Do it again, but better!
Zip it! Zap it! Boing it!
I grew up in theatre and tend to think in those terms.
In theatre, a company is not a vehicle of the market designed to generate enough interest in an IP that you can put it on a widely distributed lunchbox, it is the people doing the play. Plays rarely make it to lunchboxes. There are no On The Waterfront pencil cases. Eastpak has yet to collaborate with the Beckett estate. Sarah Bernhardt does not have an action figure1.
In theatre, new writing is unusual and interesting. There are theatres dedicated to it. Remakes, or rather, revivals, are the norm. Part of the fun is seeing different companies’ takes on well known texts. Throw a rock and you’ll hit fifteen productions of The Importance of Being Earnest. Imagine if every year the sellout cinema summer blockbuster was a different director’s version of Toy Story 2.
And in theatre, for the most part, one prerequisite before the show is a process of rehearsal. For something low budget, a week or two. If it’s a big West End money-spinner, longer.
But if you’re working in audio or in film, you don’t get that.
So… what if you do?
A Mrs Trellis of North Wales writes…
A friend of mine has a conundrum. She’s a director, specifically of films. Soon, she’s going to direct a film, for that is her job. Unusually for this film director, as part of the process she’s been offered some rehearsal time.
If you are used to working without it, it can be a puzzle to figure out how best to use that time.
Let me caveat all that follows by saying I’m not a director. I have never picked up a book on directing, I have never learnt how to do it, everything that follows is from the actor’s-eye-view.
All rehearsal processes are wildly different but, in my experience, they follow the same two truths:
A. They are led by the director or an assistant and
B. They split into three sections2.
Building the Company
Experiments
Making Decisions About the Thing
The rhythm of a rehearsal process starts with mostly 1 and ends with mostly 3 but it’s not:
It’s more:
Building the Company
Years ago, I was walking through Trafalgar Square when I felt myself being shoved out of somebody’s way. London is a crowded city and this can come with an element of heave and tug that you just have to accept, but still. Trafalgar. Square. It’s quite big.
I looked around to see who’s path I had offended and was met with the sight of a ring of journalists surrounding a large cut of ambulant ham: it was the then Mayor of London and future country-flusher, Boris Johnson.
I was reminded of this moment recently. I’ve been reading Patsy Rodenburg’s The Second Circle. Rodenburg is a voice teacher who was formerly head of voice for the RSC and is one of the major authorities on the subject in the English-speaking world. The Second Circle is a book aimed at anyone, not just actors, on developing Presence through her Circle Theory. She can explain it much better than me but, in brief, it suggests a framework which relies three Circles: First, Second and Third.
A person in First Circle looks inward. Though they may be in conversation with somebody else, their focus is on themselves. They are defending, withdrawn, in their own world.
You may associate this state with terms like shy, in a world of their own, or even cool.
In Third, our focus moves out, pushed and over-energised, we cannot let anyone else get a word in. The world is our stage and we are the star, others be damned. We are superficial, always on, or perhaps the life and soul of the party.
This is a state of control for fear of what will happen if you lose that control. There may be charisma but that charisma exists to be admired, not joined.
In Second, we are present with whoever or whatever we need to be present. We are capable of listening and empathising. We are the best eggs.
Think of: we just clicked, we were in the zone, I can be myself around them…
It is the scariest Circle to be in, particularly with a stranger, and the most rewarding. Good performers of any stripe do their best work from here.
Now, a person in First Circle might find that somebody they’re talking to overcompensates for their Firstness and moves into Third. A Third Circler can have the effect of alienating their interlocutor into First. And then no one’s happy.
While I was doing my displaced pigeon impression in the famously roomy Trafalgar Square, by quickly ducking out of the way I was being moved into First Circle by the Third Circle belligerent chumminess of the former Mayor of London and his coterie of microphone-wielding mustards and relishes.
Rodenburg tells us that all three Circles have their uses but advocates for, for the most part, seeking Second. First and Third are defense mechanisms3, and defense is great… when you need defending. We make our best work in Second.
Which brings us back to rehearsal.
Second Try
People can be funny about the phrase drama games. I suppose it feels juvenile, something that we left behind in our youth theatre days. We might prefer warmups. But an awful lot of warmups look suspiciously like drama games to me.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, think zip zap boing (zop for American readers)4 and so on.
I remember reading one acting book (please tell me if you know which one I mean, it’s gone out of my head) in which the writer told us that they began every rehearsal by handing out paper and pens and devoting thirty minutes to free drawing. I love that. I mean, it seems incredibly inefficient but I love that about it. I assume it worked or they wouldn’t have put it in a book. I’m fairly sure manager Clive Woodward did something similar with the World Cup winning 2003 England rugby team5.
The first part of the rehearsal process, what I’m calling Building the Company, is to find ways to help grease the wheels of turning a disparate group of actors, each from very different backgrounds, with very different lives and pressures and worries, into an ensemble.
Actors like being in ensembles.
We feel safe.
When we are in an ensemble mentality, we are in Second Circle, ready to both listen and offer. This is a time to smooth away any conceptions of hierarchy - phrases like ‘first on the call sheet’ or ‘bit part’ can create the false impression that one person is less important to the final product than another. It is everybody’s job to work towards an open, listening, Second Circle workplace culture.
Whether it’s free drawing, name games, group stretches and voice exercises, or your particular poison, we begin our process with something together and ritualised so that we can step through the threshold and think: ‘My problems are out there but our problems are in here.’
Experiments
I have worked with two types of director: ones who know exactly what they want before rehearsal, and ones who want to see what they can make with whatever the actor brings them.
I have also worked with two types of actor: ones who want an instruction manual, and ones who want to write an instruction manual.
Actually, I just lied. Twice! Sorry.
In reality, it’s a spectrum.
Broadly speaking, those tending towards the green end of the spectrum will spend less time experimenting, those toward brown end turn up with lab goggles.
What you’re working on dictates how much of your rehearsal time can be dedicated to those experiments.
Panto, for instance, is filled with dance routines, songs, and choreographed physical comedy. If you have two weeks to get it right, that doesn’t leave a lot of space to work out if Widow Twanky watched a robin die when she was only Fiancée Twanky.
If you have a swordfight in the show, expect even more time to be eaten away from your laboratory: anything with a combat sequence will spend extensive time getting it looking right while being safe, and will typically be repeated as part of every rehearsal and before every show. That takes time.
Then there’s the question of where the actors should go.
For some, the experimental phase leads to the blocking. For others, the blocking is all worked out at the top so that we’re not worrying about it, and the rest of the time is spent trying stuff out within that blocking. It is common to get the whole thing blocked in the first day, perhaps two days. Think of it like storyboarding.
But let’s say we’ve carefully budgeted time for all of that and find we have half an hour on the second Tuesday after lunch for experiments. This is a time for all that actor salad. You know. The fun bit. The decisions that aren’t in the script, or not obviously so. The character maths we usually do alone.
Who-what-where-when-why?
Character arcs.
Where are you coming from?
Where are you going?
Can you try it like this?
Can you try it like that?
What’s it like if you didn’t know that piece of information?
What’s it like if you did?
…no that doesn’t work.
Oh that does work! Do it again.
No, like last time.
No, like that last time when it was good.
Yes, that’s it.
What if we do everything like that?
What if we do nothing like that?
WHAT IF WE REDO ALL THE MASKING TAPE?
The less time we have to rehearse, the less space we can give to experiments and the more of that work is done in the privacy of the actor’s home with pen and script. But it’s a little easier to be in Second Circle (sorry to keep banging on about this but I’ve just read it and it’s very relevant) and therefore creative if you’re being in Second Circle with a person, not a biro.
Making Decisions About the Thing
Let’s tune back into our given circumstances. As we approach the performance end of the stick, we typically set more and more in stone. That’s it. That’s part 3.
Yes Felix, I do in fact need you to stand there because that is where the light is pointing. Yes, right now. Yes, for always.
Well, maybe not quite for always. If it’s for stage, there can be scope to keep adjusting over the course of the actual run. Discoveries will be made. Conversations will be had. Someone will wish Felix to break a leg and he will unfortunately comply. But on the whole we know that there is The Thing in Rehearsal and The Thing with An Audience, and that those things play by different rules.
In digital media, Opening Night is decided in the edit. Or by marketing. Or by home release. Or several decades after home release. So any rehearsal process does not have that same pressure to be bled dry for maximum efficiency.
So, what’s the best use of that time?
The Goldilocks Zone
Having both a rehearsal process and a recording or filming process is a delicious problem, like medium-heat porridge. All of the magic of allowing the team to settle in and figure out the script together followed by the luxury of multiple takes.
I assume that from the director’s point of view there’s lots of pre-shoot stuff you have to get on with. Baths, and so forth. Perhaps a brief mountaineering trip. Grouse shooting, I don’t know. None of that changes.
I would ask myself what technical things need to be worked out before we get to set and allocate time for those. (Is there a farandole to choreograph? Are you re-enacting scenes from Gladiator?) And then I would spend all the remaining time on steps 1 and 2, and build the most company company that ever did company.
So, everyone in a circle please aaaand …zip!
She does have a statue, an inaction figure.
All of which are subordinate to spending time with masking tape and chairs as you try to create, in your various rehearsal rooms, a ground plan of the exact layout of wherever it is you’re going to be after the rehearsal process. It is crucial at this juncture to shout: ‘Does that look right?!’ at each other a lot, then break for tea.
We all live in all three but you might recognise your own favourite: in an uncomfortable or boring conversation, are you more prone to retreating into yourself or trying to take control and liven everything up?
If you still don’t know what I’m talking about, Hi! This is an acting theory newsletter. Thank you so much for subscribing.
And with the absolutely disastrous following Lions tour so make of this example what you will.
As a non-actor - this substack is delightful and even when I don't have capacity to read it (immediately) I'm always excited when I see a new edition. Wishing you a lot more inspiration in acting and in writing! Loved this edition as well.