winter/ invierno/ otono/ in production

After two weeks out due to both actors being incapacitated, Winter returned at last this weekend.

On Friday, the show was preceded by a playing of the Uruguayan national anthem, something that is apparently obligitary on national holidays. It was incongruous, even more so when an old duffer decided to make a show of himself when two people didn't stand up. During the anthem, which appeared to last for about 45 minutes, he went over to them and had a go. Then when it finished, he continued chuntering until the lights went down. Then, five minutes into the show, he walked out.

Sitting in the back row, I found this all quite amusing. The show went fine, and the actors were on form. They are, as should be the case, hitting their stride. By Saturday the lines were bouncing off each other, and the show (in so far as this is possible with Fosse) zipped along.

Both nights we had good audiences. The public in general seem to struggle with what is called here the "codigo", the style. They find the humour hard to grasp. It's not a form of theatre they are accustomed to. All the same, the story works and the play is effective. It's just a struggle for them to get their heads around what's going on (or not going on) on stage.

At the same time, it seems testament to the unlikely cultural values of the city. I don't know where else you could expect to put on a little-known Norwegian author (locally) in a two-hander without any famous names at 11.30pm at night and get decent audiences. For some reason you can here. It feels surreal, as though I am living in an unlikely novel written by... 

winter/ montevideo/ otono/ sonrisa

It's the day of the estreno, the opening night.
I've just written to the author, sending him photos and telling him his play is a "joya".
I don't know Mr Fosse and in all likelihood will never meet him, but someone put me in touch with him and over the course of the months we have exchanged a few words.
The relationship of a director with a living playwright is a strange one.
When I ran into Simon Stephens, last June, in a kind of Montevidean London moment, he said that he felt as though he'd been living inside my head for weeks. I'd been sending him weekly accounts of the rehearsal process.
I replied that I was the one living inside his head.
And it's true. A director does feel immersed in the mind of the play's writer, if they're doing their job. Exploring the nooks and crannies which the play, which is but a fragment of the writer's mind, a nook or a cranny of its own, reveals.
As a result, although I have never met him and in all probability never will, I am inordinately fond of Mr Fosse. From what I can deduce, and indeed he may have altered since the moment, the days, in which he wrote Winter, he has a sideways grasp of life which observes and indulges the tragedies and their ironies, which all our small lives consist of.
For this is the reason we go to drama. To see our own lives reflected in the lives of others.
Last night there was a young woman in the audience for the dress rehearsal. I suspected she was not an actress or a theatre person. She was in the row ahead of me. Although the dress took its time to warm up, Natalia and Carlos got into the swing of things from the middle of Act 2 onwards. I watched her as she started to smile. The smile stayed through the rest of the play. I think, (I may be wrong), that it was a smile of recognition. At the end she came up to me and told me how much she enjoyed it.
If there is a better detailer of the small and childish gods which we are, each and every one of us, writing today, I have yet to come across them.
It is Fosse's capacity to marry the sublime with the ridiculous which makes him special.
And has made Winter such a pleasure to have worked on, these past six months.

invierno/ circular/ otono/ ensayo/ agua

It's the last week of rehearsals before we open on Friday. Life has been a blizzard of theatre, running from one play to another.

Invierno, or Winter, is almost ready. At last performance/ audience beckons.

At which point the director notes something of interest. The limits of rehearsals. There is only so far the actor can go in rehearsal. They can be word-perfect, intention-perfect, clean as a whistle, but without an audience they are now treading water.

This is above all the case for those moments in the play which are dependent on performance. Those where the actor is requested to take the greatest risk, to be the most ridiculous, or dangerous, or absurd. These moments depend on an audience reaction. When the actor pushes him or herself to the limit, they don't know if they're going over the top. Whether the scene really convinces. Without an audience they can never find out, hence there's less impulse to push to achieve these more problematic moments in rehearsal. Where the director is the only judge.

There's one moment in Act 4 of Winter which demands a significant gesture. One that threatens to push the play beyond the boundaries of taste, towards melodrama or kitsch. It's something we have adjusted, searching for our own way of realising the author's intentions.

Does our chosen action succeed or not? Until we get to Friday, we have no way of knowing. Meanwhile, we continue to aim towards technical perfection, knowing that we are now marking time, awaiting the arrival of the others, los de mas. 

winter/ montevideo/ otono/ vomito

This phase of rehearsals is a curious one. The actors, essentially, know what they are doing. The thing they lack is confidence. The process of acquiring confidence has various grades. These include:

• Being confident that you have a basic understanding of why you are where you are on stage and what you're supposed to be doing there.
• Being confident in the lines.
• Being confident in the capacity to move towards what we might call "performance" levels of intensity.
• Being confident in front of an audience.

There may be others.

The first is something which is unlikely to ever be entirely resolved. A play is a series of moments, and there's always the possibility that an occasional moment has slipped the director's grasp (or even slipped the writer's grasp in the writing of it.) However, this is the bulk work of rehearsals and two weeks before the opening of a conventional stage play you would hope the production is on a firm footing with regard to this.

The second is obviously more dependent on the actors. However, it should be noted that when actors have problems with particular lines, it often represents a moment when there's still a slight lack of clarity with regard to the former point. Fosse's text is particularly dense. It's complexity makes the lines harder to learn than a more conventional drama. The process of really being on top of the lines goes hand in glove with being completely sure about where the actor 'is' on stage (not necessarily meant in a physical sense, more a metaphysical one.) Yesterday, perhaps for the first time, we finally crossed this bridge, both actors being 95% fluent with the lines and, more importantly, feeling confident that they really 'know' them.

The third point is contingent on the second. Whilst the actor is worrying about whether or not the lines are going to come out right, it's hard to really let go and surf the dialogue. Some of the best dialogue, the most dramatic, or impassioned, requires just that. It's hard to act losing your temper if you're worrying about the lines. It's hard to act losing your temper if you can't really throw yourself at it. We're at this stage now, where the actors are on the point of being able to move up through the gears, express emotion more freely, which in turn allows them to play with the colours and gradients of the dialogue, the way in which it rises towards a climax and then subsides. The musicality of Fosse's text, mentioned before, makes this phase particularly important. Without the capacity to let go, it runs the risk of feeling wooden. Charm alone can't make it work. It has to be lived, in so far as this is possible. I think we're getting there.

The final point has an obvious condition: the presence of an audience. A play isn't really alive until the audience receives it. And it's impossible to judge to what extent the play is 'working' without this audience. Which is not to say the audience necessarily has to love it. But until the actors have experienced it with the presence of an audience, the final building blocks of confidence in the work cannot be cemented.

As mentioned, we're getting there. And the key aspect of all this is to ensure that the play arrives on opening night neither underdone nor overcooked. Next Friday all shall be revealed.

winter/ montevideo/ otono/ ventana

This project began back in September, which means it  has been six months in the gestation.  Finally, we have a date and a theatre. We open in two weeks in Sala Dos of the Circular. This will be transnoche, as they call it. A 23.30 kick-off. But if ever there was a play which fits the transnoche bill, then this must be it. 

On Friday we had one of our last rehearsals in the dance studio. Natalia wanted to do some more work on Scene 4. Scene 4 is short and sharp. it requires less work than the other three scenes and has received less work as a result. There is a moment when, exasperated , she walks across the room.  During the work with Marga and the work up to now with Natalia this ‘room’ has always been as vague as can be. A theatrical space, which can be realised at any time in any given auditorium. But all of a sudden, the scene was demanding more form.  When she walks across the room, she’s searching for something, a point of reference, a breathing space. Before returning to the attack.

And so it came about that after six months of working in a hotel room with a bed, a door and nothing else, we discovered it also has a window and a view. 

winter/ montevideo/ otono/ llamadas

In act 3 the man has his longest speech in the play. He recounts the events that surround his failure to attend the meeting he was due to go to at the start of the play. In his account, he describes the phone conversations that have taken place, between himself, his boss and the man he was supposed to meet. So far so simple. But the more you work on the speech, the more complex it becomes. There's calls within calls. Calls about calls. Missed calls. And lies about calls. And lies within calls. It's a beautiful piece of writing, but it sums up the twisted nature of the writer's mind. Twisted in the sense of convoluted, complex, opaque. It's almost beyond the realm of auditory understanding. I also suspect I have let it slip through my fingers a little: one of the problems of directing in a second language is that you possess a less immediate relationship to the words and there is a risk you let them wash over you as you focus on the relationships which occur above and beyond text (the true heart of drama, I might argue.) The other aspect of this complexity is that it highlights the beauty/ brilliance of Fosse's text: the dialectic between the exceedingly complex and the moments that cut through this complexity with the simplicity of dawn.

winter - ensayos, otono, montevideo

We enter the final phase of rehearsals of Winter.

We are rehearsing upstairs in a Dance studio. Our rehearsal schedule is conditioned by the ballet dancers below. When they are there the piano music seeps through the ceiling, making pretty havoc with our concentration.

Acts 1&2 are more or less ready. The actors start to feel comfortable within their curious rhythms. Finding the moments which the text never indicated where the sequence of curt words are actually flaring up, or merely marking time, until the next twist of thought, instinct, unlikely action.

Acts 3&4 have all the shape but are still in the process of finding their body. But they are nearly there. And then it will be runs and runs and runs. There's no room to slack off with Fosse. Everything has to have the requisite degree of truthfulness and theatrical. The play is like a big cat. It can come over all cuddly but if you leave it alone for too long it will turn around and bite your hand off. 

a summer's day in el galpon

An approach by the Galpon to do some workshops with their actors lead to four talleres on A Summer's Day.

The objective here was to look at the way in which Fosse's poetics operate. We used the long speech at the end of Act 2, where the woman looks back on the moment she and her friend's realised her husband wasn't coming back.

The events are all conveyed in reported speech, something that is almost anathema to contemporary ideas of drama, predicated by the demands of TV and film. The action of a human seen to be reflecting is generally considered to be dangerously passive (a word that is generally used in a pejorative sense in the script world I inhabit - ie - 'the lead character is overly passive'). At the same time, drama, from the Greeks onwards and presumably beforehand has always used the act of reporting events rather than showing them, something that goes against the modern mantra of "Show don't tell." Try telling Euripides. Or Shakespeare. Or Fosse.

A Summer's Day is a text which is very aware of the terrible power of that which is seen through the mind's eye. The Old Lady relives the day her life changed. Fosse employs the curious device of presenting her younger self and three other younger characters who interact with the 'present' of the old lady now, more serene, seemingly at ease with herself with the events described having occured decades ago. As such, this play is a meditation on time, as well as loss.

The exercises we used worked on 'presenting' the action which the old woman is recounting. The objective was not to discover a potential staging, but to find ways for the actors to get a foothold on the text, to "see" what they were telling. This is very much a rehearsal device; I doubt it would function in performance. Nevertheless it allowed the actors to access the large speech, and to connect with the emotion and drama which lurks within it. Ultimately these things have to emerge, to be conveyed, through the voice, and we were working towards this aim, with the actress reacting to the events as she saw them, and her voice thereby engaging with the complexity of the situation. In the end, it's clear that the lines she speaks are full of the storm and the anxiety and the fear of loss. Yet the trick is not to impose these things on the text, but to allow the words themselves to reveal the actress' emotions.

In the last workshop, we used the same technique, or 'presenting' the text, for Shakespeare's famous Seven Ages of Man speech, one which none of the actors knew. 

winter - rehearsals feb 2013

We're now re-rehearsing Winter. Our former Princess, Margarita Musto, has gone off to become head of the Comedia Nacional. So Carlos has a new princess, Natalia Bolani. A different actress brings other qualities to the role. In addition, the style of the piece alters slightly, with a new more naturalistic emphasis, perhaps.

The last word is there because as yet, a month away from the production, there's still much that is unknown about how the production will finally look and feel.

The process of re-rehearsing Winter has been, at times, bewildering. Having worked on it last year, one would assume that basically, the director knows the play well. Second time round should be easier. However, in practice, it's been the opposite. It's almost as though, the more you know the play, the more difficult it becomes. This has to do with the layers of precision and meaning inherent in the text. I realise this might sound like a cliché, but to my mind, my role feels as much like that of a conductor of an orchestra as a director. The words, silences and movements are notes. The performers are a range of instruments, their voices, bodies, attitudes all contributing to the play's interpretation. As with music, it is the false notes that have to be first heard and then tackled. The narrative does not really allow for the actor to merely enter the flow of the piece with their actions conditioned by the characters' desires or 'motivation'. Because these things are shape-shifting, fragile, paradoxical. As in life, characters want more than one thing at the same time. And those things might well be entirely contradictory.

Perhaps this is the root of the play's difficulty. This fact of constant equivocation. The woman wants the man but at the same time she doesn't want the package. The man doesn't know what he wants, but at the same time he knows what he doesn't want. This is the way real people think. Nothing is black and white. The words and the characters are like spinning molecules, which we try and trap in a form and stasis that works, only to find they keep spinning, and that which works in one moment doesn't in the next.

As a result the process of rehearsal is exhausting, delirious. The more you know about the play, the more it seems to slip through your fingers. I'm not sure if I'm doing credit to the process in what I'm writing here. As a director, I don't think I've ever felt as challenged by a text as I have been this time, specifically by the second round of doing it. This means that the direction is hard work. Every beat, every word, has to be accounted for, has to work within the music of the text. It's also a highly satisfying, joyful process. The piece demands and rewards input. The actors can never coast and neither can the director. The words spin and fly around the room like butterflies. We try and catch them in our nets for a moment, before releasing them to return and play the following day. 

three primary uruguayan stagings of Winter

SUA, Montevideo

For one night, the soon-to-be-renovated basement and courtyard of SUA were transformed into a theatre space. The space was crammed to the gills. All the seats were taken and people stood at the side of the space or at the back of the courtyard. Claudia had laid out 'espirales' to combat mosquitos. It was the first performance and the first time we had worked at night. We were also unsure how the audience would react to the dual space. In practice the evening flowed better than I could have hoped. Having observed the reaction to Fosse's writing in London, I was worried the audience might not engage with Winter's two unorthodox leads. In this instance and subsequently, the opposite was the case. The night was warm and welcoming and the Brechtian break between scenes helped to puncture the drama, ensuring the audience re-engaged for each of the four scenes.

Casa de Cultura, Libertad

The Casa de Cultura is a 150 seater theatre. There was no secondary space available. The backstage of the theatre is something of a booby trap and Claudia sprained her ankle tripping on a stair. Shorn of our dual space option, we had to find a way to mark the change of scenes. There space contained a white screen for showing video. This has to be manually "wound" down, a process that takes thirty seconds. Tiko, who was assisting, came on stage between scenes, whilst the music played, and wound down this screen. The fact that it seemed to take forever was a great advantage. It punctuated the scenes as well as  the screen acting as a bed for the Hotel scenes.

La Sala, Las Piedras

I have written extensively about this performance here. Suffice it to say that the evening in Las Piedras proved to be the one where, the actors growing in confidence, the play really took off. From the moment of the Woman's entrance, the audience was engaged in their game. The two spaces were provided by using different parts of the theatre: the stage and a back wall. The audience were requested to angle their seats between scenes in order to change their perspective. 

winter - staging

One of the key objectives of the staging of this play was to negate any sense of melodrama. To ensure that any emotional resonance or pathos should occur in spite of the staging, rather than as a result of the staging signposting the audience. Claudia Sanchez, the designer, and I worked closely with this in mind.

COSTUME & MUSIC

We arrived at a perception that these two characters are 'Beckettian'. or more specifically, "Godotian'. Yet Godot himself (natch), feels as though it has been influenced by the clowns of silent cinema, Keaton and Chaplin. We made this reference overt, using music from Chaplin's films and costume that readily echoed the epoch. Both characters wear a hat in one scene, with the hat itself defining an oddness; removing the action from the contemporary, even though this is a play which would appear to take place in the here and now. Furthermore, it means that initially both characters are presented as comic, or absurd. These aren't characters who seem appropriate for a great romance. They are a far cry from conventional romantic leads, thereby steering the story away from any obvious romantic, dramatic context.

THE BED

Early on it was decided to stage the bed scenes using the wall, something pinched from Macdonald's Court production of Love and Information. Beds are hard to make work on stage and the bed in Act 2 is an essential component. The horizontality frequently acts as a alienatory effect, because the audience cannot see the faces clearly. (That simple.) Using a wall as the bed allowed us to overcome that. It also allowed us to emphasise the ready-made, theatrical aspects of the production. This is not real life. (Real life beds are never vertical.) The more the staging worked against a notion of naturalism, the stronger the piece would seem and the more in keeping it would be with the heightened gestural vocabulary exercised by the actors.

OTHER STAGING

Apart from these details and one Brookian touch in the final act, the staging was kept as resolutely simple as possible. Part of the reasoning for this was the desire that the play should retain as far as possible its universal appeal: if we can stage it anywhere, it might be that anywhere we go we will find people who can connect with it. Fosse never defines the setting with any great degree of specificity and there's no doubt that this neutrality is part of the play's appeal. 


USE OF SPACE

As we were rehearsing in SUA, but knowing we would subsequently do shows in other venues, we had to resist the urge to tailor the show too specifically to this space. However, there's one aspect of the building which almost seemed to demand inclusion. SUA itself is a large old house. We were working at street level, which consists of various high ceilinged, large airy rooms, the largest of which was the space we rehearsed in and would act as the hotel space (Acts 2&4). At the rear of the building is a courtyard which, as the building is being redeveloped, is full of construction materials. It made sense to use it as a delipidated park, for Acts 1&3. It also meant that the audience had to move from one space to another. As far as possible. we sought to replicate this in the other spaces we used in Libertad and Las Piedras. The objective here was to break the audience's concentration, to remove the magic. (Or staging as theatre magic). Thereby ensuring that the script was as unadorned as possible (in contradiction to Chereau's elaborate staging.) 

GENERAL

The more Fosse's texts are weighted by their staging the more they have to bear. When their beauty truly emerges from the simplicity of the human relationships he describes. It seems to me that the script should be capable of being staged on a magic carpet and nothing else. Which is not to deny the value of stagecraft, but to note that in the case of Fosse's writing the stage signifiers run the risk of obscuring the core of his texts.

gestures - margarita musto & carlos rodriguez

winter - SUA - rehearsal 3 - gesture

I went and spoke to my friend Lucio after he saw the presentation at SUA. He said he liked what we’d done but we’d only used one of three types of gesture. He’s studied this sort of thing and gave a very precise breakdown of gesture as action; gesture as symbol and gesture as something else.

I’ve never studied Meyerhold; nor any of his descendents. My perusal of the idea of gesture has been instinctive rather than educated. However, I have spent the greater part of the last five years reading scripts, rather than exploring the possibilities of the actor, and it’s only now, after directing three relatively big shows in recent years that I felt ready to engage with a breaking of the rules in this fashion.

Gesture is obviously a part of the actor’s armoury. When an actor puts his or her hands together in a supplicatory fashion; when an actor raises an eyebrow; when an actor shrugs their shoulders… These are all gestures. What we wanted to do with this process was investigate how we could develop this vocabulary and integrate it in a more elaborate fashion.

Fosse himself has sent me an email and he had one key note in it which was to concentrate on the use of repetition. This has already been alluded to with regard to the text, the written language, but it seemed a viable exercise to repeat it with regard to physical gesture as well.

To offer two concrete examples. The woman in developing her relationship with the man presents and pursues the idea that she is his ‘Lady’ or ‘Princesa’, as we translated that term. Margarita used a gesture to depict this idea (not the words, but the idea) which was a kind of curtsy. At first, when her character does this, it’s baffling. What is this seeming, stumbling wreck of a woman doing? However, as the gesture repeats it the gesture takes on a clearer resonance. It articulates an idea of herself which has remained extant in spite of her dissolution, something she can cling to as she clings to the man. As she alters through the play, the audience’s understanding of the gesture alters, as does her usage of it. In the third scene, she adopts it ironically. Furthermore, the man now references it in his bid to convince her of the truthfulness of her declaration that she is indeed his lady, even as she now rejects the notion.

One of the man’s gestures, articulated by Carlos, revolves around his unspoken relationship with his wife. This involved holding his hand over his mouth and emitting an strangulated sound from the throat. It’s the sound of someone struggling with a pain or a weight which is never explained in detail. The tragic nature of the Man’s character emerged through it’s usage. The things we cannot say are the things which are hardest to bear. It also highlighted the pathetic aspects of the man’s predicament, something Margarita’s woman was not afraid of teasing him about as she mocked his strangulated cry.

The gestures helped to open up the inner world of the characters. By using them repetitively, they also became an understandable part of their vocabulary. Whether they were necessary for performance or whether they should remain as a rehearsal device will be the subject of further discussion.

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