Director's Challenge - Part 26 - 6th Rehearsal and subsequent cast meetings

This rehearsal was an eclectic mix of things that we wanted to cover. Imogen and I have made a rehearsal plan for the following rehearsals:

This rehearsal: line run, full run, talk about costume, focus on getting the right intonations in lines, work on learning line, and enhance certain scenes.

(In between ensuring that people are learning lines - I'll be working with Tom and Grace; Imogen will be working with Ollie and Kate - we know that Evie has learnt her lines and are confident that as a uni student, Megan will have the initiative to have learnt her lines).

Wednesday 20th: full run, make sure all lines are learnt, pause and tweak, dress run.

(In between ensuring that all props have been brought in, tech has been sorted, and costume has been arranged.)

Saturday 23rd: full run with tech, pause and tweak

(Potentially on the Monday do a full run and at lunch on Tuesday invite certain cast members in to run through weaker scenes - have various full runs and line runs before the performance to ingrain it into their heads - the issue that we have had is that we lost 3 rehearsals because the Y11s had to focus on their GCSE - if we had followed the schedule we would have finished blocking by February half term and would have done our dress rehearsal last week - as such I do feel now that we are quite behind in our rehearsals - however, extra rehearsals wouldn't have been possible due to Megan being a uni student and the differing schedules of everyone else which would have made it hard.)

As it transpired, in the rehearsal we had our line run however much of the cast was still on script for much of the play and as such, we thought that rehearsal would be better suited to the learning of lines and ensuring that certain sections were absolutely perfect. So, whilst Imogen worked with Megan and Ollie on lines, and Grace and Tom ran through their scene, I worked with Kate and Evie on their various parts of being Leah and Phil.

I attempted to add much more humour to the scenes and allow for the actors to have a much better connection to their character, especially in Kate's case. We worked on Leah's monologues first and gave Phil a much larger role in them allowing humour to come from his subtle actions. For example, in Leah's second monologue we played around with the idea of Leah trying to steal one of Phil's crisps after she strangles herself and makes her way back onto the riser. Moreover, I tried to enhance the chemistry between the characters and had the holding of their hands in Leah's first monologue to be much more intimate by having them stare each other in the eye.

In Phil's section in Scene 3, I tried to make Kate perform much more nonchalantly and have a coolness to her character. I suggested that maybe she could try being more condescending to all characters except Leah to enhance their character's relationship, however. this may need to be reevaluated at some point. I told Kate to make more use of the space and make sure that she's coming towards the front of the stage at certain points just to show everyone's complete reliance on Phil. I also suggested to Kate throughout the rehearsal that she should adopt an internal monologue for Phil in all scenes to allow for her reactions to be much more natural - it also stops her from getting bored when not speaking.

We managed to talk to the cast about costume, the messages of which can be found on my Production Meeting blog.