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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment