Rehearsal: A Demonstration of Excess and Waste
Our rehearsal process is a demonstration of excess and waste. We often waste the three weeks of rehearsal common to most subsidised shows by fannying about for two weeks and then panicking like crazy for the final week. It’s what the film director Werner Hertzog refers to as ‘what starts as aesthetics ends in athletics‘.
We waste so much time. We talk endlessly in circles about irrelevant issues that cannot be acted upon. We listen to the director’s vision, which is less actable than the discussion, we do character work. I’m not even sure what that means. We try to become part of the creative team by ‘creating characters’, that basically involves ‘writing’ whilst standing up and talking and improvising about things that do not have any impact on the scene. Ah yes, but we must improvise the previous circumstances of the scene. Bullshit. That will be great fun, but in essence, entirely wasteful.
Much of the things that we do in the rehearsal period are not helpful in putting on the play. They do not help the actors to act the scenes, instead, they are a wasted time. Activities like these are things that I call PARLOUR GAMES or FAKE WORK,, they feel like creative work, but actually, they are not supported by the text, nor do they support the work on the text. These games and exercises are little more than fannying about with good intentions. This is often a form of well-meaning hippie crap that masquerades as acting or performance training. Improvising around the circumstances, total. waste. of. time. Hot Seating: Nonsense. These are tools of improvisers and devisers and is a completely different skill to acting. We answer inane and ridiculous questions about what colour, shape, flower, animal, fizzy drink that our characters are, it’s all complete twaddle. It is unnecessary, it does not make you an artist, it makes you FEEL like an artist. If helps you to tell yourself that lie. But it is a lie.
This is how to spend your time rehearsing a show
Learn the Lines in advance of the first rehearsal (completely devoid of intonation).
Read the Play Lots.
Understand the Script as a Whole by Asking Some simple questions that will unlock the essence of the play.
Analyse each scene of the play for action (the actable parts of the script) with simple tools again.
Practice the actions of the play without the script, on real life scene partners.
Build relationships between the actors.
Add the words.
Block the Play.
Run the Play until the actors are comfortable with what they have to do.
Perform the Play, live in the moment, make it different every night.
All else is waste and does not contribute to the performance, but to the actor’s belief that they are doing some good, hard work, fake work, pretend work.
And before you get there before me, it doesn’t make us any less of an artist because we don’t stroke our egos by thinking we are creative artists equal to the writer. We are interpreters, creative, dramatic interpreters, it is not our job to ‘work on the play’, it is our job to tell the story to the best of our ability.