My play Working Lives was performed on Wednesday, a one-off performance as part of a playwriting festival. It was a great experience, and it reminded me of all the stresses and rewards of writing for the stage.
When you create a script--sitting around brooding about characters and themes, and then pushing yourself to write down as much of what you have in your head as possible, and trying to mould it all into shape and keep quality control and all the other things you have to do to make something usable--when you're doing all this you're making something quite abstract, with parts that you think might work in front of an audience, it's all quite abstract and bloodless. In fact it's like a short story, but without descriptions and "fine writing."
This is fine. You feel you've done all the work, and having it performed is sort of an added extra. Then it gets passed over to the director and cast.
The rehearsal process, certainly this time, involved a rather complex combination of reactions as far as I'm concerned. The cast was very well chosen, and the director clearly knew exactly what he was doing, and seemed very sympathetic with my actual intentions. I saw three early rehearsals, then two late ones, including the tech run-through on the Monday two days before performance.
It was this rehearsal that made me very very anxious. At least two of the actors didn't know their lines, and while the performance was billed as "script in hand", the director wanted them to be off-book for the performance. So the actual run-through was very ropy, with some long embarrassing stalls. It was all very rushed--we had to be in the space and out again within an hour. The director afterwards assured the cast that he was very happy with their performances. I wasn't so sanguine.
On the Wednesday, the day of performance, the cast weren't able to get together again till about 6.30 (the play started about 8pm). A quick line-reading was all that was possible, and a cast member was having big trouble with two substantial scenes. He was forgetting lines, and persisted in skipping ahead in a scene bypassing about a page of dialogue. The director said (thank God) that it was okay for him to take the script on stage. One of the other actors also did this. But it was obvious to me that the performance would be very basic and I was prepared for a very embarrassing 45 minutes during the actual event.
And then.
It was to be the second play in a double-bill. I saw the first, an entertaining though afterwards rather unsatisfactory piece. We settled in for the second half. I was sitting next to the director. We smiled at each other, said each other was great, shook hands, and saw the lights go down. The play started. The first scene went all right. People laughed. The scenes progressed. One scene in particular, a job interview that goes disastrously wrong, took fire on stage--the audience laughed, really immediate, genuine laughter, and the director was almost creased double, in fits. And I knew the thing was working. The last scenes of the play turn very serious, but I think we held the audience right to the end. I was very relieved and very euphoric. There was much congratulation (genuine) and hugging and talk of taking the thing on tour. Don't know if it will happen, but it seems a real possibility.
What has all this to do with Gilbert? Well, rather famously, he wasn't able to watch his own first nights. He would leave the theatre, stroll on the embankment, go to his club or see another play, returning only for the curtain calls. This is a very idiosyncratic thing of his, an almost physical condition which made him sweaty and hysterical if he had to see his own plays performed in front of an audience. But I can understand it very well. It is simply a very stressful, though often very rewarding, experience. I believe at the start of his career he did witness his own plays. But there was a point at which he stopped. He decided it involved too much unnecessary suffering.
No comments:
Post a Comment