And if I had thought yesterday was a demonstration of last-minute culture, today was the same thing in spades. I arrived in the Seminar Room at about 9.30, to discover that the carpet had been laid, which was definitely a result. Mary immediately set to work taping the carpet down, using some wide sellotape. And the small team of guys, all based in the college, so far I could tell there also had a small stack of lights, and some stands, so we were definitely moving in the right direction. Unfortunately, their solution to the problem of constructing a balcony was bringing along two small coffee tables. Relatively sturdy coffee tables – Mary tried standing on them – but coffee tables, being far too small, too low, and in no way any sort of balcony, did not do the job.
At this point, the language barrier was just too great for me to convey what it was that I needed for a balcony, and I called Aparna and handed over the phone to one of the guys. When she promptly sacked them all, on the spot, over the phone. I did feel a little bit sorry for them, as they somewhat morosely dismantled the lights they had just rigged… if rigged is the word, for tying lights onto a rusty tripod with a length of shoelace. But about twenty minutes later the replacement arrived, a guy I had met previously as part of, or head of, or something, the small media centre who do a lot of work for SPA. He asked about our needs, including the dimensions of the stage unit that would serve as Juliet’s balcony, and then disappeared, promising that everything – lighting, staging, the lot – would be done in two hours. I wasn’t quite sure whether to believe him – rightly, as it turns out – but that would mean just before the dress rehearsal was due to start.
At some point (it does get a bit hazy around here) I also consulted a man about building some screens, gave him a set of dimensions, and he went away. A new set of guys did indeed arrive with some lighting equipment, though to be fair it didn’t really look all that different from the previous sets. Though, crucially, it did include a small dimmer board., which I don’t think the other lot had had. But it soon became clear that no-one had told them there were two ends to the staging, and the two big tripods they were using both pointed in the same direction. But they fiddled about with them for a bit, until I told them to stop for a bit since the t-bars attached to the tripods were all at eye level, and we needed to start our dress rehearsal.
In the meantime, we had also been told by the man who had promised to make the screens that he could not do them after all, but by this point we had bodged and botched our own, out of various promotional boards that were lying around. And then the stage arrived… which turned out to be exactly the thing I had ordered three weeks ago, only to be told two days a go that they could not manage. As I had always thought it would, it did the job beautifully. And we were only about an hour behind schedule.
The dress rehearsal itself was pretty dress rehearsal-like, which ought to be encouraging, in that there is generally a huge improvement. But my fear that the flaws with this production are rather more fundamental , being rooted in the comparative lack of experience of any kind of acting skills. Though that is unfair, for there are many talented individuals in the group. All the same, I did find it all a bit dull. But I have done this enough times to know that theatrical miracles do occur, on a pretty regular basis, so I have to hope that they start to raise their game.
Fingers crossed.
