The Seagull

For more information visit www.headlong.co.uk

[theseagull2013-blog]

Rehearsal Diary - Week 4

By Jack Lowe

  The runs, costume fittings and adieu Jerwood!

  The runs

So what happens when the fragmented sections of rehearsals are pieced together for the first run through? Well. A collective gulp and then off we go…

…and when we come out the other end, after Blanche has softly stage whispered…

Blanche McIntyre  Aaaanddd…lights.

…we begin the debrief, the notes and reworking.

Run-throughs reveal the inner personality of what the show is looking like.

It can accent certain moments which are being given way more weight/focus than is needed within the play.

It can reveal an inner beauty to an actors’ work which perhaps wasn’t as apparent in earlier, more fragmented sessions.

It can answer some questions which have been troubling us since week one.

It can pose new questions never thought about before.

It can give the assistant director a free half of a marmite sandwich as he might have missed lunch. Which is of course a bonus.

Either way, the first run-throughs expose all these things and more. This week we’ve used each run through to trial different things. From simply focusing on story-telling as clearly as possible, without any shade to that lightness. Or on another occasion we tried to run the show with the sole intention of upping the pace of it. These dynamics and rhythms are there to play with the orchestration of your evening out. The run-throughs test the water and grow your experience.

Costume fittings

I’ve been sat in the production office watching the fittings this week. The collection of faces pulled by the actors in response to what is put in front of them is brilliant value. Ardman animation has competition. Really, really funny.

The choices of clothing in the show are really clever, and are made even more important by the wider set design. Oops.  Nearly a spoiler there. We’re getting to know each other now though, readers,  so that’s a little snippet for you. And there’s only a few days to go now after all!

I’ve been really excited to see the colour palette of the costumes taking shape alongside with the choices of fabrics. There have been endless discussions about the nature of the costumes, with open input from the actors . There is a fluid dialogue between the actors and the creative team through all the different levels of the design, which is grand.

Adieu Jerwood

With the risk of sounding like a shameless plug – The Jerwood Space has been a  great place. We’ve had a fun time and our three stage managers  were very obliging in providing me with the obligatory farewell American high-school jump photo.

We’re packing up our props and costumes, taking all the research off the walls and pulling the LX tape up from the floors.  Stay tuned for next week where I’ll unpick some of tech week and first previews. Watch out Southampton, Headlong are coming to get you again!

[theseagull2013-blog]

Dear Director

Date: Thurs, 3 Jan 2013 15:02 To: Blanche McIntyre From: Laura Hopkins Subject: Re: More Seagull stuff

Dear Blanche

Putting my responses in italics for ease!

I've been turning the thoughts that we had in our meeting yesterday over and over again in my head all night. I'm starting to think that, although they're brilliant, the projected lake and the flying actors/ vertical set don't quite work together. I think this is because one makes the play about pictures, and the other makes it about relationships in space. 

Yes I agree

That is, by projecting a fake lake that people interact with, we suggest to the audience that we're exploring the limits of naturalism and the extent to which you can trust what you see.

It’s true, but potentially it could work on further levels – we would be referencing a lot of the cultural phenomena we have been drawn to around early cinema and photography, so it’s a potentially rich environment – in a visually poetic way.

By putting actors in abstract physical relationships we ask the audience to take a more scientific approach - they have to discount the setting altogether, and decode the abstract forms to gather information about the characters. So this approach suggests that we're exploring how to convey the inner 'reality' of the people. 

A couple of questions occur: your word ‘scientific’ and the idea of mapping makes me think of a clean, clinical environment – do you see the setting having an aspect of this?

Do you think there is an inner reality of these people that we are able to define concretely and convey, or are we suggesting possibilities?  Is the set interacting with the actors?  Or is it a consistent objective landscape on which the characters, their relationships and journeys, are expressed?

My own instinct is that the unreliable landscape is more interesting, and a truer representation of reality. 

I think both are honouring Headlong's original challenge.

In this case a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work, does it?  How we make sense of the world differs for - and is surely more or less opaque to - each individual.  So we maybe we do need a setting that as you (madly) suggested at one point, affects and responds to each person individually???? I think some 21st century reference to psychoanalysis and neuroscience here could be useful, if not applied reductively or clumsily? My instinct is that, you want to see whatever is defining their experience at that moment – like Nina soaked with rain,  Irina ascending from on high,  Sorin moving with effort, someone blindfolded. The other thing is the idea of traces that you suggest – I imagine a final ‘map’ could show how arbitrary and chaotic life is.

Laura

Designer

[theseagull2013-blog]

Dear Designer

Sent: Mon , 31 Dec 2012, 11:57 To: Laura Hopkins From: Blanche McIntyre Subject: More random seagull stuff

Dear Laura

I've been turning the thoughts that we had in our meeting yesterday over and over again in my head all night. I'm starting to think that, although they're brilliant, the projected lake and the flying actors/ vertical set don't quite work together. 

I think this is because one makes the play about pictures, and the other makes it about relationships in space. 

That is, by projecting a fake lake that people interact with, we suggest to the audience that we're exploring the limits of naturalism and the extent to which you can trust what you see.

By putting actors in abstract physical relationships we ask the audience to take a more scientific approach - they have to discount the setting altogether, and decode the abstract forms to gather information about the characters. So this approach suggests that we're exploring how to convey the inner 'reality' of the people. 

I think both are honouring Headlong's original challenge. Either we can put 'real' people in a 'fake' setting (option 1), or take something we think is the essence of our experience of reality and stage that (option two).

I like the first one but I think we'd need to do more in the way of hiding, revealing, distorting and so on, and probably have one or two more distorted/naturalistic pieces (like the card table?!). I think it would be a good idea, if we do have a lake, to have other stuff with it - otherwise we give it a massive symbolic importance, which as you say it really doesn't have. Maybe if we go down this route we end up using things like those magnifying squares or clouds of string or gauzes.

I think the second one is a more interesting idea, but I'm not sure that relationships between people count as the essence of human consciousness, unless we do something that makes it clear that their experiences of each other are subjective/ constantly shifting/ difficult to process. Probably this would need a large abstract thing onstage which they mapped onto - I think this is where you were going with the climbing frames and logs and where I was going with the star maps and x-rays.

I'm so sorry this email is so lengthy and dense - I've slightly used it to work through my thoughts, and I've not used my brain this much since I was at uni doing the compulsory philosophy paper (which made it hurt just as much). I hope some of it makes sense. Let me know where your head is at.

Blanche

Director

[theseagull2013-blog]

Dear Designer

Sent: Fri, 28 Dec 2012, 13:22 To: Laura Hopkins From: Blanche McIntyre Subject: Re: Random Seagull Stuff

Dear Laura

I'm raising something mad here, but I realise my first reply seems to suggest we need a design that changes shape or nature according to how it is perceived. 

Is that even possible, let alone effective?! 

Blanche

Director

[theseagull2013-blog]

Dear Director

Sent: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 10:48 To: Blanche McIntyre From: Laura Hopkins Subject: Random Seagull Stuff

Dear Blanche,

I've been thinking a lot about the backdrop of the lake, and the essentially inactive quality that the setting has in the play.  We see the lake framed by Konstantin's proscenium; we are told about waves and fish, islands and swimming;  but the potential power of a great body of water either as psychoanalytic metaphor, as elemental Nature, or wild/wilderness, is always remote, isn't it?  The energy and emotion all come from the characters, who move and interact at a little distance from this backdrop, in a kind of non-specific space (most of the time).  I have been thinking about water surfaces, and this reminded me of the boat sequence in Night of the Hunter; it's completely wrong, but something about it snagged me...

Let me know if anything resonates for you!

Laura

Designer

[theseagull2013-blog]

Rehearsal Diary - Week 3

By Jack Lowe

  The direct address, calling for “line” & Café Samovar. This week some views on the more technical aspects of writing in The Seagull, a thought about actor-process and the brilliance of London as the most multi-cultural city on the planet. Direct address So, an actor talking to the audience. It’s a slippery device in theatre. When done well, dissolving the fourth wall instantly asks the question: who are the audience meant to be? Are they a specific person (a priest being confessed to), a collection of different people (a jury) or merely ghosts in a forest that the character is talking to? From Greek tragedy through to melodrama, direct address is the standard way for characters to communicate their thoughts to the audience. It’s only with the invention of the fourth wall and psychological characters in the late nineteenth century that we start to think of direct address as unusual or odd. Looking back through the annals of theatre history, Shakespeare obviously did some brilliant things with direct address. He asks us to come on journeys with him, gives us insights into the psychology of his characters and explains the action that has just happened. So, fast forwarding a few hundred years from Shakespeare, it’s interesting to consider what the function is of direct address is in Chekhov’s plays? It seems hard now to think of the naturalistic style of theatre that has dominated our stages since Ibsen and Chekhov as a new form, but when Chekhov was writing it was at the cutting edge of the avant garde. So why is it that in The Seagull, a play about new forms, Chekhov continues to use direct address, as in his earlier plays? He was writing direct address way before he wrote The Seagull. After The Seagull, Chekhov drops it as a technique in Uncle Vanya and the other Moscow Arts Theatre plays. The Seagull, it seems, is an interesting fusion of both the old forms and the new. We’re excited by this question. In The Seagull there is a mixture of direct address and naturalistic characterisation which requires the characters to be aware of the audience. This is standard for a non-naturalistic writer like Shakespeare but ground-breaking in the context of fourth-wall playwrights like Ibsen and Strindberg. So John Donnelly has done something really interesting in his version in 2013. He hasn’t edited the direct address out like adaptations tend to do. He has tussled with it and in his version, the audience are there in the theatre. The characters know they are there too. It is set in a theatre. So each moment of direct address is a moment of direct connection with the audience. It is a moment in which the character needs to off-load a worry or give an opinion, and check where the audience are with their thoughts on what is happening. The direct address is therefore perhaps a manifestation of a conscious awareness that the audience are there in the room too. We’re in a theatre and the theatre is the playground in which the action is taking place and the drive of the action is unstoppable. The audience have to sit there and watch these people destroy each other. They are complicit in their destruction. That’s a jolly thought. The actors in the room have been grappling with this strange but potent way of making the audience complicit. Our design is helping too, but that would be giving too much away. We’d love to hear what you think, and anyone reading this I’m sure would have an opinion, when and if you make it to see the show. Line

Push open the door into the rehearsal room to take a peek at what is happening. The stage has two or three actors on it. Actor X is mid-way through a line before he/she calls out… Actor X: Line SM gives the line Actor X: S**t in my boots. I knew that.

I’ve observed something incredibly fragile this week amongst the cast. All of them have left the script at the side of the rehearsal room and are launching into runs of acts without the life raft of the text in their hands. This is a moment which reveals the myriad of individual actor processes going on in the room. It’s a strange and curious moment because the safety is gone, the guiding sketches at the side of the script are figments in the memory and now the actor is stepping up into the next gear. When running sections of the play, it’s really interesting seeing how some actors find their way back into the moment after having called “line”. Some plough through, others adapt what came before (perhaps unconsciously) and others have an ability to hit the pause button and continue. Some even rewind and go back, before hitting the same mark and continuing. This may seem like a dull thing to bring up because it is, of course, part of every rehearsal process, no matter what the show. It’s fascinating to me because it does in fact act as a really good indicator as to what makes sense in the brain of the actor and what doesn’t. By very definition, if something feels right, the line is more likely to be clear because they should be connected up. Calling for “line” is also an appeal for  safety. It’s the outer voice of our brilliant stage manager and an acknowledgement that there is much more happening on stage than the text. (otherwise it would be lovely, but really just a radio play). So the gradual reduction in the calling of “line” is an integral part of what we’re doing. Café Samovar

The legendary status of our company manager, Simon, was confirmed this Thursday evening. He managed to convince the brilliant Café Samovar in Queensway to stay open late for us for a company meal after hours. So we arrived at 7pm, having ordered our okroshkas, shchis, pelmenis, kotlety’s and studens. We were met by some odd music on the TV (matched with an odd mixture of images), lovely Russian décor and of course, a shot of vodka to kick the evening off. We spent most of the night proposing toasts to things from the sublime to the ridiculous. The actors sharing unrepeatable stories and Blanche at the centre of the table, leading the massive failure not to talk shop about the play! We also asked our hosts to help us with our pronunciation of Russian names. Always a tricky one. This was met with bemused smiles from the waitress but of course a quiet sense of pride at the big C-dog, Chekhov himself, coming from mother Russian. It goes without saying that eating together is an incredibly simple way to relax with one another and share ideas. Perhaps some of the most important ideas have come out of sitting and eating. This is not to say that we cracked the play on Thursday evening, but the ability to sit with one another and happily socialise is pretty much what the characters in The Seagull are trying so desperately to do. And of course failing miserably. Good job they’re actors then.

[theseagull2013-blog]

'The lake. Such majesty in nature. Eight thirty one the moon'll rise over the woods and who needs scenery?'

Explore some of the images that inspired Laura Hopkin's design for The Seagull.

[theseagull2013-blog]

'NINA    This isn't real. It's a dream'

The artist David Johnson on the relationship between imagination and reality.

'Reality is something we experience in the gut rather than the intellect, though what exactly we experience will slowly be modified by what we believe.'

[theseagull2013-blog]

Rehearsal Diary - Week 2

Wordles, giggles and Consciousness.

By Jack Lowe

    Wordles

There are so many things happening in the rehearsal room, it’s sometimes difficult to know what might be interesting for you folks to see.

So to give you an overarching feel for week two, I’ll start with how I’m trying to use day-to-day observations to visualise the process.

Above is a “Wordle” of the most prominent words which have come up in discussions during week two. It’s a simple way of seeing the room. So you can see that words such as ‘decay’, ‘release’ and ‘public/private’ are on the tongue tips of cast and creative team alike. Hopefully I’ll be showing you some other, more inventive, ways in which I’ve been doing this, but for now it gives you a quick flash at the way I’m trying to see and capture the rehearsal room for you.

    Efficiency leads to the giggles

One of the perks of having an incredible stage management team means that there’s a constant stream of props, mark ups and generally bits and pieces arriving in the room. I suppose weeks one to four are like the gradual uphill part of a rollercoaster ride ready for tech/dress where everyone goes “ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh?!!”

Midway through week two, amongst many other props, (which will eventually get replaced but are there for the time being), was a head bandage for Konstantin. This bandage, like a tickly elephant in the room, was the single handed cause for surely some of the worst corpsing in the history of rehearsing Chekhov. I’m talking minutes of giggles. With the risk of this feeling like an in-joke, I include a picture of Alexander Cobb modelling the bandage.

From Laura our designer thinking he’d gone and had a Mohawk haircut to most of us agreeing that the pineapple look would perhaps be slightly distracting for an audience, there were giggles galore all thanks to a  simple bandage. The Seagull is, on many levels, a very funny play. The scene we were working on  is in Act III where for a glimmer of a moment Irina and Konstantin have reconciled their differences. Irina re-bandages Konstantin’s head wound and they reminisce about his childhood. Then Konstantin chooses to unpick Irina’s relationship with Boris and all hell breaks loose. This scene should be very painful to watch as you’re witnessing the neuroses of mother/son at play and so laughing through it did, it has to be said, provide light relief within the painful situation we find them in.

    A doctor comes to visit

Chekhov lived with tuberculosis for most of his adult life, which of course is even more of a testament to his brilliance in the face of illness. His plays are peppered with doctor characters but on Tuesday we welcomed into the room a different sort of doctor. Dr. Jim Hopkins from King’s College London, confidently paced through the doors of our rehearsal room, sat down in a circle of chairs, and introduced the cast to the endless and fascinating world of consciousness.

Now. consciousness is a slippery beast. There are many different schools of thought who argue different things about it, but from the start Blanche had been talking about “consciousness” as a way of understanding the characters in the piece.  John’s version of the play, at times, really hones in on the idea of that each of the eleven characters in the play are conscious of very different things according to how they personally see things

The hour with Dr.Hopkins was hotly anticipated and didn’t disappoint. He spoke beautifully about a number of areas but one really stood out: the importance of early childhood (0-4 months) in how our world views are shaped. This gave the cast some empirical starting points for why their characters might be or might have behaved in certain ways in the past and indeed in real time during the play.  During the hour of Q&A, there were moments where actors looked across at each other and smiled when Dr.Hopkins inadvertently landed on the exact cause for certain moment in the play. In a way, this shared moment of understanding between the actors is, in itself, the exact same feeling we hope you, the audience, will experience.

[theseagull2013-blog]

Rehearsal Diary - Week 1

By Jack Lowe

      Busking

One of the most fascinating moments in the rehearsal room is seeing what the director chooses to do first. On the first day of rehearsals  a new group of artists gather together with a plethora of worries, concerns or perhaps completely at ease. Either way, how do you start? Warm ups? Table work? Open discussions? A mixture of all three? In our case, it was a doubly special day, as the first day of rehearsals was also the actress  Pearl Chanda’s 21st birthday .

On Monday, after we’d said goodbye to the usual incredible army surrounding a Headlong show, the acting company began to set up a playground in the rehearsal room. Chairs, tables, piano stools, anything we could find was scattered across the 20mx10m rehearsal space.

Blanche then asked the actors to walk through the whole play, busking it rather than acting it. Every now and again we’d stop and chat. There was something relaxing about getting through the play so quickly. It somehow seems less of a mountain to climb, because let’s face it, The Seagull is one of the great plays in the canon. Busking it gave the actors the chance to exorcise any ideas they might have had in the run up to day one. Jogging our way through John’s text immediately shaped the two dimensional text on the page into three dimensions via the brains and into the bodies of the cast.

The company watched the actors in each scene from all perspectives, spreading themselves around the four walls of the rehearsal room, quietly taking in the decisions being thrown up into the air by the actors. There was a sense of fun and enjoyment in the room, generated by the instinctive responses that were being played out. It was a revealing and, at times, an extraordinary way of starting to work on the play. For a play which asks so many questions about the nature of theatre, it was a fitting start to the week by going back to the basics of characters interacting with each other in a space.  

When we did stop we asked each other about how things read and how things seemed. We started to develop a language for talking about the play from a place of activity rather than sat at a table.

The idea of constellations began to become important to the way we’re thinking in the space and about how the characters talk to us as an audience.

    Constellations

One of the things I’ve been doing this week is to observe the actors working on the text with small pile of buttons next to me. This was a response to Blanche’s desire for the audience to read the constellations and configurations of the relationships in The Seagull like we read the night sky.  So I’ve been collaborating with the cast and allocating buttons to each character. Asking actors to isolate and reduce their characterisation down to single solitary button, based upon initial instinctive thoughts, feels like a positive and safe thing to do. For Irina, a light green one encircled with a gold rim was chosen, a worn down dark green one from a cardigan for Masha and a large black one from a smart blazer for Konstantin.

I then started to place these buttons in configurations together based upon the work of the cast.

These have created an interesting archive for the process; a collection of images and shapes which somehow seem to make sense even at this early stage.

Perhaps they won’t be of any use further down the line but they’ve certainly got the cast thinking about the piece as a larger piece of fluid choreography, delicately balancing the space.

    Duet Conversations

We have of course spent some of the time sat down, talking about the play. These conversations have been in small duet groups:

Nina & Konstantin Konstantin & Irina Semyon & Masha Yevkeney & Polina Konstantin & Petr Trigorin & Irina Nina & Trigorin

These have taken place over the week and the conversations have brought up all sorts of cultural references from the game playing in Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf to the paintings of Munch, gothic art all the way to Jack Nicholson’s performance in About Schmidt. The vast reaching tentacles of John’s version have set in motion lots of exciting and explosive conversations. For me, one the most interesting aspects of John’s version is his ability to distil what are traditionally four or even five lines of Chekhov’s text into a single word or quick fire exchange. This is asking the actors to work incredibly hard to articulate and story tell in every possible and tangible moment.

Some of these conversations have lasted hours, asking endless questions and exploring past, present, future moments through the spinal cord of the characters.

Stay tuned for snippets of these references as we progress through the next three weeks.

[theseagull2013-blog]

A good thing it is for a man who, on such nights, sits under his own roof, in a warm corner like a seagull.

[theseagull2013-blog]

Idea for a story. A beautiful young girl lives by a lake all her life. She loves this lake. She's happy and free, like that bird was once. Then a man comes along and for no reason at all – what do you think he does?

[theseagull2013-blog]

A Manifesto

The Theatre is DEAD. The stench of it’s [sic] rotting carrion infects my nostrils. Its carrcus [sic] must be burned as a warning to all. There must be a new theatre. The new THEATRE shall be elemental. It shal [sic] contain earth, fire, air, water. It shall be wrenched from the guts the bloody bowels of the SOUL. We are shaman [sic]. Invoking the spirits of the angels and the damned. The audience is SICK. They have come here to be cured. They will not leave as they were when they arrived.

[K.G.T., Fragment lxii]