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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