Day 75: Coriolanus (NT/Donmar Warehouse Live Simulcast)

Where to start? I'll leave aside the obvious (slightly fan-related) comments on the casting, and focus on the staging and delivery and how it was different to my initial reading. I'm certainly glad for having read it first and formed my own opinion and viewpoint for the play before seeing it done live, as it certainly would have coloured the reading of it had I gone about this the other way round. Adding a female Tribune rather than them both be male was an interesting twist which worked very well. I'm not entirely convinced that making them a couple was necessary, but it did lend an explanation as to why the characters are left somewhat indistinct from one another in the script. (I wonder how a similar change in say, the characters of Rozencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet might affect their dynamic.)

The minimal set and neutral, mostly-modern costumes allow the focus to be firmly on the actors and lines, and allow the audience's "imaginary forces" to join in. The intimate setting of the Donmar Warehouse seemed to lend itself to the cameras, and certain timely closeups certainly blurred the usually clear difference between stage and screen performances. It helps that at least half the cast are well-established screen actors, but I came to the realisation that simulcasts have really become a regular occurrance now, and that where last time I was a hopeful drama school applicant I made it clear I had no aspirations for film whatsoever, in five years that has become an almost obsolete ambition since landing a role with the National Theatre, RSC and several other companies comes with an understanding that you almost certainly will appear on the big screen at least once as part of a broadcast performance. I have also come to understand that smaller, more intimate theatres like the Donmar or the Traverse place actors close enough to their audience that those minute gestures and expressions which I'd previously considered only really useful to screen acting can still come across, and indeed are necessary elements when the stage show is being filmed.

The entire action was set at a much higher emotional pitch than I initially read into the script. That sense of manipulation that I mentioned in my previous post was still there, but Coriolanus sparking the fire that eventually killed him was played up much more, and the breakdown that comes with his family's pleading for mercy is a much faster effect than I originally saw. The finale was also a lot more gruesome, and fantastically well done. I will close with full encouragement to anyone who hasn't seen this production who has the opportunity (for the re-screening in a few weeks time, or if at all possible live) to go and enjoy. It's an allstar cast with excellent acting (and yet another check for the northern accent sounding SO much more native to Shakespeare) lots of blood, sweat and tears and unexpected dubstep music for the scene changes which worked far better than it sounds like it should.

Day 74: American Buffalo, by David Mamet

For a change, this one actually seemed to have a plot... or almost did. We don't actually get to see the plan through, since two people (one of whom we never meet) end up in hospital before the heist can go off. There are no women on stage and the two mentioned as the story unfolds turn out to be a lesbian couple who cheat at cards, and that (along with some colourful language on the subject) is all we find out about them, though again there's an implication of more going on, just the guys in question are too busy badmouthing them to each other to listen. Possibly. The story is perhaps an easier-to-follow indication of what the "point" of all of these plays might be: to show everyday disappointments and "natural" (or at least naturalistic) situations. It's a pretty normal thing for plans to be scuppered, even if the plan itself (to rob a guy) isn't quite so much a part of the daily dealings of the average member of the audience. I did find myself wondering if maybe this time we might actually get a resolution to the problems posed in the story.

Challenging established "rules" when it comes to any art form can often be a great way to bring in new ideas. In this case though, bucking the idea that a story should have a conflict and a resolution, or a setup and consequences... or even just a beginning, middle and end... it feels like sort of the literary equivalent of finishing a song a note early. Off-colour comments from the characters aside ("I'm not your nigger, or your wife") this play did at least resolve some of the plot it set up.

As a thought experiment, I tried imagining the various characters as female, and how they would play differently. Genderswapping the young apprentice is the most obvious, at which point the entire story becomes focussed on a bullied and damaged anorexic desperate to please a boss who is probably her father/uncle, and she's eventually basically beaten into a coma for trying to play with the big boys. It's horrific. If all three are women, on the other hand, it becomes a rather twisted take on a maiden/mother/crone dynamic where basically nobody likes each other, they all have their own agenda and eventually an argument turns into a catfight and someone winds up in hospital... and the whole thing is kind of a dark comedy. Perhaps most interesting would be to cast Teach as a woman. I'll admit I've been focussed on how there aren't a lot of well-written women in these plays, and I may have been swayed a bit by reading a lot of articles lately on the subject of women in hollywood/on stage. I played a number of traditionally male roles growing up - in a largely all-girls environment it was usually the larger girls who maybe didn't fit as well into the stock costume dresses who ended up playing boys... but I liked it. I was never going to be Juliet, or Hermia... but I made a pretty good Mickey in Blood Brothers.

Day 73: EAS, script work and character development

Since I have a fair amount of experience with building characters for LARP, and friends seem to point to that as encouragement for my acting aspirations, I decided to start building stats and a background for a charater based on Imogen as a way to help me find a deeper character to slip into for her monologue. It did lead me to the realisation that the sonnet I've chosen to start preparing for the RADA certificate actually isn't as contrasted a theme as I first thought. Imogen has wound up where she is now after being (wrongfully) accused of cheating on her man... and Sonnet 121 is basically saying "if I'm gonna be accused I may as well have fun with it". It's a totally different attitude, but the trigger is the same. I'm not sure whether I want to keep that and use the argument that the contrast is in the way the two voices approach the accusation, or just try to find something completely different.

EAS class today saw the start of duo/group script work. I've been given the opening scene from "The Goat, or Who is Silvia?" in which I play half of an older married couple. My "husband" is supposed to be 50, it's not explicitly stated how old I'm meant to be, but playing much older than I am is pretty tricky for me. This is certainly going to be an interesting challenge - not just because it's a shift from my usual playing age by quite a way, but also in bringing a certain level of intimacy to the scene, even if it's no further than an occasional touch of the hand or shoulder alongside an ease of personal space. I'm aware of the trust excersise that's bubbling away under the surface, and it's a useful lesson. I'm looking forward to exploring that a bit more next week - I came to this looking for challenges and it's good to see that there are areas I might not have thought of to work on which are being stretched.

Day 72: Squirrels, by David Mamet

I'm now halfway through the first collection of Mamet's plays, and once again I find that while being varied in subject material, his approach to conversation and obsession with mundane stories and misogynist characters is a common thread. For once, we have a woman on stage who isn't actively a love interest of either of the men involved (though, not for want of trying on her part, and there's a strongly implied history with one of them), has creative talent and aspirations and... doesn't actually have a name. This vibrant, chatty, outgoing woman with a flair for writing, is only ever known as "The Cleaning Lady". Most of her lines (which are substantial) are spoken more at the men than to them, and most of her scenes could leave out what little nodding-along she gets in response and work perfectly well as monologues. It's something at least that she's there and as fleshed-out as a character as the others (perhaps even more so), but I can't help feeling like in the context of the way she's treated that the takeaway message is "and don't we hate it when they just go on and on like that". I'll admit, I've formed a pretty strong opinion of this particular playwrite, and perhaps I should give the benefit of the doubt here. The character is well-written, though not well-treated nor apparently entirely phased or surprised by that fact.

This time, the snapshot is of a series of freewriting sessions between an older author and his younger apprentice. The Cleaning Lady appears to be at the very least a previous collaborator with the older man on writing projects, with a certain subtext that there was more to that relationship than writing. She also attempts to ask both men, on at least two occasions, if they want sex.

Day 71: King Lear, by William Shakespeare (RSC 2008 film adaptation)

Between staying out later than intended on Saturday and not really having a handle on my sleep pattern post-caffeine yet, I wasn't entirely feeling up to the level of attention reading the play would have required. I found this online with the sort of cast I've come to expect from the RSC, and thus have something to show for the day. I'll admit I found the parallel plots a little bit hard to follow even in the synopsis, but the characters and their interactions put me in mind of a sort of veiled dry-run for Hamlet. The players are somewhat shuffled but the themes of madness, vengeance and family friction, ending in a very similar pile of bodies killed variously by poison, duel and suicide (and in this case, heartbreak).

In stark contrast to the other Shakespeare adaptations I've watched for this project so far, the set and staging for this one is minimal almost to the point of being replicable on a stage. The outdoor scenes are actually outside, but that aside, court scenes are laid out so that there is never a back turned to to the camera and we watch from a very theatrical-audience-like perspective with closeups being used very sparingly in the early scenes of the play. From the available interviews it seems this was a deliberate and specific decision, with the intention of placing emphasis on the script to carry the story and give the audience the same opportunity for imagination as a scantly-dressed stage production would.

I do intend on reading the script at some point, probably in the not-too distant future since I have it out from the library at the moment. There's certainly a good mix of female characters to choose from, and while none of them are leaping out as perfect for me the way Imogen did, Goneril seems to offer a lot of scope and challenge as a more mature and calculating character while still having a place in the younger generation of her family.

Day 70: Non-script day, January bio questions

This month I'm asking my own bio questions again, including revisiting what I want from training. As I start to pick up more scheduled activities to complement this blog project, I'm starting to see the year ahead taking form, and it'll be interesting to see if I end up anywhere close to where I think I'm headed.

What are your goals for one month, six months and a year from now?

In a month, I should be signed up and paid up to sit the Bronze Shakespeare Certificate exam at RADA, hopefully will have started doing at least one weekly sports session of some kind, have 2 more development/"around the subject" books read, and have chosen a first modern monologue to start working on. In six months I should be preparing to audition for the performance group at EAS, either prepping for or have done the Silver Certificate, have at least 3 Classical (including one non-Shakespeare) and 2 modern monologues learned, be regularly doing 3 sessions of excersise/sport per week and for the project I should be seeing at least one live show per month (and at least one live or film adaptation per week) and reading at least one development book per month. Also by this point I should have touched on every Shakespeare play at least once. In a year, I should be preparing for Gold, alongside initial auditions for my chosen schools, and have if at all possible read and seen every Shakespeare play (whether live or film - some of these will be trickier to find than others). If I'm physically fit enough (and the nerves in my leg have healed enough to be safe) I'd also like to be back in skating and possibly working on finishing my SkateUK badges. If at all possible sometime in the year I'd like to get some experience playing to a camera.

After all the work and thought that's going into this year, what do you want out of a full time three-year training course?

This year is about finding my way back into studying, and cultivating a work ethic and the curiosity and flexibility I think I'll need. I've always been a bit selfish and cocky about my creative endeavours and this is a chance to spend a year figuring out, of what comes naturally, what works and what doesn't and finding the strength to admit the bits that don't. Training will pretty much definitely work on the bits that don't come so easily, and if I'm conscious beforehand of at least some of those areas they will be easier to work on. So what I'm looking for is, once I've got a grasp of what I can do and convinced a school that it's a solid foundation, the chance to spend a few years being pushed and encouraged to take everything to the next level. I suspect from what I know of myself now, certain priorities are likely to emerge - confidence and trust, which I never thought I'd lose in the context of the theatre or pretty much anywhere in life but which at the moment are big issues; dance and movement may be a slightly problematic area if the nerve damage doesn't heal completely (it may never do so, but if it's going to then I should have complete feeling back in that leg by the time I get to those initial auditions) and learning to work around that is already frustrating. Any camera work is going to still be fairly new (though I'm hoping to address that) and probably slightly nervewracking, but much more important this time round since I'm starting to understand the draw of film work. My first priority is still the stage and specifically Shakespeare, but it's a pretty exciting time for the British film industry at the moment and if it continues to grow then there's a good chance I'll still very much want in on it once I finish training. There's also the increasingly-common filming of larger stage productions for simulcasting (particularly for Shakespeare) so even if I were to stick primarily to the theatre there's far less of a garuntee of avoiding the cameras that way than used to be the case.

How is the caffeine withdrawal going?

Yep, quitting caffeine. Currently not completely cold-turkey, but that's more because I really like the taste of tea and coke than specifically chasing the buzz. It's not every day, and it's usually one or the other. I'm now at a point where I'm often feeling pretty sluggish. I'm convinced that years of waking up with energy drinks (and at the lowest points of my illness in the last couple of years they've been the necessary boost just to be able to get out of bed) has destroyed my already less than perfect metabolism. I sort of feel like my body has just straight up forgotten how to make energy happen (though again, years of illness have made me reasonably good at hiding this fact). I've had people ask why bother getting clean when the addiction itself doesn't really cause any harm, and mostly it comes down to this: three months ago I was relying on at least one can of Monster/Relentless/whatever to get out of bed, and maybe another later in the day if I was up and doing things all day, and still being completely finished after anything more than about ten hours of activity. If I'm in the 14th hour of a tech rehearsal or shoot, I might well be hitting up the caffeine, but I'd rather not already be on the third one by then having started falling over in hour 4. I am mostly hoping that by this time next year I'll have a better handle on how to keep myself energised in a more healthy and sustainable way.

Day 69: A Chorus of Disapproval, by Alan Ayckbourne

This is the second play this month which is about a group of actors putting on a performance, in this case of The Beggar's Opera, which I read and reviewed waaay back on day 12 of this blog. There's a lot of comedy (and some fairly kinky romance themes) in the backstage antics, along with a big dose of emotional blackmail. The songs and lines they are rehearsing reflect and intertwine with the more serious parts of the story, which works out nicely for pretty much the whole thing, until the ending. The Beggar's Opera has a twist happy ending with a reprieve from hanging, but it's left entirely unclear whether the mirror character in A Chorus will get similarly "let off". By this point he's managed to damage relationships with almost everyone in the company, though it's perhaps an interesting staging question whether he's really been as innocent in the whole situation as he makes out (and reads on the surface).

Using the play to reflect the rest of the action is certainly a much-used device in terms of play-within-a-play type stories, but in this case I think it feels closer to some experiences I've had personally - when working for months on a script it can be easy to start seeing parallels in life to those situations your character finds on stage, or even start to deal with those situations informed by how your character copes in the script. That mentality, where the problem feels just a little bit familiar because you've acted through it, makes it very easy for things to go wrong when there's no script, and your own needs are far more complex than the characters involved on stage. I hope I'm making some sort of sense here, it's not an easy concept to write conscicely.

I enjoyed reading this script and I'd certainly like to track down a performance at some point, not least to see whether Guy gets played as the overly-hazed new recruit or basically as a spy. The former is the more obvious choice but he certainly has the potential to have his own agenda hidden under the surface.

Day 68: Sexual Perversity in Chicago, by David Mamet

I've had a lot to comment on about this play to friends in rather colourful language not entirely appropriate to the tone I've been trying to set for this blog (and at least mostly succeeding). I am increasingly of the opinion that David Mamet is mostly driven by the urge to give voice to the worst possible stereotype of the entitled white American man, in a variety of ages and social situations. The blatent misogyny in this particular play might be shrugged off in part as merely a sign of the era in which it was written, but I found much of the interaction between the men and women throughout to be almost painful when read as a female today. One woman is very nearly assaulted on stage by a man, and then her friend and his friend hook up into what turns out to be a pretty ugly and uncerain relationship. That eventually breaks up, and we're treated to the two lads basically letching to each other about every ass that walks past them by way of consoling the newly single guy. And, curtain. Nobody has really gained anything other than a new neurosis or two for the ladies, and another notch in the bedpost for Hookup Guy.

I wasn't allowed to watch soap operas as a kid, and perhaps that ingrained in me a deeper discomfort with stage and paper stories as well as television which deal with small, gossipy plots set in the real and present world happening to unremarkable characters. These are the situations I shied away from at school when they happened to me, my books and films and plays were an escape from that world and my tastes as I've grown up haven't changed much from that drive for escapism. My aversion to the genre, though I'm not sure that's even an apropriate term for it, does seem to come up short against a lot of recently-written drama. I've come to realise my taste in film has become narrower still, ruling out almost anything that isn't epic fantasy action, animated, 3D or all of the above. And nearly all of the "straight drama" I've seen in the last decade focussed on an author I loved growing up in some way. Partly that's a cycle - films advertise similar films, and I end up blinkered to at least half of the new releases simply because I don't know anything more about them than a name on the billboard. In a way, this project has started to address the blind spots, but actually appreciating and enjoying those stories that fall into a category I learned to look down my nose at when I was nine is something a bit harder to do.

It seems somewhat unfair to simply dismiss a story as pointless, but if there was a take-home message other than perhaps a warning to women about the evils of the sexually active male of the species, then I missed it entirely. Once again, Mamet has got me irritated that I've had to sit through reading something I didn't enjoy engaging with. Not in a challenging, thoughtful way, but as an observer to a particularly low-speed train wreck which turned out to be improper use of the emergency break rather than a derailed fireball. At least I'm getting practice writing eloquent vitriol in a careful bid not to resort to swearing.

Day 67: Duck Variations, by David Mamet

This is basically fourteen short scenes of two old men sitting on a park bench vaguely discussing a variety of topics, with the self-assured ignorance of stereotyped "set-in-their-ways" old men, and somehow always ending up coming back to talking about ducks. They run a gamut of very confidently knowing nothing about oil slicks, zoos, and boats, and several angles of man's place in nature and the meaning of life. I think it's a play that probably benefits far more by being seen rather than read, as the dialogue leaves a lot of room for unspoken emotions.

My initial instinct was wondering what the point of the play was. On the surface it's just two old guys talking about life and ducks. But after time letting the hindbrain work on it, I think the reflections on life are something that everyone can relate to. Their speech and slightly derailed thought patterns are distinctly "old person" in nature, but I find myself thinking that perhaps younger (maybe disabled, or unemployed) people could just as easily be used, without much need to tweak the lines.

This was the first play in the first book of Mamet's collected plays (Methuen edition) and I'll be working through the rest of them over the coming week or two. I'm interested to see what sort of variety is to come. This is the second of his plays I've actually tackled (See previous post on Glengarry Glen Ross) and have once again come up against the problem of incomplete thoughts and sentences as a script style choice. While I did eventually start to understand the context this time, it makes the action a little bit harder to follow when dealing with the print version.

Day 66: No script, first class at EAS.

First of my two days off reading this week, and very definitely a Skills Day. Tonight was the first class of the new term at Edinburgh Acting School. Lots of fun, and aside from warmup and wind-down games the bulk of the evening was dedicated to two sets of small group improvisation scenes. Certainly a relief to be breaking in with the comfortable side of things, LARP has kept me a bit more limber with my improv skills than I am with a script. Said script work is scheduled to start next week, with the promise of working through character development and staging in the coming weeks. All in all, I'm looking forward to it. At the moment I'm mostly hoping to open up and be more trusting with the audience and other actors... mostly learn to play with (and FOR) others again. Also will work on listening. I still talk waaaay to much in social time before and after class, and that's partly just the way I handle new-group nerves, but it's also something of a habit that makes me look like an attention-grabbing loony which isn't what I want.

Day 65: Long Day's Journey into Night, by Eugene O'Neill (At the Lyceum Theatre)

There's a lot I could say about this play. I was certainly talking about it all through the (over half an hour) bus ride home. I'll steer away from the commentary I found in the program and elsewhere online and stick to my own impressions, that should keep this down to a more-or-less standard length post. After the realisation that one of the actors looks strikingly like a friend of mine (not the first time that's happened) the first thing that really stood out was how "acted" the first few scenes felt. Part of that may have been the entire cast putting on accents, along with this still being in previews, but as the story unfolded I started to think that may have been deliberate, since two of the characters are themselves actors, and everyone is hiding something from someone else and thus "acting" normal anyway. The difference when those pretenses are dropped, one by one, are all the more emotional as they are played so much more naturally.

There's something I can identify with in almost every character in the play. For most of the scripts I've looked at so far, I find myself following one charcter more closely than the others, or at least having a better idea of what it is that makes them tick. There's also one scene of the father drunkenly telling his son how he wound up the way he is, an alcoholic washed-up has-been of an actor. And he lights up talking about "the old days", which is brilliant, and pretty much the only time I found myself genuinely smiling along with the action (there really isn't a lot of positive emotion involved in most of the story). The same scene also contains some fantastic advice and a not-so-subtle warning to those even thinking about becoming an actor. Throughout the play, having an actor and his two sons on stage proves a gloriouus excuse for quoting mainly from Shakespeare in a far more relavent and effective way than I've ever seen elsewhere.

I came away from seeing this feeling like I'd run a bit of an emotional marathon. The story deals with passion, chronic illness, addiction, general family friction and a lot of (not) dealing with your own past or that of people you love. It's all the stuff that everyone probably has some experience of, though hopefully not quite to the extent and concentration of the family on stage, but that nobody really talks about. And it's exactly the not talking about it, and eventually everything coming out (mostly through copious amounts of whisky), that drives the play. Although nobody is actually dead on stage by the end, it's still a pretty powerful message about bottling up fears and secrets... and I'm pretty sure it's the voice of my old English teacher in my head saying the watered down whisky bottle, and the fresh ones kept locked up in the cellar are sort of a metaphor for the ongoing thread through the story.

Day 64: Antigone, by Sophocles (translation by Robert Bagg)

Having once again noticed the use of modern turns of phrase, and this time quite an obvious one ("you bet" for yes...) I did have a look at the notes and find that this was deliberate, but I also noticed that certain parts which felt more classical did so for a reason - they are written in verse which doesn't generally rhyme, but for certain characters is in iambic pentameter. This third installment in the cycle feels more lyrical in general, there were certainly large parts that felt like they should be sung (as suggested in the stage directions, and as they would have been in their original form) far more so than the previous two.

The actual plot line in this play is very short: Antigone buries her brother, against the mandate of the new king of Thebes, and this leads fairly directly to a triple suicide. Cheerful stuff, and without the politics and cliffhangers of the previous plays. It does rather feel like a devastating postscript to a story already dripping with tragedy. The new king seems to have a family as cursed by prophesy as Oedipus's was, but the difference is that he brought it, consciously, upon himself where Oedipus was following a path that seemed to be written for him at birth. There's a difference too in the way each of them copes with his respective downfall. Oedipus finds a renewed faith in his last days and dies mysteriously, vanishing without a trace on a sacred hilltop with at most a single witness sworn to secrecy. All this after living a life exiled for crimes of which he is guilty but couldn't possibly have known it at the time. Kreon, the new king, could be seen to inherit the curse through his association with the family, as it is Antigone's death which leads to his son's suicide, in turn triggering Kreon's wife to follow suit. It was mentioned earlier in the cycle that due to the curse of basically inbreeding, the daughters would never be considered eligible and were expected to die untouched. A more modern story might twist the ending in a more positive light and have Kreon make the right call to save Antigone's life and thus perhaps break the curse and give everyone (who's left by this point) a happy ending... but then, it wouldn't be a tragedy. Instead, he sticks doggedly to his belief that as rightful king his word must be law, and to his plan to see Antigone put to death. With his entire family dead, he realises too late that he has no other choice but to turn to his guards, and have them escort him away.

There are resonances in the final scenes of this play with the deposition scene in Richard II, but rather than stepping down to a usurping Lord as Richard does, Kreon is admitting defeat to prophesy and the Gods themselves. Both have an arrogant sense of right to rule, and both are struck low in a melodramatic way... and both have a strong thread of Faith running through their story. Finally, both seem ready to accept death at the end, seeing no life ahead of them after loss of leadership.

Day 63: Our Country's Good, by Timberlake Wertenbaker

This is a play I've seen performed once, by a mostly well-off, almost exclusively white extra-curricular drama group at my university (a group I was a member of for much of my time there, but I wasn't in this particular play) who probably had not a single experience between them of anything more criminal than downloading a song or two. In the front of the book there is a preface which explains that the author took his premiere cast to see a play in the prison at Wormwood Scrubs as part of the rehearsal process. This is followed by a handful of letters from inmates who were in that production who subsequently read Our Country's Good and were talking about the accuracy of it, and plans to try to put it on themselves. I can only imagine how that would go, but I expect it would be a rather powerful and harrowing experience.

When I read the synopsis to a friend, their first comment was "so it's a black comedy then?". Well, no. There are bits that are funny, but it's not a farce. There are just people. Officers who are fallible, some even have a shady history which makes them liable to be stern in order to hide that past, but perhaps also allows them the streak of humanity that might save a life somewhere along the line. There's the thread of a question which never really gets answered satisfactorily through the play, whether an evil or criminal personality is endemic from birth. The play within a play, in this case, is turned on its head as a device. Instead of showing up the evils and failings of those in power, it brings out the humanity and pride in a group of people so broken and forsaken that they truly believe, "we left our country for our country's good".

There's not a lot of happy endings in this play. There are on-stage deaths, and more described offstage. There are love affairs and propositions but these involve women who have only really known sex in the context of prostitution and rape, which makes it all the more devastating when possibly the most tragically used (and used to it) woman in the entire colony loses the man she could never tell she loved for fear he'd stop sleeping with her. Those responsible for hangings are haunted by the ghosts of the dead. Through it all there's the background concern that the next supply ship is overdue, leaving the officers with their own sense of lonliness and abandonment. There are layers and layers of stripped-down humanity, and it is the combination of an isolated community, desperate and dangerous people and the mirror that is theatre that really lets us see all of it. It's one thing to get to grips with those layers as an actor and perform it as you might any other play, but I find myself just a little bit curious to see how much deeper it might go when performed by a company with the personal experiences to inform the life of the characters.

Day 62: Taking a day.

I had plans for working today, but it turns out I needed some time to think through that first rejection. It won't be the last, and it's not the end of the line. It means a full weekend, but with the new allowance of 2 days off a week for the project, it's not a failure either. I know I'm out of practice, and from the tone of the email I feel as though there's still the spark in there, it's just been buried under years of thinking this was a path I'd never see again, much less embark on it. I'm nervous about trusting an audience... that's a new feeling for me. I never suffered stage fright as a kid, just revelled in the high at the end of a show, and the creative process to get there. The deeper into this project I get, the more things I find that I need to work on, and the harder the journey looks. But I'm on this journey now and giving up isn't an option.

Day 61: Oedipus at Kolonos, by Sophocles (translation by Robert Bagg) ...and EAS Audition.

I'll keep my commentary on both the reading and the audition brief. I'm writing this a day late and wrestling with partly wanting to ignore the entire project (at least for the day) and partly knowing now it's more important than ever to throw myself back in and keep swimming.

Really enjoyed the story here, complete with a mysterious "how did he die" cliffhanger ending Moffat would have been proud of. I did find myself noticing the text feeling a little bit more modern-sounding than I expected, mixed in with other phrases which read like the careful word-for-word translations I remember from learning latin at school. Once again I find myself feeling I can't really comment too much on the translation when I wouldn't be able to read the original and haven't seen any other translations.

I'll admit my focus was a little bit more on this evening's audition than on the reading for the day, so I'll turn a bit of attention to that. For my monologue, I was aware of keeping myself a bit close and protected... exactly what led to doing the T-rex impression in practice. Good to know what my default nervous "tell" is, now I can keep an eye out for it. I could feel myself holding back... and I'll cut to the spoiler, I didn't get in. Thinking about it though, I am five years out of practice, particularly with opening up to an audience. I'll still be doing the weekly Improvers classes, and hopefully that will help me get back some of the confidence I've lost over the years. I suspect not having slept well the night before also didn't help.

Day 60: Rehearsal Day for EAS audition

Under the new plan of five days of play-reading a week, taking the day before my audition "off" to focus on refining my speech seemed like a good idea. It took rather a lot of focus and coaxing to really get started, a slightly worrying trend I recognise all too well from my school and university days: I have a tendency to start new projects at a run, hit a lull where I'm ahead of the game and think I can relax, and then all but grid to a halt until I can see the looming deadline, and then cram whatever's left into the smallest possible amount of time. Mercifully I have an understanding friend willing to sit patiently providing tea and a sounding board to get all the other things on my mind out until I can actually start working, and then put me up for the night when we suddenly realise it's well after 11 and my outdoor gear is still wet from walking over in the rain.

There's a game we used to play as a warm up in my drama group at university which we called Directors from Hell (after the Hollywood Director sketches from Who's Line Is It Anyway) and after establishing that I knew the lines but was still playing very close to my chest, this was the obvious fix. I'd commented that I felt like I was working in a milk-crate (my friend has a VERY small lounge, and various clutter was giving me an unnecessarily small amount of floor space) which led to the first suggestion of doing the scene as a Tyrannosaurus Rex. As I tend to use my hands a lot in normal speech, anything that restricts my arm motion tends to very noticeably affect my recall. (Friends have occasionally found it hilarious to watch me, sitting on my hands and attempting any themed variation on "A is for Apple"... generally if I get further than C someone puts a stop to the "cruel torture", and I'm usually tapping a foot or similar just to get that far). This was followed up with Care Bears, which proved that I was aware of the moments of change of pace and emotion and got very silly and overdone rather quickly, and finally as Loki, which really didn't fit the script all that well but helped with finding some conviction and fire in what is very easy to read as a nervy and internalised speech.

I certainly still have a little bit of work to do in the morning once I've slept on it, but I feel like I've got a bit more control over what I'm doing, and have found my way back to some of the little tricks and instincts I had started to gather through school and uni performances.

Day 59: Coriolanus, by Willam Shakespeare.

Back to reading Shakespeare after a bit of a break and several film adaptations. Speaking of which, the plan is to see the National Theatre cinema broadcast version of this on the 31st, though Thursday's audition, if it goes well might come with the slight drawback that one of the early classes will clash with that. We'll see how things go.

The play seems to me to be almost more about how literally everyone is trying to manipulate a man who is basically famous for being a formidable soldier and not much else. His army let him charge the gates on his own, his friends talk the consulate into putting him in power, the Tribunes rouse the general public to call him out for treason before he's even accepted the seat, once exiled (very much with an air of "well if you can't make your damn minds up who needs you lot anyway") he forms an apparent aliance with an old enemy who OF COURSE plots against him behind his back, and when he comes back to invade Rome his family come to him to try to convince him not to burn down the city. Because putting a child (his son) who is just about old enough to know to "run away and then come back to fight when I'm bigger" in front of a hardened warrior who's just about had it with everyone is a really good idea. As it turns out, it works... to distract Coriolanus long enough from his fight for the conspirators in his new band to find him and kill him. If the character were particularly cocky about what he'd achieved in the wars, I'd think maybe that was the moral here... but he's not. He never really wanted the government position - he walked out of the meeting because he was embarrassed by his friend trying to "sell" him as a candidate and they chose him anyway. He did everything he could to throw the election day with the public and THEY chose him anyway (a point which was used as the spark for the rebellion pretty much as soon as he was out of earshot). I can't help but feel that the real tragedy here is that this was a man who was doing just great for himself until everyone around him started meddling, the whole thing spiralled and the final actual sword thrusts becomes pretty much lost in the general backstabbing that's been going on for most of the play.

This was not a quick read, and as much as I find myself getting distracted and feeling like it's a bit of a slog when a play takes the best part of the day to get through, I did enjoy the story. It feels a bit drawn out in places, but that only adds to the detail of just how many different groups and individuals seem to want a piece of the man over the course of the action.

Day 58: Oedipus the King, by Sophocles (translation by Robert Bagg)

I may have picked up the Oedipus Cycle book in Waterstones almost entirely because I felt cultured doing so, and joked about being the picture of privilege settling down to read this morning with Classic FM on in the background. As it turned out, my limited knowledge of the story wound up making the whole thing an addictive page-turner. I also found myself wondering why it was never pointed out to me when we were performing Murder in the Cathedral at school that it was quite clearly stylistically based on greek tragedy (something I couldn't have noticed for myself until I'd actually read some). Admittedly that was an extra-curricular performance rather than part of normal lessons. It's just one more time I've found myself cursing time spent in secondary school losing my curiosity for language and history. I wasn't expecting to find quite such a revalation in reading this. If anything I might have been expecting a bit of a slog as I did in Congreve's plays, but this goes back so much further and touches that fascination for ancient civilizations I had in primary school.

I found myself musing that I wouldn't be able to tackle the original material, since greek isn't one of my languages. I picked up a (translated) anthology of Brecht plays at the library today, if I find one of those that I like, I might dust off my decade-out-of-use German to have a go. I doubt I still have enough latin to try anything in that, though I remember at GCSE being given a passage or two of Illiad to play with and loving it. On the subject of languages, I've recently acquired a beginner book of Irish, since my other half lives over there (and has suggested it might be worth applying to one or two schools there as well as here in the UK). Now that I've got the book, I have become suddenly very self-conscious about actually trying to learn to speak the language. I think that's partly because over the years I have learned languages (or at least smatterings of them) either at school or through necessity in places where English wasn't widely spoken. In itself the fact that everyone in Germany is more or less fluent in English made it quite tricky to make full use of exchange programmes - once out there, if you sounded like you were remotely struggling, the locals would just switch to far better English than I could ever hope my German to be. The complete opposite is true backpacking in Tanzania, where apart from hiring a tour guide, it was very useful for a couple of us to make friends with a phrase book for several hours a day and I came back with a few hundred words. That was quite some time ago and I've forgotten most of it, but the joy of codes, riddles and languages (which I think I always approached as more or less the same thing) was a huge part of who I was when I was younger and it's just one more thing I'm eager to reconnect with.

I seem to have massively diverted from the play in question, but for the first time in a while I've found my reading has sparked memories and thought processes at a tangent, and that's worth exploring whenever I can. More specifically then, there are some really quite grisley turns of phrase and graphic gory descriptions of the offstage action. I'd have to see other translations to know for sure, but I suspect those are not an artefact of the translation and are probably some of the closest words to the original intent. Particularly in the earlier part of the play, most of the language wouldn't sound entirely out of place in an entirely modern setting, aside from explicit references to singing and dancing the lines. After the reveal though, the whole thing feels much more deliberately tragic. In performance I'm sure that change of pace would only help the final scenes feel even more devastating. Again though, I'd have to look at other translations to see whether the shift is a common device (and so presumably evident in the original work) or a choice by Bagg to update the voices of the characters for most of the play to appeal to a modern audience.

Day 55 - 57: Hence the need for the overhaul.

Friday I spent trying very hard not to come down completely with the start of a cold. I'd promised myself at the beginning of this project that I was going to try to just power through whatever got thrown at me, but I'd fallen asleep around 7pm on Thursday and was generally feeling pretty wiped out and figured taking a day was the better idea. Saturday was an annual get-together with friends I don't see very often which took up the entire day and most of the night... and Sunday was largely spent recovering and catching up on a week's worth of this blog.

In amongst all the faff though, I have got the Imogen monologue more or less memorised. I've been running the lines while walking whenever I'm out of the house, which has turned out to be a much more effective way of learning than sitting around with my nose in the book. It's obvious when I actually think about it. I know I'm more of a kinaesthetic learner than anything else, and old speeches I learned as a kid come back to me more readily when I'm wandering somewhere, so it's no surprise that the new ones work themselves into my mind more easily when I'm moving. I do still need to work out where to cut the piece I'm working on so that I can fit the time restriction for Thursday's audition this week.

In view of the new plan, which is to complete five plays a week from this point onwards, my plan is to take Wednesday off. That way I can focus entirely on polishing my audition piece the day before, and let my hindbrain do the tweaking while I do something else in the morning on the day. If it turns out I get an attack of nerves and want to spend Thursday working on the audition as well, then I still haven't lost more days than I'm "allowed", I just have a really long weekend ahead.

Day 54: History Boys, by Alan Bennett

This is the second of the books I got for Christmas, this time I do have the film to go with it but for this first contact I read the script. It's an interesting take on how students see their favorite teachers, though perhaps it's all rather more literal in this story. I'm fairly sure even in the 80s most schools wouldn't have been so lenient on a teacher known to be "interfering" with their students. I see a clear parallel with the storyline of Dead Poet's Society, though the focus is in this case more on the teacher.

I was (perhaps unfairly) a bit put off by a large chunk early on in the play being in french, as it's one language I never really learned. I'm aware that puts me in a dramatic minority in this country. After the abysmal attempts at primary school where for reasons I can't recall our class went through about five teachers in three years, I gave up entirely and chose German as it was offered from the beginning of secondary school. Mercifully in this case there's enough Franglais and English interspersed into the "lesson" to have a reasonable idea what's going on. I'd be happy if the film includes subtitles, but either way I'll cope.

The closing scene is a clever way of bringing a trick I normally associate with screen to the stage: showing what each of the characters went on to after the main action of the story. It also brings the focus back outwards to the rest of the cast in a scene which could just as easily be focussed entirely on just the teachers, instead showing his legacy.

Overall I enjoyed reading the script, and look forward to coming back to the film adaptation at some point later in the year.

Day 52/53: Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard

Took two days over this one as I was travelling home from the holidays. This was one of two playscripts I was given for Christmas. It's a really interesting mix, as it's set in two time periods as the current owners of a large house try to piece together the history of the place, uncovering along the way a young creative mathematician ahead of her time and a link to Lord Byron. It's an interesting take on historical research, and a fantastic story unfolds as the modern-era characters uncover documents, books and artwork in scenes alternating with period ones showing those same documents being written and the events that surrounded them.

I definitely enjoyed this one, possibly because I've been filling up on murder mysteries for a couple of weeks and while it's not quite a whodunnit, it does have it's own mysteries. The writing style is easy and fun to read and while there's not a lot of backstory revealed about the modern-era characters, they are essentially narrators to the Byron-era characters and their story. That could be played down entirely or left to the actors and director to bring their own characterisations into the mix. I'd be interested in seeing how that side of the play is brought to the stage, if I get the opportunity to see it performed.

Day 51: Go Back for Murder, by Agatha Christie

The final installment of Agatha Christie certainly didn't disappoint. This time a group is brought back together after several years to re-enact a long-since closed case at the (apparent) murderer's daughter's request, eager to clear her mother's name for her father's death. The group piece together a reconstruction from their memories of events as they unfolded at the time. Clearly nobody can actually be arrested or in any way officially accused now, and as it turns out the daughter, trying to clear her name as the child of a killer to mollify a skittish fiancé, ends up leaving her boyfriend anyway. In that sense it's probably the least satisfying ending of the lot, and as much as I like the idea of the premise, I doubt anyone would have such clear memories after the 20 years or so that are meant to have passed.

That all said, there's plenty of little twists and it's as easy and fun a read as the rest. It seems unlikely I'll ever get to see most of them performed (apart from the Mousetrap if I can work out timings to grab the tour somewhere along the way) but I feel like it's something I will be keeping an eye out for in the future.

Rethinking the Project

At this point, I'm one or two plays down this week, and a full week behind on actually doing the writeups. I am determined to make this work, and to do that is going to require accepting and moving on from the general lapse that has been the festive season. It's also going to involve tweaking the rules a little bit to make this doable as I add more to my schedule.

From this point, I'm going to say I will do 5 plays a week, with the days off worked around whatever else I'm getting up to. Doesn't have to be the full weekend off either, but I am going to get back to doing my daily writeups. Days off still need to have a bit of development reading or viewing, to get at least a short writeup, or clear progress made on an audition piece.

Day 50: Henry V, by William Shakespeare (BBC Hollow Crown adaptation)

It's a surprisingly rare treat to see one actor play the character of Harry through all three plays, and the shift in character from Prince to King might be easily chalked up to a change in actor in other circumstances. On film, small expressions that might be lost on stage show up the spark of Hal that's still very much alive behind the toughened mask of suddenly-acquired leadership. It also allows flashbacks from moments in Henry IV which would lose impact if played by someone else. The famous speeches as well become much more intimate and personal (something explored in the Hamlet adaptation I reviewed early in this project).

I'm glad I kept this one in reserve a while and let myself explore a little more Shakespeare before coming back to cover it properly for the blog. There is so much to appreciate that might have been lost on me a month ago. Henry V was originally one of the first plays written for the newly-built Globe, and there are references to that in the introduction from Chorus. Having just finished working through The Age of Shakespeare by Frank Kermode, there's mention in there that Will Kempe, who had played roles like Dogberry and Bottom, left the company when the Globe opened, and I've found comment elsewhere that Falstaff's offstage death at the start of this play seems a little abrupt after the promise at the end of IV part ii that he would return. It doesn't seem much of a leap to wonder if he was written out of the work-in-progress for reasons of continuity.

While there are several famous speeches, mostly delivered by Henry himself, I find I'm drawn rather strongly to the opening Chorus of "O, for a muse of fire". On the surface it's pretty poetry, but the whole speech has enormous depth to it which I didn't fully appreciate the first couple of times I watched this, without the subtitled script turned on. It's certainly something to go back to. One of the things I'm looking into doing this year is the RADA Shakespeare certificates, which have the bonus of not requiring sticking to gender, which school auditions at the end of the year will. I'd thought to try something from Midsummer Night's Dream (especially Puck) but I'm certainly considering this one now.

Day 49: Saturday is Skills Day is BACK!

..and this time, it's rehearsing a monologue. Oh yes.

I have finally got some information out of Edinburgh Acting School as to what would be required to audition for the adult Performance class, and was told "a monologue of your choice". No indication of length, period etc but I figured it should be something I can refine and reuse for degree course auditions next year. Since I had already started looking through Cymbeline for material, I've chosen one of Imogen's speeches and started working on it.

I was sent a set of ten questions by an actor friend which act as a starting point to get into the head of the character, particularly for single speech/scene settings. I've gone through the list and found that as much as I felt that I liked Imogen as a character to start with, I have a lot more in common than I first thought, or at least have found a way to interpret how she's got to where she is in a way that's familiar (albeit on a different scale) to my own experience. I've also started to realise that there's a huge amount of conflicting emotion going on, and a lot of head-chatter, for Imogen during this particular section, and it's also the only time during the entire play that she doesn't directly have somoene looking out for her. That's a pretty scary position and one she clearly doesn't really want to admit scares her. She comments at one point in the speech that "Plenty and Peace breeds cowards: hardness ever of hardiness is mother"... as a way to psych herself up to explore a potentially scary and/or dangerous cave, but her demeanour and actions through the whole play show the reverse of this. She fancies herself as independent, even a little rebellious, but always with a safety net knowing she'll never really have to face "hardness". Her self-assured "hardiness", which is there from the outset, starts to crack just a little in the absence of that "peace and plenty". She complains about the conditions she's now found herself in, blames everyone she can think of for being lost and alone, and eventually spends 10 lines trying to get up the courage to explore the cave.

Day 48: Verdict, by Agatha Christie (Day 47 spent having adventures)

Verdict is an interesting one, which deals with a lot of difficult topics, not least being the apparently cold-blooded "mercy killing" of a seriously disabled woman. I can't help but feel like this must have come from either a personal incident or a news report. Unusually for these plays the backstory is a lot less personal and developed than the characters in previous plays have been, instead seeming more coldly factual. In part perhaps that's because the leading man in the play, husband to the victim, is supposed to have limited interpersonal skills which are focussed mainly in a rather naive set of personal morals and ideals. But the other characters feel starkly two-dimensional, in a way that would make sense if they were lifted from a reported story. Alternatively if it is related to something that happened to someone Christie knew, she may have wanted to keep the characters a little bit bland to avoid identifying people.

I found myself uncomfortably relating to a lot of the facets of the situation in the story. I've been through a period of chronic illness, but I'm also all too familiar with the subsequent problem of not understanding why people won't believe the truth. The twists in the story are pretty much entirely dark and depressing, and the very close of the last scene feels almost jarring in bringing just a sniff of hope that not every single person left alive is going to have an unhappy ending. Perhaps that's something that would come across more smoothly in performance, but as it is I almost feel like leaving the whole thing as a tragedy would do more justice to the story than the ending as it stands.

Day 46: Towards Zero, by Agatha Christie

Once again I've been left feeling a little bit ambiguous about "whodunnit", since apparently one person successfully framed himself and several other people, and it's the others who are actually the more plausible guilty parties. While there's only one ending written into the script, I feel like it could benefit from alternative ending options (much like Clue uses) since it really is left wide open for most of the final act.

I'm not convinced there's any one character I'd particularly want to play in this one, all of the women have their intreague and alterior motives and not one of them is an entirely nice person, though Mary could be fun to explore as she appears to be on the outside of most of the action (and is described as such by one of the other characters early on) and yes is the only person the murderer deems necessary to get out of the way (at least temporarily) before committing the act.

There is a certain amount of backstory provided in the entrance descriptions for one or two of the characters which doesn't really come across in the script, which could be seen as a hangover from the literary background of these plays as I've mentioned before, but it occurs that such backstory is more useful to the actor than it is relevant in so many words to the audience. It's not something I've seen done much elsewhere, but is certainly a device I'll be looking out for in future. Much like the detailed stage directions and set notes I've noted in these and other plays, at first glance they seem to narrow the creeative liscence of the director and/or actors, but it does also allow for a more consistent starting point, dictated by the author, whenever and wherever the play is performed.