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.