It's just over four weeks now before we start rehearsals in
Armidale! Time has flown over the last few months, but we have been
busy. After our last trip to Armidale, Jo then locked himself
in a room for pretty much the whole of May, writing the first draft
of the play, which has the working title of In Between
Wonderful. As first drafts often are, it was epic! More
than 40 characters populating over 100 pages. He and I then spent a
couple of weeks shaping and shaving, to get to a draft that we
could then bring in to our development workshop.
We then spent a crazy but wonderful two weeks in the loft at STC
with actors Danielle Cormack, Eamon Farren, Al Flower and Amber
McMahon, stage manager Beck Palmer, and resident designer and all
round genius, Renee Mulder. Working on the development of a new
piece of writing is a really different skill to rehearsing a show
for production, and we were really lucky that all our collaborators
all know how to put their development hats on, and get stuck
in.
The play was read, pulled apart, put back together, thrown out with
the bath water, resuscitated, reformed, renewed and reinvigorated
over an intense period of time, mainly in the first week. Jo, who
had really spent the previous month in solitary confinement,
reading the play aloud to himself, suddenly found the play
populated by voices and bodies, and fifty opinions being hurled at
him from all angles, which is a dizzying experience to say the
least. But trouper that he is, he uncrossed his eyes, took all
the notes, and managed to redraft the play six more times over the
course of the workshop. Characters were cut, new characters
appeared, imaginary underworlds were mapped, and a talking kangaroo
turned into a talking goat.
At the same time, Renee and I were working furiously to work out
how to bring Jo's invented world to life on stage. As scenes were
written and rewritten, so were design sketches and ideas. We
have 14 different settings and 24 characters to realise. The brief
- be simple, imaginative, and use what we already have as much as
possible. Renee and I have a shared love of anything old and
theatrical, and since the action of the play now takes place in the
lead up to the Armidale show, a carnivalesque quality runs through
the design. The Hoskins Centre, where we're staging the show, has
an amazing revolve on stage, so we're also going to use that
heavily! We'll also use our actors to create staging as much as we
can, so the design will be about signposting the act of communal
imagination more than anything.
At the end of our two weeks of laboratory, we had some special
guests come down to Sydney from Armidale - four of the students we
had worked with in the Easter holidays, and their teachers. We did
a reading of the final workshop draft of the play, and they were
fantastic in their detailed feedback, particularly around the
specificity of Armidilian quotidiana, and school life.
This gave us great material to keep improving the drafts of the
play, as we prepare for day one of rehearsal in September. Casting
is also currently underway, so watch this space regarding
that! Three actors will join us from STC, and we will also
cast three local young people to make up the rest of our cast.
Exciting times ahead...
S x
Susanna Dowling is director of the New England
Project
Feature: New England Project #3
Date posted: 28 Aug 2012Author: STC