Sunday, 15 October 2006

The night before rehearsals

by Sam Berger

The night before the first day of rehearsal is always a strange one for a director (or at least for me). It is an evening spent looking over the script, thinking about the coming day and generally making sure that everything is in its right place. It's a period of time where suddenly it seems there's a million things to do, and there's only a fortnight to achieve them.

I remember hearing Ann Bogart once say that she's always scared at the start of a rehearsal that people are going to find out that she's a fraud, that she hasn't got a clue what she's doing and that everything is going to fall on its face. Thankfully, I don't have such doubts. Whilst there is the obvious nervousness and sweaty-palmed anticipation, I have confidence that the pre-production work I have done is enough to see me through. I also think having had the opportunity to work with Tim - talk through things and clarify certain aspects of the play has been extremely useful in preparing for tomorrow. Also, having seen Paul and Simon in The Keith Ashton Experience has given me an insight into their capabilities that one virtually never achieves during the audition process.

In other news, I was in London this weekend to see a performance of King Lear by the Russian theatre company, Maly Drama and - much to the disbelief on many whom I have told - it was probably the best performance of a Shakespeare play I've ever seen. Oh.and it was entirely in Russian. The reasons for the performance's quality, I think, were thus: firstly, the translation was into modern Russian, which made it easier for the actors to cope with rhythmically, and secondly all the actors had come out of the director, Lev Dodin's acting school - hence, as he pointed out in the programme notes, all the actors shared the same theatrical language – an element that is essential for any self-respecting theatre ensemble.

Now that rehearsals are beginning, I will try to keep these updates slightly more regularly than before. And, as promised in my last entry, here's an interesting quote on theatre to think about. In fact, it's a simple sentence from Sanford Meisner, the main man, and just as rehearsals are about to begin I think it's apt in reflecting what I aim to achieve from my actors, and what I think all actors should strive to achieve:

Acting is the ability to live truthfully under the given imaginary circumstances of the play.