On Monday this week, the set arrived in the rehearsal room. It’s a very simple and elegant thing, a kind of steel box or frame, and it suddenly opens up so many new possibilities and echoes in the play. As the actors started rehearsing in it, I realised that all the images that they were creating became so much clearer and stronger when they were in that frame, and the bodies were next to the straight lines of steel. It’s the kind of thing that I suppose is obvious to a designer, but seeing that transformation happen was a big discovery for me. In this interview, Nina talks about ‘seeing the world slightly differently’, and noticing things like ‘how weird buses are’, and I feel like Georgia’s set is doing that too, by putting two ordinary people and their baby into this frame and properly noticing them.
So this week there’s been a lot of playing and finding ways to be in that new set: leaning on it, hanging things on it, doing pull-ups if you really want to show off. We’ve also been putting in some changes to the script sent to us by Nina from across the Atlantic, as the play is evolving as it’s being staged.
I really want there to be a linear progress narrative to this keepy-uppy thing, but I’m afraid our score stayed at 35. We were scuppered by the arrival of the set and had to work out some new techniques so we could play in The Cube. If you take a look at the set, you’ll understand why – here’s a picture I’ve shamelessly nicked from Ben Kidd’s Twitter:
(Rehearsals / Model Box / Mess (Mixed media, 2016)
See you next week!
Catch In the Night Time (Before the Sun Rises) at the Gate Theatre, 4th-27th February.
