Lovely Sunday | Rehearsal Diary – Week 2
Assistant Director Tommo Fowler takes us inside the second week of rehearsals for Tennessee Williams’ A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur.
The first week’s research has continued and got more pernickety now, but it’s yielding some fascinating results that both give subtle insights into character and show off the brilliance of Williams’ writing.
Bodey, for instance, occasionally gets her facts wrong – be it the stars of a film she saw with Dorothea (thanks, IMDB) or the lifespan of a canary (to have lived ten years, her taxidermied pet Little Hilda must in fact have been a Little Henry). Sometimes, characters showing off by speaking other languages get their grammar slightly wrong, and we see that they’re not as knowledgeable as they like to think – something that gives us an important decision: do we show their error through the reactions of someone else onstage, keep the knowledge to ourselves and await the tweets from pedants in the audience, or do we lay the error at the feet of Williams himself and change the line accordingly?
And what’s to be made of Miss Gluck and Bodey using the German formal ‘you’ when speaking to one another – even though, according to Bodey, Miss Gluck is “my best friend in the whole building”? Is Bodey exaggerating? Have they not known each other very long? In which case, how should they interact physically? Is there some sort of inferiority complex going on…? Questions abound!
Fortunately, all these minutiae are things that probably only the greatest of University Challenge champions would pick up on. For us, though, they’re like gold-dust in helping us to create a full life for each of the characters.
As well as paying increasingly close attention to interpretation of the words, the second week has also seen a healthy focus on their pronunciation too. With our voice coach, Judith, we’ve been exploring the different accents needed for each character. We’ve got St Louis, Missouri (upper class and blue collar), Memphis, Tennessee (just four hours to the south, and the most stereotypically ‘Tennessee Williams’ of them all), plus a German character who’s learned English in the States. Miraculously, the actors are managing to hold their own and avoid creating a strange vocal cocktail, which – with such slight differences – is no mean feat!
This week has also been the week where hysteria has begun to set in. Without fail, after lunch, we all spend at least half an hour laughing too much to do very much work, and have started developing an extensive short-hand of anecdote-inspired in-jokes and renditions of YouTube videos to punctuate any moment. With only four weeks to put on a technically complex full-length play, this might seem like dangerously frivolous procrastination – but, from the director’s perspective, this aspect of rehearsals is just as important as running sections or discussing character motivations, etc. A group of people who had never met before a week ago are now a close-knit and supportive family, buoying each other up and building a rapport that elevates the performance to something greater than the sum of its parts.
At the very end of his masterwork The Empty Space, Peter Brook says that “To play needs much work. But when we experience the work as play, then it is not work any more. A play is play.” And he’s really smart, so I reckon we can keep telling stories just a little longer.
A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur | 12 Sep – 7 Oct | More Info