First dress rehearsal

First dress rehearsal

By the time a production reaches dress rehearsal stage, my job as director should really be pretty much done.  All of the moves, the design, the characterisation, the intonation etc etc etc should all be fixed.  And of course the important word here is should.  My job as teacher, however, is never complete.  (And if you look at it in binary and non-binary terms – and nowadays I do so more and more – directing is binary, and therefore fixed.  While teaching is non-binary, and therefore remains fluid and changeable.)  When one works with young people, one is always a teacher: they need to learn.  And that is doubly, triply true at CMS, possibly in India generally.

I arrived at the first dress rehearsal on the Saturday full of optimism.  I knew the production was not even close to ready – there were scenes that had never, for one reason or another, been rehearsed.  Actually, none of it had been rehearsed in the way that Alex, my own director with Wild Goose Theatre, would consider to be rehearsed, with enough repetition to fix it firmly in the memory.  But for my productions with young people, this situation was entirely normal.  They are on a steep learning curve, and learn so much in the last few days.  What was more, this was the first of two dress rehearsals: a second one had been forced upon us when I discovered that one actor would not be able to attend this morning, because of a family wedding.  And since I had never yet had all of the actors in front of me at one time, we scheduled a second dress on the Monday morning, the day of the first performance.

But it did not begin well.  Three major characters were missing, without any explanation as to why.  As a result, we waited for them, for about an hour, realisation slowly dawning that they were all attending some other event somewhere.  They had switched off/were not answering their phones, which was telling in itself.  But the result was that we were very late starting.

A second issue was that many of them were not in costume.  Probably most, in fact, since apart from those who were still in school uniform, because of some conference that morning, that they had come directly from, nearly everyone’s costume was incomplete, since they had never having been given the sort of attention to detail that makes them special.  And a dress rehearsal without costume is just another run-through.

But things got worse as the afternoon wore on.  As well as the four people missing – the original one as well as the other three – two other people absented themselves for various reasons.  And there were the usual failings on stage: late entrances, forgotten lines, misplaced props and the like.  But all of that was as nothing compared to the utter chaos that raged backstage.  It was, effectively, a huge playground, and many or most of them were playing.  Loudly, boisterously, without awareness of the effect that lack of discipline had on the work onstage.  My usual role during a dress rehearsal is to act as a sample member of the audience, to sit and make notes, and afterwards to deliver them.  But more and more I was forced to intervene, to go on stage, to go backstage, and to do my best to quell the bedlam.  I suppose the prime example was when I had to intervene was when I discovered two or three of them having a tug of war using the ropes that were used to restrain Lion.  I was, of course, apoplectic.

The following day was Sunday, always scheduled as a rest day, and I was determined that it would remain so.  Despite the utter carnage, I was convinced that a rest day was necessary, for everyone.  Apart from anything else, there was another dress rehearsal on the following day.  Surely that ought to be enough.