Rehearsals were concentrated into three intense sessions when Trish and I could get together. Two of them were in Paris (where Trish lives) with a third sandwiched in between in Shrewsbury. For the latter, we were very grateful to be given the use of the function room upstairs in The Old Bell. During the second Paris stint, we stayed part of the time with the Erickson brothers, Christian and Jeff, in their fascinating house in Mericourt, near Giverny. The garden alone is worth the visit. They let us loose in their upstairs space (part-bedroom, part-wardrobe storage from their previous shows) wined and dined us royally and even provided a first test audience of the work-in-progress along with near-neighbours, Conor Lovett and Judy Hegarty Lovett. I freaked when I heard Conor and Judy would be coming to dinner and to see the show as it stood. For those of you who don't know, Conor is the master of the one-man show, having won numerous prestigious awards along with his director wife, Judy, and their Gare St Lazare productions have travelled the world. I felt completely unprepared to perform in front of them - however casually - but everyone assured me they were lovely and told me not to be intimidated. They were, but I was, nevertheless... We bumped into Conor again a few nights later at the Cultural Institute in Paris, where the delightful "Swing Time" was playing and I still treasure the words of encouragement he gave me. As mentioned in the previous blog, Trish and I had different opinions about whether the lines should be learnt before rehearsals proper. In the end, practicalities dictated a compromise and I learnt about half before we had our first sessions. I didn't have the time or the necessary belief to learn more of them, but once rehearsals started I found it easier to get them into my memory. To do so, I just took them section by section, learning a few, then adding on more, until bigger and bigger chunks were starting to settle. I found it extremely difficult, especially in isolation from a rehearsal period, and there were certain sections that were just brutes to memorise. What made the writing so great - the colour and variation, the ebb and flow of Janey's wandering story - also made it very difficult to remember, at least for me. Once I got the lines into my head, though, they more or less stayed. It's been easy enough to recall them before a performance, no matter the gap between runs. The long-term memory is still ok, I guess; it's the short-term one that's the bitch... Trish's work on the text with me was an eye-opener. She was almost forensic in her approach and forced me to scrutinise things not just at sentence-level (as they say in teaching) but also at word level. Nothing was taken for granted; not an inflection, not an interpretation, not a nuance. It was a great experience and of invaluable help to me in playing the character on stage. She caught the rhythms of the piece much more quickly than I did and really helped shape it. She's a great director (but I still don't agree that lines should be learnt before rehearsals!!) We premiered the piece (after a try-out in my kitchen in front of some long-suffering friends) in Allihies - raising 150 euro for the Irish hospice Foundation in the process - and with Paula, Theo Dorgan and Tony Curtis in attendance. (Well, they were there for the visiting Penn State students for whom they were giving workshops and readings, which is why we chose that date for the first airing.) As I write this, I am still recovering from a successful two-week run at the Edinburgh Fringe, more of which anon. For now, though, here endeth this shaggy dog tale of how it all began. Woof, woof...
0 Comments
|
Archives
September 2017
Carol CaffreyActor, writer, mother. Irish born, currently living in Shropshire. Categories |