the last month

Half hearted blogger I suppose i must be. We opened this week; a technical rehearsal; two dress rehearsals; 2 previews for staff and family; an invited guest night and 2 public shows.

Why the absence? The last 3 weeks of rehearsals were hard. My father died which, whilst a release for a very long term Alzheimers sufferer was still unsettling especially as I did not go to the UK for the funeral.

Then Ritchie's grandfather accidentally ran over and killed a drunk lad lying by the side of the road one early drizzly dawn. Then Danny's younger sister died of cancer. So we were struggling to maintain one let alone two casts, not to mention the emotions of several cast members; plays are not necessarily the most important things in the world at the best of times.

Despite all of this, many people are claiming it is the best of the big shows to date. We seem to have less unexpected laughter than previous years as people follow the story closely. Its strongest element is probably the swift story telling that Jo manages in the second half as we sense a society on the brink of dictatorship. Feelings run high. Last night Charlie was subject to hissing from a section of the audience as his character entwined himself completely round the gangsters. Many have come up after the show to say it is very close to the bone, telling it like it is etc.

Yet for a director this is a confusing time. The show is no longer yours, you lob in a few notes, tweak the odd scene but ultimately whilst you glow if the audience likes it, watching it every time becomes counterproductive; you worry unnecessarily because you yourself feel no more surprises in the production.

so onwards to Love patrol series 7 I guess.

End of week 4

So the thing is blocked out. When the second half moves as it should, it's a giddy ride but it only needs one line to drop, one entrance to be slightly late and the wheels come off.We've been working this second half for the best part of two weeks, one cast one week, the other the next. This is a deflating business and i feel sorry for the second cast. The thrill of discovery is replaced with, if you're not careful, the chore of going over it all again but we did improve on some scenes.There is also as I feared the fact that one or two roles seem more appropriate to members of one cast than the other.

And there's been the evening rehearsals with 37 youth who have proved very hard to keep focussed. Jo came to one rehearsal and when she could bear it no longer (some group chortling and then criticizing another youth's mistake. She stood up and screamed at them, saying that as she'd written it, she was bloody well going to take it back and she didn't give a shit. They were stunned and the next ten minutes were bliss. for the first time one could rehearse little bits to a backdrop of silence.No one dared look anywhere else from their choral seating area than at the actors performing on the stage.The only mistake she made was after the run through, that was very good, she gave the play back to them.Too soon in my opinion! The next day it was business as usual.

In the last 24 hours there's suddenly been unlooked for, unexpected money available for a big extension to the sports area at WSB. It's made it impossible to focus entirely on directing.

the youth group

A difficult evening rehearsal with the youth. Its hard to keep 37 people engaged for three hours; even in a chorus play you're going to have more individualised scenes but the level of inattention reached yesterday was headache inducing. It was also laced with an unpleasant sideline where one actor sitting on the rostra at the back kept pinpointing his girlfriend sitting down on the stage as the source of a lot of the noise, which she wasnt. Ironically just as we started working out a page which dealt with the difficulty of getting a happy marriage. He shouted down to her repeatedly what are you doing? be quiet! what are you here for?

They were mortified when I said at the end that it was the first session I hadn't enjoyed. Must finish it tomorrow.

Week 2

Very busy week as I have added rehearsals for the kids play from 4 till 7pm.This play has 40 youth (or maybe 37); some youth old timers from previous years plus a lot of new faces, tempted by a love of drama or free food?! It's a play heavy on chorus to accommodate so many and the initial thought was to do it in the round as that is the shape of the stage we built in the youth centre last year.But in the round  is not easy with those numbers and and people who have never acted so, plan B, stick them all on a load of rostra at the back of the acting area, deliver some of the choruses from there and bring usually smaller numbers forward on to the acting area. It's a noisy group, several of whom make you reconsider your objections to the American practice of drugging hyper active teenagers!!!!Nah just kidding . Sure, the most used directorial phrase is 'quiet please' but they do love it and already in the week i have been there with them, the sea of youth is dividing into 37 individual characters who just like all of us can be lovely, funny and pretty vile all in the space of 5 minutes. The play is based on discussions Jo and Richard had with them about 'their dreams' which ranged from not being constantly hungry, driving a bus, being sports and music stars, being happily married and going overseas. Jo has added little tweaks in her script to highlight the difficulty of achieving these dreams and topped it off with a lot of chorus and songs which have been set splendidly to music by Albert and Tio.

With Klaem long Lada ia we had a stodgy post Easter start. Already 8 to 8.30am learn lines/ do exercises regime not being followed, people coming late and some friction over some members desire to get an advance to contribute to a Vila 'bus association' collective that some of us view as at best a loss making venture and at worst little more than a scam. So we talked that out before going further in rehearsals and 17 still want to go ahead with the sceme. But at least a talk about that and a talk about rules and priorities seemed to set us on our way and we had encouraging run throughs of the first half by the end of the week. The other thing that slowed us down was rehearsing the second cast. Instead of understudies we do the show with 2 casts; same actors but swapping parts.  This gives most of the core group a crack at something substantial as well as coping with sickness during the run. But with so much chorus and with the first cast bedding down so well, it did feel depressing to go back to the start and work it all out again, especially as most actors had focussed on their role in the first cast. It can get awkward too when someone is so clearly more at ease in one part than the other actor taking that part. It is also incredibly hot and humid in the theatre at present which doesn't make it easier. But still good moments. Joyanne comes up to me before the run through and asks, 'Does June find it easy to tell Terry she cant keep seeing him because she's going overseas on a scholarship or does she really like him and it's actually quite hard to tell him?' I said  'If that's how you want to play it go for it.' And she captured that awkwardness beautifully. I sometimes worry that we're a 'learn our lines bang it down on the stage' kind of group so I like it when actors bring these character questions to scrutinize.

What else? had a chat with a new manager who has transferred from the private sector. The youth centre over small pocket money to a few youth to pick up litter between Wan Smolbag and the Malapoa turn off. She was getting them to sign receipts and one couldn't sign because she couldn't read and another didn't know his family or last name and she helped him sign his other name, writing it in very big letters for him to copy. She talked too of her daughter studying in the Philippines who does work for her church at the weekend and sees a level of poverty she had never encountered in Vanuatu. They visited a mother and 9 children who lived under a tarpaulin and another baby had died two days before the daughters visit but was still lying there as the mother didn't have the money to bury it.  And we questioned how long it would be before , or if it ever would reach that stage.

Have spent the weekend blocking out the second half in my head. It has to move at breakneck speed and is full of chorus that will become boring if it is just chanted out. Hopefully bits can be said by actors stepping quickly in and out of character and by whizzing it around our multi tiered set.  I find it thrilling when you give yourself a chance to think it through often taking a fairly outlandish thought of where to start off a sequence and then just running with it. Really felt quite powerful...inside my head!  Next week the stage where doubtless some of it wont work but at least its a starting point.

Living it!

The end of a very happy week; all of us agreeing how much we prefer theatre to film! and just being around the centre..a hiphop class to the left of you, a game of hockey or futsal to the right; staff of all sizes doing zumba on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The laughter of Rainbow theatre, our group of actors with disabilities making use of the dance facilities and joining a rockstep class. All this and lunch at the nutrition centre. Those of us who do Love Patrol in the second half of the year miss this unique environment when we go on location.

We've been focussing on one cast all week because a couple of actors are away. Quote of the week from Helen as I try to set the atmosphere for a scene involving 3 beleaguered wives left at home on a friday night; you're embittered by the struggle for every vatu; one minute this woman's your friend and the other one's your enemy , the next day its the other way round.....'yes, Peter, we know we live it everyday'. Put thoroughly in my place.

First Day

25 March

Cakes were much enjoyed, (orange polenta in my opinion the best!) as was the rehearsal. Seemed to work although Peter Brook's comments about his first ever day at the RSC  resonate each time I tackle a new 'big play'. In The Empty Space he recounts making a model of the first entrance of , I think, As You Like It, the day before and then asking everyone to do it and it was a disaster because they weren't like his models. Some were tall, some short; some walked fast, others slow , which of course opened up new possibilities and he never made another model. I don't make models but the images I see in my head are still generalized and I get so excited as I prepare it thinking that I think I've cracked it. It is only when the actors come in that you realize the flaws or in this case perhaps the floors because there are several different levels, slopes and heights to consider.See the finished set:

Some staff had A4 papers this morning which were apparently passed round in the middle of Saturday night drawing links between various businessmen and our new naturalized citizen PM. It asks people to remember what happened in Zimbabwe......

Day before the off.

March 24

Have been baking cakes all morning..orange polenta, banana, dried fruit bread and carrot cake....some theatre groups start with earnest character discussions, read throughs, impros and we start with a cake breakfast....all with low sugar content naturally! The actors have been on tour with no time off to relax from that and 2 years ago when we started Zero Balans it proved a lovely way to begin. Have the opening 5 page chorus section in my head which is very different form saying it will work on the stage but cant wait. Doubtless tomorrow will be a huge anti climax..someone will be sick, several will be late some will be hungover or generally feeling Monday morning is too hard to handle so feet on the ground..... feet on the ground repeat after me feet on the..

Chinua Achebe, a great African novelist, died today aged 82 . In the various obituaries there was this quote from his novel Man of the People which is quite relevant for the new play Klaem long Lada ia..maybe good for the program:

we ignore mans basic nature if we say, as some critics do, that because a man.....had risen overnight from poverty and insignificance to his present opulence he could be persuaded without much trouble to give it up again and return to his original state. A man who has just come in from the rain and dried his body and put on new clothes is more reluctant to go out again than another who has been indoors all the time. The trouble with our new nation is that none of us had been indoors long enough to be able to say 'to hell with it' We had all been in the rain together until yesterday, then a handful of us-the smart and the lucky and hardly ever the best-had scrambled for the one shelter our former rulers had left and had taken it over and barricaded themselves in. And from within they sought to persuade the rest through numerous loud speakers, that the first phase of the struggle had been won and that the next phase-the extension of the house was even more important and called for new and original tactics, it required all argument to cease and the whole people to speak with one voice and that any more dissent and argument outside the door of the shelter would subvert and bring down the whole house..'

March 2013

March 19, 2013. OK, so trying a blog again for the new play Klaem long lada ia…climb the ladder. The play explores the drift  towards a politics that flirts with organized crime on the one hand but goes unquestioned, because at the other end of the scale, poverty is growing, as shown in the  play by a group of young men on a building site and their wives in the settlement who can focus only on making a pittance to survive.

Rehearsals start next week; this week we are reconfiguring the stage .We’re acting on split levels a lot more than in the past and because one of the main locations is a building site, we’re using bricks and scaffolding to give it that atmosphere. The play has a large amount of chorus in it too which I hope to stage using all the actors, with people jumping out of the chorus to take on a character; even sometimes taking a line of a character whilst almost simultaneously part of the chorus. This means we need to stylize the costumes a bit so that everyone can be on stage a lot of the time as chorus without having to change or be too associated through costume with their character when they are in the chorus.

For the first part of the year we have been making and touring a 45 minute verbatim piece on different kinds of violence in our society. In December last year Joseph Marae, an elderly man, was killed by a drunk youth who was trying to drive away from a fight. He ran Joseph over and the car dragged him along the road . Angry residents stoned the bus. The owner of the bus returned with a gang, smashing up people’s houses in the street including that of Joseph and his wife. Perhaps he was unaware of why his bus had been stoned.  Joseph died in hospital the next day. He had acted on and off with WSB for a decade. He was in a film in 2003 or 4..or 5, my memory isn’t what it was, and he was in our last big stage play Zero Balans , even accompanying us  on our tour last year to Santo. There he made an unscheduled appearance too at a local music concert sitting on a stool in front of over 1000, singing a couple of songs he had learnt in his youth when working on ocean going ships. His wife, Leisongi, and he had acted in some series of Love Patrol too. Vanuatu is purportedly a country that adheres to the much vaunted ‘respect for elders’ maxim, but  youth make up 50% of the population and it is their affection or disaffection that will make or break Vanuatu (well its one of the factors) . The way Joseph mucked in with youth in a non-patronizing, non censorious way was an example to all. His funeral became a march through town to the cemetery; one of the biggest protests seen in Vila. For the most part although angry, the crowd was restrained. There were no calls for wholesale blocking of freedom of movement from one island to another, just for trouble makers to be sent back and for the police to respond to calls. But mingling amongst the marchers and onlookers, there were some who had had enough. 

All this influenced our decision to look at violence in the first play of the year. One that Jo does not write. The actors interviewed all sorts of people and we turned the words of the interviews into songs, sketches and monologues. Some of the interviews were very shocking and in discussing them the actors in turn volunteered stories so that some of our meetings became informal therapy sessions; memories of watching the 2 students, who bullied one actress when she was in class one, being stood on chairs in front of the whole school, told to pull down their trousers and being beaten with electric rope. The scars of that event are perhaps less healed today than the bullying that preceded it.

We performed in schools and communities around Vila running discussion and role play workshops after the performance.  Now the actors are in Tanna and Santo. The shows in Vila were also fundraisers for Joseph’s widow and family. She, one of her sons, Kalo, and a number of small grandchildren came to one of the performances at WSB and asked to make a speech. Leisongi and the children unfurled a banner with a quote from Gandhi:

Wealth without work
Pleasure without conscience
Science without humanity
Knowledge without character
Commerce without morality
Worship without sacrifice

Politics without principle

Gandhi claimed these were passive forms of violence that led to more active violence in a society. Kalo went on to ask the audience to think about the direction Vanuatu was heading if we wanted to maintain our supposed status as the happiest place on Earth. It was a moving event with, for me, a weird side effect. The actors were seated behind him waiting to perform. As the family left the stage Danny got up to thank them and introduce the play but he was choked, as were several of the cast and yet, as I said to them later, they were being watched by the audience waiting for the play. No one in the audience uttered a sound as they waited for the actors to find their composure but it was also a performance because they were on stage. A very truthful moving performance and worth pondering on…the simplicity of truthful emotion as opposed to acted emotion and as actors there are times when  we want to make the gap between the two as small as possible.