Drama Games for Rehearsals

INTRODUCTION

'Caress the detail, the divine detail.'
Vladimir Nabokov

.'That was a great show.'

.'What a fantastic production.'

.'That's the best performance I've ever seen.'

Every theatregoer has heard an audience gushing with praise after a particularly fine production. But what makes a 'great performance'? We can all sense when a piece of theatre moves us, or entertains us, or excites us, but have you ever asked what makes it work? There are an infinite number of contrasting ways to play a role, so it can't be about getting it 'right'. I would argue, rather, that it is about detail.

Good acting, in contemporary theatre at least, is most often associated with truthfulness. But what makes an actor believable? It is the detail of their performance; the rigour of their observation of real life; and their ability to recreate that on stage in a way which resonates and reminds us of ourselves. Acting is, and should be, hard work. An actor must have a profound understanding of their role and have the tools to communicate it. These skills are not only learnt through practice, but through observation of other actors.

Pick up any celebrated actor's autobiography and you'll most likely find it peppered with anecdotes about watching rehearsals; peering from the wings while they wait to enter, spying through the crack of a rehearsal-room door or saving pennies for the bus fare to Stratford to see a masterful actor at work. The one thing that all of these celebrated actors have in common is experience. Years of hard graft. They have talent, of course, too. But they've also practised. And that is something we can all do - starting now.

Most technical aspects of acting can be learnt. Voice, body and mind can all be trained. This book aims to give you the tools to do that, by providing exercises to use in your rehearsal process, which will improve and encourage a greater level of detail and complexity. Each time a company begins rehearsals for a new production, everyone has the opportunity to develop their craft. Use this opportunity both to illuminate the world of the play and present the best possible production, and to come away with skills honed for the future.

I love rehearsals. The process can be a veritable playground, an adventure in which to explore the play. It is joyful work. But it isn't just fun; it also requires diligence and precision. Without rigorous preparation in rehearsal, actors are simply guessing. And guessing leads to lack of decision-making, hazy interpretations and insecure performances which wobble from night to night like a spinning top, throwing other actors off-course. If you are a director, you can prevent all this by putting the time in to prepare your actors for their roles. And actors, you can do this work for yourself too. Know the play, the role and the context. This will make your work detailed and layered. It is this belief in the importance of rigour in rehearsals which led me to write this book.

Games in Rehearsal: How and Why

Think of the play like an iceberg. The script pokes up above the surface, but underneath there is a vast world to be mined. And not just the themes and the socio-historical context of the play; you must also understand the genre of the writing. How can you stage a Shakespeare play without understanding how verse works? How can you put on a Restoration play without knowing that the theatres were lit in a way which allowed the actors to see and speak directly to their audience members, hence the 'asides' in the text? What I hope to do in this book is to give you the tools to explore every aspect of your play, in detail, in order to find the layers and mine the text fully, both for you and for your audience.

Finding the Play in the Play: My Experience of Directing The Rivals

I spent a good portion of my early career directing classical plays, from Shakespeare and Georgian comedies to early modern classics. One of the first was Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals, a Georgian comedy set in Bath, for London's Southwark Playhouse. Wondering how to prepare, I curled up with a dusty Sheridan biography and before long I was so swept up in his world that I lost all track of time. I couldn't quite believe it. This raggy old book was a revelation. This tome about the playwright's life illuminated the play in such a profound way that I felt like I'd stumbled across the 'how to direct the production' guide. The parallels between the action of the play and Sheridan's life were remarkable. He drew constantly on his own experiences. Sheridan and his protagonist were both involved in a duel for love in the fields outside Bath. Just as Lydia and Julia debate the merits of a sentimental man, so was Sheridan outraged by the frustrating fashion for sentimentalism. And as for Mrs Malaprop's obsession with learning new words, albeit incorrectly, Sheridan's father was involved in writing the first dictionary.

For the next month, Richard (we were now on first-name terms) became the main man in my life. I read the books that he read. I took myself off to Bath and spotted references to the play at every turn, pointing to details in the text I'd never considered. Mrs Malaprop amusingly (and, of course, mistakenly) compliments a character as 'the pineapple of politeness.' A funny line, yes, but it wasn't until I passed the stone pineapples adorning the grand house of Sheridan's lover that I understood the extent to which the exotic pineapple was the ultimate symbol of privilege. Malaprop's line isn't just funny, I realised, it shows her allusions of grandeur. Her faux pas is therefore doubly embarrassing as it speaks of her grappling to be seen as something she's not.

By the time we started rehearsals, not only did I feel confident in my knowledge of the text, I was eager to introduce the actors to the fascinating world I had discovered. I turned up on the Monday morning with a suitcase of photographs, Bath biscuits and vials of the pungent 'Bath water' for the actors to try. But here's the crux. We were staging a play, not writing essays. Research is all very well, but sitting and reading won't invigorate a cast. How could I use this research in rehearsal? And that's when I realised. Games! Exercises designed specifically to explore the text in a practical way. And while we're at it, why not also use games to help the actors with other challenging aspects of performance. The Rivals is full of long lines with multiple clauses which are hard to play. It also features asides and plenty of verbal sparring which needs great dexterity in the playing.

So, I thought, we'll use games and exercises specifically to tackle each of these challenges.

For the direct address, we played Tea for Three, in which the actors learned how to play to the audience - a requirement of most Restoration and Georgian comedies. To understand the specific themes of class and marriage specific to the period, we played Pinchwife and Sons and Marry Your Daughters. To help the actors tackle the long phrases we played One-Pound Words, to become dexterous with the complex descriptive language we played Personal Pronouns, and to capture the competitive sparring between Captain Absolute and Jack we played Ha! Theses exercises, alongside energising daily warm-ups (many of which you'll find in Part One of this book), ensured our rehearsals were demanding and dynamic. The games were never time-fillers. They allowed us to understand the play and work on the text in detail. And as we did, we began to enjoy it more and more, finding a shared love for the play and great pleasure in each other's company.

Rehearsals for The Rivals will always remain with me as one of the most enjoyable chapters of my working life, and, as a result of the depth with which we worked, the show went down a storm.

The joy of rehearsing is bound up in the opportunity to discover another world, a period, a place, a lifestyle. for curious nosey parkers like me, it is an ideal way to spend my time. And whilst I no longer throw my life out of the window every time I begin working on a new production, I learnt the value of contextual knowledge in understanding a text and the importance of using this knowledge in an active way in rehearsals, in order to create a layered, detailed production.

Games in New Writing Rehearsals: Nell Leyshon's Winter

Games can be equally helpful when rehearsing new plays. When I worked with the writer Nell Leyshon on her play Winter, about the lives of the early settlers in Newfoundland, the theatre company invited us to Canada to workshop the text at their coldest time of year, to give us first-hand experience of living in the arctic conditions the characters suffer in the play. Rehearsing in sallopettes, trudging the frozen roads and looking out over the icy sea gave us a glimpse of life at -30°. During the workshop period we played games every day to help the actors explore the characters and to provide Nell with context for the world she was writing about. We made Character Graphs to plot the development of each story over the course of the play, we played musical games like Soundscape Orchestra to explore the use of sound in the production,...