#cropshire

[donottouchtheclown]

Rehearsal 31-07-25

Big day today! In preparation for this upcoming Tuesday's sharing with tutors and Sam Ward, we reworked the carrot dealing scene to incorporate Chip; revised politician scenes 3, the stocks and politician scene 4; and devised the first meat substitute scene.

A major discovery from today was that we needed to pull focus to the love story of Peach and Chip, and insert a moment of tension between them before we could go into the carrot dealing scene. If we only saw them fall in love and get married in the opening scene and then did not return to their storyline until the moment of Peach's betrayal to Chip, the moment would feel out of context and lack urgency. We therefore added a moment of disagreement between them in the meat substitute scene.

The carrot dealing scene proved a major chance to properly introduce Beppo as a character, and seen as we plan on ending the play with just Millie and Beppo left, we inserted a nursery rhyme into the opening of the recipe book Millie and Beppo read - maybe the play is dedicated to children/the next generation.

What proved a challenge is navigating how the village characters and politicians start bleeding together in politician scene 3 and 4, first with Laura and then with Ali and me. To clarify the transition from the politicians into the rebels charged guilty of carrot-dealing, we decided to choreograph a moment where our politician blazers get pulled off before we get put in the stocks. We also cut the lines us three had in politician scene 4 and clarified Laura's text before we go into the ballet by scrapping anything that was not strictly read from the book.

We ended the rehearsal with a stumbling run-through up until politician scene 4, where we found ourselves rushing through most of the scenes and fighting to keep a hold of the plot. More on this in the next post!

[donottouchtheclown]

Table work: new dramaturgical structure

17/07/25

In the afternoon, we hashed out a new dramaturgical structure. On orange post-it notes, we wrote down the progression of rules to be imposed on the people of Cropshire:

Carrots get banned

Phallic vegetables get banned

All vegetables get banned

All depiction of vegetables gets banned

All fruits get banned, as well as the speaking of fruit/vegetable-related words

No one can speak without gesture facilitation through the hand mechanism

On yellow, we wrote our major plot points, and on green, our recurring transition gimmicks (weather reports, politician scenes, the use of cue cards).

The resulting structure:

In our Friday rehearsal, we rewrote the first politician scene, and used the set-up of this scene to write an initial version of the second and third politician scenes. Over the course of the play, the politician scenes are to get increasingly absurd (think unprompted salsa-dancing and cat imitations!). Society derails. To be continued.