Directors Notes Issue 8

One of the many challenges a Director faces in the course of rehearsals is to take the cast out of their comfort zone. Nervous energy is important to any production and nothing is worse than a cast feeling relaxed with four weeks to go to opening night.

As is traditional on Bank Holidays, we decamped from our normal rehearsal setting to Charles and Jacqui’s kitchen. Many great decisions have been made at that table and some of literature’s greatest pieces have been dissected. We have also discussed weightier tones, such as whether dogs should be exterminated and is a house in Rathmines allowed to be a corner of a foreign field that is forever England.

5 of the cast gathered for a read through of the play. From a practical perspective, this tests the cast on their line knowledge, but it also brings them to a different environment. When you rehearse in the same place each week, you start to associate lines with particular movements and your position in the space. When somebody offers you a glass, it’s easy to say “thanks very much” If you’re not offered a glass, it’s more difficult to remember your line. As things don’t always happen as you would expect on stage, you need to get the cast into the mindset that they own the lines independently from the setting and the action. And sitting around a kitchen table with the 1812 overture going on outside on a Halloween Eve, is as good a change from normal as you could ask for.

It was good to see that everyone had brought something for the day that was in it (except me of course) and we feasted on braic and banana cake until the dogs came in and ruined everything. Then we had to go outside and do something with fire that I don’t want to go into. Dogs and fire are two of my main phobias. Having the two of them together wasn’t fun. Ask Noeleen about tin-foil, she knows what I mean.