several times as I am sure it just appears rude and as if I do not believe the words of well-wishers. It is not an attractive trait and Steven shares this with me.

When we relax we are able to talk about the show with Simon Stokes, the artistic director of Plymouth Theatre Royal, and he offers confidence-building words and also constructive advice. And he is right. It was clear that we have to make some big but simple changes. There is a section at the start of the show where we had choreographed the awkward moves and adjustments of the characters and, to be honest, the performers never really pulled it off; but the reason why it has to go is because of Simon’s specific observation – it is old style Frantic. It looked out of place in a show that is clearly a big step forward.

This will be easy to resolve. The scene was slower and more turgid than ever and meant the show had to work really hard to get through the gears. It eventually got there but I spent the first 15 minutes begging them to speed up.

It is also clear that the cast have no idea what the show is like. This is not their fault and we will do our best to sort this out.

Simon also reveals that he had a conversation with the cast where he said to them ‘I bet there were times in rehearsal when you thought the show was rubbish’ and they said ‘Yes’. He went on to say to them that they are wrong and how he feels that it is a great show and a theatrical event and will be one of the theatrical events of the year, etc. This is illuminating but not entirely surprising. We had sensed a lack of absolute trust from the cast (why should they?) and we had remarked that this was a very hard show to get a handle on from the inside.

It is also great to have Simon’s support. He has seen so much of our work and can appreciate and encourages the arc of development.

Day 29 (second preview)

We start the session with a speed line run in situ of the first scene and it is perfectly clear how liberating this is without the moves. I had always hated this scene as I thought that it was being strangled by the performers. Now I can see that it could have been us strangling them. They fly through the scene but it strikes me that this ‘speed run’ is not far from the pace I think it requires in performance. I tell the performers this and ask them to look out for and resist slipping into old habits with this scene.

The build-up to this evening’s performance is bitty and unfocused as we all try to resolve the gremlins and unsatisfactory moments from last night’s show. It is clear that in trying to solve everything immediately we are in real danger of unravelling large sections of the show. We recognise this and pull back. Everyone is tired. Everyone wants to get their bit right but we have to just bite off a chunk tonight. We still have Monday when we will come to it fresher and another day wiser.

***

The show tonight is received throughout in stony silence by an extremely varied demographic. It is Saturday night but there are loads of young couples and groups as well as older parties. We usually struggle for this older, independent audience so this is heartening. Apart from their silence, that is.

I decide to leave with them at the end. They have just given the show a tremendous round of applause and I am intrigued.

Outside they are full of enthusiasm and praise! It is great to hear and it occurs to me that this might be a show where audiences do sit there engaged, disturbed, silent. Normally we do have a much more energised audience and the cast are only addressing them and not getting anything back so they would have no idea that they would be getting such positive responses out in the foyer.

I feel happier with the show tonight. It was clearer, it was more settled. I am much more relaxed and confident coming out of the show, having told the cast of the positive responses of the audience, and not having to face any well-meaning colleagues and friends. I am so rubbish at those first nights and I think I probably owe some people an apology. I let Simon Stokes know that it has been better tonight and he reassures me that it is a fine piece of work. I am much more comfortable hearing this kind of thing now.

Day 30 (press night)

The day off yesterday has done none of us any good. It has given us a glimpse of the rest and sleep that we all crave but only a glimpse. And now we crave it all the more.

Today is much more focused and steady. We start with notes and we are handed the audience response sheets collected from Saturday night’s audience. They are fantastic and probably come along at just the right time. It backs up my claims about how well the performance was received on Saturday. The cast definitely need to know they are doing something right as the performance must feel lonely without that instant feedback from the audience.

We work through various scenes and re-tech some new lighting notes. The improvements are clear and everyone seems calmer tonight. Saturday’s show had its technical problems, probably as a result of all the tinkering we were doing right up until the performance, but tonight we have made sure everyone has the time they need to compose themselves and think about the performance. There are still things we would like to change and there are things Miriam would like to add or try but we have decided that we have to make sure everyone is comfortable with what we have tonight. We have to trust what we have and hope for the best rather that self-destruct trying to solve everything for this press night.

Saying that, I am nervous tonight.

***

I am filming the show tonight so that we can send a copy to the producer from the Sydney Opera House. I stand at the back as the audience come in. It is packed. (The whole run is sold out already!) They are a mixture of young excitable school parties, nervous faces from the Theatre Royal Plymouth and various reviewers from around the country.

It is instantly clear that tonight is different. The audience engage and respond. The story is witty and clear. There are laughs where I thought there would be laughs and there are gasps where I thought there would be gasps. Admittedly I watch most of the show through the viewfinder of the camera which can present its own picture, but I think we are getting there. This press night has come along so soon and I don’t think I could have asked for more from the cast and crew. Tonight was a fair presentation of the production and I am happy to say, ‘this is our show’.

You can never tell what critics are thinking after or during a show. The Sunday Times reviewer had the misfortune of sitting in exactly the position that would obscure the camera most. So every uncomfortable twitch of his is caught for posterity on the film we will send to Sydney. The reviewer from the Guardian is spied at the end clapping slowly, deep in thought. A good sign? A moving piece of theatre? A waste of a train journey? Theatrical trauma? Who knows? Someone else is sure he spotted her laughing with the best of them (yes but was it a good laugh? – you get the sense of paranoia?).

Representatives of the other producing partners and host venues are also there. Some are thrilled and buzzing at the prospect of this show coming to their venue. Others are more enigmatic but still stress earnestly how this is a massive development and new maturity for the company. And this was our intention. It was not the giggly, cheering audiences that we were courting with this show. It was a step to find an older, more reflective audience. And we seem to have created an older, more reflective production. I am happy with that.

***

I am exhausted tonight. I want to go home now. I am stripped of any personality (again) and am truly thankful that I am going home tomorrow. Steven is staying on to lead workshops and keep an eye on the show for a few more days.

I have no idea how this production will be received critically and tomorrow will probably be a limbo day where reviews will sit on editors’ desks waiting to be unleashed on Wednesday and beyond. I do not understand people who say they do not read reviews. I think it is a denial of the obvious situation, namely, that critical appraisal and the esteem in which you are held by the public is crucial to your continuing existence. For a company like ours that lives on a financial knife edge it is crucial. We are always living under the sword of Damocles (he works for the Arts Council). Good reviews are what we are all looking for. They are the basis of future marketing. They are a tangible sign of success. I know that is skewed and an artist should trust his own work. My God, I should know that. This play is all about the clash between art and perceived success but this is the real world. We have been successful because we have operated within that real world, exploiting our good press, suppressing the bad, courting the audiences and constant non-artistic appraisals – how can we do this better? How can we be more efficient? There is no shame in that. And that is why I will sleep badly tonight despite being dead on my feet. And that is why I will jump up each morning from now to check the Internet for reviews.

Day 31 (on the train back from Plymouth)

I feel rough. But not as rough as Lisa Maguire, our executive producer, who sits opposite me as I work on the education resource pack and gradually changes colour all journey.

After about an hour I get a call from Steven.

‘How would you feel about a four star review in the Guardian?’

He has been told that the reviewer is submitting such a review and it is here that we both confess to a very strange shift in emotion. I am utterly relieved. This is probably the most important National for us. This is the reviewer we care about most. A four star review is probably enough to boost the whole of the tour (although everywhere is already selling extremely well!). But then I am a bit disappointed. Why couldn’t we have five stars? What is lacking?

I am sure I was not thinking about four and five star reviews before the call so why am I disappointed? I genuinely do not know. I think about it for a while and then convince myself to test this news out on people. Lisa is very happy. My wife is thrilled. And then it starts to thrill me. It is still to be published but it is just great to know it is not going to be detrimental to our future.

As we arrive in London our PR officer calls and says that there is an excellent review in the British Theatre Guide (an online theatre magazine). When I get home I check it out and it really is all we could have asked for.

I know there are not many people that will see this but it is tangible. The Guardian is not. It is the evidence, the pat on the head, whatever you call it. I cannot help myself. This is ultimately what I am looking for when I read the reviews – praise and the promise that everything will be all right.

Days later (6 October 2006)

The Guardian review was followed by another full of praise in The Times. The Sunday Times gave it a good review but inexplicably three stars. There have been lovely e-mails to the office from people from Plymouth and the general feedback has been fantastic. Finally Mark Ravenhill gets to see it and is thrilled. I only find this out this morning and I am so happy to hear this. This is not just because I think we must have served his play but because I think we worked well together, I think we got on and it would have been a great shame if the feelings about the finished project were to tarnish how we felt about the process.

That said I still have to grow to love this show. I will see it again next week and I have not really missed it. I have not even thought about it much whereas on previous productions I have been phoning the cast after performances to ask how it went. I guess it is all a process of growing up. I am sure Rufus did not sit at home (if he ever gets a day off to go home) and worry about every performance of Market Boy once it was up and running. Surely it is not just because I have had a difficult time on this show and have not exactly found new best friends that I have a slight detachment from it now that it is made? No, the feeling I have is something far more interesting. It is a relaxed confidence in the show. I guess I believe in what we have done and I certainly believe in Mark’s writing. I also believe in the performers’ abilities to really pull off great performances night after night. There is no problem there.

The ambivalence about this show will fade, I think. I am looking forward to seeing it again, in front of a new and totally different audience. If the show works again I am sure I will grow to love it. And to be honest there are very few Frantic shows that I have loved wholeheartedly. There have been moments that I would have died for but when I have been able to achieve objectivity and detachment about shows I have often been underwhelmed by our work (Dirty Wonderland excepted). It is possible, and I am really hopeful at the moment, that the opposite will happen here.

Once I have had the opportunity to see the show again I will sign this diary off. I want to see whether all of the ups and downs of rehearsal are put into perspective by its success (or lack of). Part of me feels that, to be true to the diary, I must just finish here but I think there is one more interesting step to take. Once I have seen the show, taken part in the post-show discussion, I will then head back to London. It is on that journey home that I think I must finish the diary, full of the feelings of the nights before. I also will not read the rest of the diary until then. I made that promise at the start that this would not be an ego-led, considered piece. In reading this diary I have as much to learn about me as you do.

(After Liverpool)

I am on the train returning from Liverpool so I guess I am coming to the end of this diary.

It has been a strange couple of days. My first response when I got to the theatre was one of shock. The set has serious sight line issues. There are large sections of the show where substantial parts of the audience will see nothing. This is crazy. I do not know how this has happened. It has been a concern from the day the tour and set were finalised and I was under the impression that a compromise had been reached and the problem effectively solved. But this is nothing like it.

I set the cast off on a speed run of the show. I place the designer in one corner of the auditorium and I sit in the other and we stop the action when it becomes impossible to see. Some of these moments are easy quick fixes but others require complete reblocking of the work, replotting of the lights and the knock-on effects for stage management include the cutting of one of the most aesthetically pleasing lighting effects. After a while it strikes me that I could unpick the whole show trying to find some equality of view for the audience. This would be a disaster, turning the show into a homogenised lump. I realise that some moments will have to remain as they were to maintain the integrity of the piece and I am afraid that it meant that some seats would miss out. (Apologies – I am sure you know who you are.)

This fiasco meant that this pressured day had just become almost impossible. The implications of this were evident in the performance. The lighting was too dark as our relighting designer never had the chance to do his job completely as I had taken up the best part of the afternoon reworking the show. It meant that the performance never really connected with the audience in the way I believed it could. The performers themselves were doing nothing wrong but as it was too dark we could not really connect with them and their performances fell short of the audience, never really getting over the unnatural gulf created by pushing our set back as far as possible as a futile concession to sight lines.

That said there is a very good response at the end. I am slightly disappointed by the experience but interestingly I have not lost faith in the show. I fully believe that it is an easy fix (apart from the sight line issues) and it will be a much better show tomorrow. It occurs to me that, just like the actors cannot whisper their performance on their bigger stage, neither can the set and lighting whisper. It has to be unashamedly bolder. I have no qualms about requesting this even though it is a director cliché to ask his lighting designer to bump up the lighting levels.

The next day myself and Lisa have a meeting with the artistic and executive directors of the theatre. My impression is that we are there to talk about our planned body of work and pitch it to them to see if they are interested in developing a long-term relationship. When we get there we are also joined by their literary director and other associates.

The first thing that happens is the artistic director launching into a tirade about how ‘pissed off’ she is with the sight line issues and how disappointed and frustrated she is that this has happened! We are being told off!

Then just as quickly they start to pitch their idea for a show to us! I do not know whether I am coming or going. This is a very strange meeting.

I have sympathy, of course, about the sight lines. I am frustrated and disappointed by this too.

Back in the theatre I work with the actors on some notes and adjustments until it is time for them to break and prepare for the show. I am still not entirely comfortable with this cast. They do not embrace ideas as quickly or as fully as I would like. Sometimes this is challenging in a good way and allows me the opportunity to see that I am wrong before exposing the idea to an audience. These are the moments where I feel that their attitude is only new to me and all part of growing up. But there are also others that betray their insecurities through a resistance or moodiness. I guess it is all about people management. They have all had a good run of the show in Plymouth. They all know that it works. They have had uniformly brilliant reviews for their work. Their friends have said all the nice things that they need to hear so at least that atmosphere of doubt and lack of confidence in the direction seems to have dissipated.

***

Last night’s show was much better. It really connected with the audience. The improved lighting made all the difference. And yet, I am still not completely in love with it. There were moments where it dipped for me. What is crucial is I believe that these moments are all eminently fixable. I leave with complete faith in the show. Not necessarily that it is firing on all cylinders but that it will eventually.

The post-show discussion was with around 150 members of the audience and was quite challenging. They put forward good, difficult questions. Knowing the difficult nature of this production I felt nervous about this. I have written extensively on the ideas in this show but this was different. Some of the questions were clearly a challenge for me to back up and explain the idea. While I never began to doubt my answers I was aware that I stuttered uncomfortably and I was never really convinced by how I sounded. We have spent the past 80 minutes challenging and provoking the audience. This further 20 minutes of questions seem like a fair revenge. But unlike other shows I do not think it will ever get comfortable.

***

I think I might have reached the end. There is no conclusion yet. I have not read it. I am resisting. At the moment I think this has been a fascinating exercise for me. I am afraid that by reading it I will find that it is not this for anyone else. I am also aware that it has been rushed, written in snatched moments to and from rehearsal. It is written in moments of doubt and weakness. And written in moments of confidence and arrogance. And I think it is these latter moments that I am scared of. There is a dignity in standing in front of you naked and saying ‘I am human. I am weak’ but there is no dignity in doing the same and shouting ‘I am great. I am great.’

We have come back to ego again. My initial fear about writing this.

But it is done now.

So this might be the end. But then again it might not be. If there is a need and desire for a conclusion then I will do that. But for me to do that I have to sit and read this and it strikes me that I would probably be more comfortable reading someone else’s diary than my own. But that is one of the fears and one of my fascinations. It might sound exactly like someone else’s diary. And I don’t yet know whether that would be a good or a bad thing.

(And when did it become OK to start nearly every sentence with ‘but’ or ‘and’?)