A rehearsal today, squeezed in after exams. It was going to be the big dramatic Lord Capulet loses his rag scene, but a bit of an administrative mess-up on my part: Khushi, who is translating the play for me, albeit at present on a piecemeal, on demand basis – she has exams to juggle – had not received Act 2 in English, so we went for an earlier scene instead, where Juliet is told about Paris.
It needed three people – Pranita (accent on first syllable) as Lady C, Richa as Juliet, and Aashika (Nurse.) Aashika is very funny, and is going to be great, but she seems to be a bit of a scatterbrain – she turned up late, and without a script. Khushi (her friend) had sent it to her, she said. So where was it? A shrug. But I had also sent Khushi’s version to all three of them, via WhatsApp. She didn’t have her phone. But it was all right; Khushi had sent it to her. We were going round in circles. Never mind, she would have to share phones. And at this stage, we were only looking at the words.
A slightly surreal rehearsal, held in the staffroom/Aparna’s office; it was cool in there (a/c) and no-one else was there… except then two teachers came in, moved the big work table into the middle of the room, set up a table-tennis net, and started a game. An energetic, skilful one, at that. While we just ignored them… more or less. (Richa can be distracted by anything.)
They were using phones for their scripts. Yesterday, I had had a rehearsal with Vikram, with an English script that we were trying to translate as we go, and we had discovered problem number one with using phones, that you can’t write notes on it, especially with the script as a PDF, and had resorted to using a bit of paper for Vikram to write his own rough translation. Very old school, and not very efficient, or reliable – it was a scrappy bit of paper, and I suspect might get lost.
Today, the script was in Nepali, which made things easier (for the actors at least; I was a bit lost), but then we discovered problem number two, which is that while a phone might be a script, it does not stop being a phone. I noticed that Richa, when not speaking her lines, was texting messages. Not exactly the focus I would need.
But all three were good actors, and will be great. Pranita is a beautiful young woman, with huge poise, Richa (when I can get her to focus for more than three milliseconds at a time) can shoot fire, and Aashika, though looking permanently anxious when not acting, is very, very funny… even in Nepali.
In the evening, I unwittingly unleashed a firestorm. I had checked with Aparna that we could organise a sort of launch party, with food and drink, some dancing, some games, some singing (“I like the flowers…”) It would be after the exams (at last!), and before they all go off for five weeks holiday (have I mentioned that before!?) She agreed it was a good idea, and WhatsApped everyone. The first lot of responses were very enthusiastic, but then someone pointed out that it clashed with some other large-scale end of term event. Nightmare. Could it be rearranged? Didn’t look like it. A poll was set up, but I thought this was all a bit futile; if the event didn’t include more or less everyone, there was not a lot of point, and various people were adamant that only one date or another, or postponing until after the holiday, would work. It was all too exhausting, so left it to all of them to agree, or not, between them.
