HOPE OPERA - REHEARSAL DIARY, 2004

  WEDNESDAY 14 JULY

HAYLEY MASON, ACTOR

We went to Hull prison today. We performed to 50 or 60 men, all different ages, one as young as 18. We set up everything we needed – unfortunately we weren’t baking (restrictions about what equipment we could bring into the prison), but we’ve settled into adapting the show. I actually felt really nervous today as they all filed in. They’d come from having their tea. Again there were moments of laughing and heckling, but also moments during the show when you could hear a pin drop – which I think is quite amazing!  
 
I spoke to a young man about God and faith before we started. He truly believed that he was there for a reason and that God had a plan for him. He asked me if I thought God answered prayer – we both agreed that he does! I have found the people I’ve spoken to have a real honesty. It sounds strange to say, considering where they are.  
 
I also spoke to two young lads. At first they seemed really cocky – I couldn’t believe that I went straight up to them… God is working! Behind their hard front and macho image, they were just normal people who wanted to talk about what they’d just seen. At the end of the show we didn’t have much time to talk, which was a shame, but that didn’t stop a lot of the inmates coming up to us and shaking our hands, thanking us for coming. I’m not saying that out of smugness – it was really humbling. My prayer is that every single one of them takes something away with them and that god would continue to plant seeds through us, and that he’d water them.

Posted by rlights on 2004-07-16 00:00:00

  TUESDAY 13 JULY

SALLY OKAFOR, ACTOR

Today was our first prison for this tour. For both Hayley and myself this was our first time in a prison. We were very warmly welcomed by both the chaplain and the security guard. We were allowed to take everything we needed into the prison, which was truly a miracle. Everyone we met on our way in was warm and friendly. The chapel was a peaceful place with beautiful artwork by prisoners hung about the place, and it felt good to be there.  
 
The first of the two shows was lively – some of the younger lads did call out a bit, and we also had an interruption at a key moment, but it all went pretty well. The guys were all willing to have a chat at the end, which was good.  
 
The second show was an older audience, and fewer in number. These guys really seemed to get a lot out of what we were saying to them through the play, and I felt quite emotional at points when I could see how moved they were.  
 
I met some amazing people today, and even though the younger lads seemed to laugh at some of what we were doing, I think it was only because they weren’t quite sure how to respond.  
 
A brilliant first day. I know it will get harder, but I think we’re ready for it.

Posted by rlights on 2004-07-15 15:17:24

  SATURDAY 10 JULY (LATE)

ANTONY DUNN, MARKETING

Yes, better bread tonight, you’ll be glad to know.  
 
No fundamental changes to the show yet, but it does run a bit more swiftly. Might even be down to 55 minutes, in fact. Excellent. Seeing it a second time, it’s interesting to look again at the dynamics of the show; from its initial casual jokiness it moves into increasingly challenging stories, and this is where the decision to make the cast play themselves seems really to pay off.  
 
One of the moments nearest the end of the play – well, I don’t want to give too much away, but the discussion that Ivan mentions in this diary on June 24 has become crystallized into a very powerful little moment. The cast tell us something very important about themselves, and because the audience knows it’s the truth, and not just some lines spoken by some fictional characters, it’s very arresting.  
 
It’s going to be very exposing for the cast when they’re performing in venues which aren’t just packed with enthusiastic RL supporters, as these previews have been. Quite scary, probably. But I’ll get some of them to write diary entries after they’ve been into some prisons next week.

Posted by rlights on 2004-07-13 00:00:00

  SATURDAY 10 JULY

ANTONY DUNN, MARKETING

First preview performance was last night. Woo! Done it!  
 
Went extremely well, although it’s the longest 45-minute play in history, clocking in at a sneaky 60 at the moment. That’ll speed up as the cast get more and more familiar with the performance, but there’s an afternoon of rehearsal today where some little tweaks might be made. I’ll tell you later.  
 
Good for us office staff to see the whole thing at last. Good mix of the hilarious (Ivan’s star turn as an irascible king) and the heart-breaking. Great contrasts between the hyper-stylised bits, such as the mask-mime of the Pandora’s Box legend, and the improvised links in between stories, for which the actors are simply themselves.  
 
Good bread, too, actually, if a bit… um… chewy. We’ll see what it’s like tonight, eh?

Posted by rlights on 2004-07-13 13:30:12

  MONDAY 5 / TUESDAY 6 JULY

ANTONY DUNN, MARKETING / ROCK ‘N’ ROLL

I’m in London all day, but get a call from Bridget about 6.30pm. “Do you know any Bob Dylan?” she asks. A bit, but not really.  
 
“Any chance you could write a kind of Dylan-style song for the show? The words are done, we just need the music.”  
 
Yes. By when, though?  
 
“Tomorrow.”  
 
Right.  
 
It transpires that some music’s already been written to fit Bridget’s words, but brilliant as it is, it’s a bit too, well, beautiful to suit the mood of the story it’s going to belong to. Suddenly remembering the noisesome tapes of my earliest recording career (mysteriously ‘leaked’ to her Roughshod company back in 1994), Bridget’s suggested to Paul that I might be the man for the job…  
 
So I’m on a 10.00pm train back to York, with a borrowed Dylan album in my CD player, listening to it on eternal repeat, trying to absorb the style. Bridget’s e-mailed me the words, and I’ve got until tomorrow lunchtime to create something. Love a challenge.  
 
So Tuesday morning I stay home and bother the neighbours for a few hours, then bring my hastily scribbled manuscript and my guitar into Friargate Theatre, to play the new song for Bridget and Paul. A bit like auditioning, really. They hum and hah a bit, then go off to think about it for a while.  
 
[Some hours pass.]  
 
It’s in. Now I just have to spend some time with Ivan, teaching him the song, and exploring Dylan-style ways to perform it…

Posted by rlights on 2004-07-07 00:00:00

  SATURDAY 3 JULY

IVAN SCOBLE, ACTOR

A great day for all of us. Had some scripts to work with – really made us feel uplifted, and gave us something to sink our teeth and hearts into.  
 
Started the day by reading through the script of The Tempest, then worked intensely to physicalise it, going through it with a fine-tooth comb; then did some more work on Pandora’s Box, a monologue that Hayley will be narrating, and which we’re dramatising through mime and music; read Rob’s Story, which Rob tells while the rest of us tell it physically; and then The Shepherds at Court, which is lots of fun because it’s a comedy piece. Enjoyed that. And the show’s shaping up, obviously.  
 
For me, it was good to see it from an outsider’s point of view for a moment: while the others were rehearsing The Tempest, in which I don’t have any lines, I was out of the theatre learning lines for some of the other stories in the show. When I came back in to contribute my line-free bit to The Tempest, I found myself right in the middle of an amazing piece of theatre. Think that’s how we’d like our audiences to feel…

Posted by rlights on 2004-07-07 09:40:18

  FRIDAY 2 JULY

ROBERT SHERLOCK, ACTOR

Rachel Payne, our Musical Director, is in the building, so it’s time for the actors to dust off their drums, guitars, clarinets and violins, and see if they can strum, blow, bow or beat a noise that may add value to the show.  
 
This may account for the new ‘closed-door’ policy of the office.  
 
We concentrated on the story of Pandora’s Box, which has been developed as a narrated mime. Your diarist has the dubious honour of representing the evils of the world on his clarinet. They do say there are some parts you’re born to play…  
 
On Rachel’s departure, we began the old-fashioned process of blocking a script, and ended the day with an ‘all you can eat’ Chinese meal. Guess those costumes are going to need letting out already.

Posted by rlights on 2004-07-06 00:00:00

  THURSDAY 1 JULY

HAYLEY MASON, ACTOR

Nearly at the end of the second week of rehearsal period, and what have we got to show? Lots of story ideas! Some developed, some not. We revisited our personal stories, and went over the seven words and five actions that we’ve developed to describe a crucial moment or two from those stories. Played about with each one, drawing out interesting bits. We elaborated on Rob’s. When we’d finished we had a series of freeze-frames and also a comic narration – all in a morning’s work!  
 
Bridget had scripted some of our previous ideas – which we all read through, and really liked. You’ll have to wait and see which stories we’re using, though… Everything seems to be coming together now. It’s like baking bread… it takes patience, adding different ingredients and kneading together (cheesy or what?).  
 
Speaking of bread, we had an entertaining afternoon observing each other making bread – whilst wearing masks. It definitely brought the process alive, and we managed to produce the BEST-TASTING BREAD YET!  
 
A busy afternoon, defining blocking and allocating lines. It feels like we’re starting to really get our teeth into it now… guess I’ll be in learning lines tonight, and the next night, and the next…

Posted by rlights on 2004-07-02 09:26:14

  WEDNESDAY 30 JUNE

SALLY OKAFOR, ACTOR

Today we had the third of our three schools in for a day of workshops. It was all about storytelling and the different techniques we can use to help us tell stories. The techniques we focused on today were freeze-frames, physical theatre and props. We (the actors) gave some demonstrations of how freeze-frames can tell stories, and how physical theatre can do the same. We also showed the young people how you can tell a story using only three props, and how effective it can be. They then had a go at all three exercises.  
 
The story they focused on was Theseus and the Minotaur, so string and the sea were elements that needed to be experimented with. Suzi [Fowler, Education Officer] got us all to make two ships using only our bodies and some string. She then set up a soundscape of the sea, and half the group formed the ship while the other half created the soundscape. Then Ivan and I went off to work on our show while Hayley and Rob stayed to help Suzi.  
 
Ivan and I worked on combining two versions of Pandora’s Box, using the best parts of both. This was very hard, though, as they were very different. With Paul and Bridget, we put movement to the text very roughly. For the remainder of the day, Sean [Cavanagh, Designer] came in with costume for us to try on. It took quite a while but I think we’re on the right track.

Posted by rlights on 2004-07-02 00:00:00

  TUESDAY 29 JUNE

BRIDGET FOREMAN, WRITER / DIRECTOR

Today is the second of our three days this week with the year 9 groups from local schools taking part in our Education Project. The group of about 18 students from All Saints School join us between 9.30 and 3.30 with their drama teacher, Ged Cooper. There’s excitement in the air as we gather in the theatre, and Suzi takes us through the first part of the day – recapping the folktale that this group is working with, and playing some games to learn a few names and get ourselves working together as a group. We spend some time talking about what the story means: persistence and an awareness to the possibility of change for the better seem to be important themes, which fits in well with the overall topic of hope.  
 
The morning is taken up with a couple of specialist skills workshops. The Hope Opera company demonstrate these skills, drawing on the work we’ve been doing in rehearsal, then the students have a go themselves, working with the idea of freezing and thawing moments of the story, and creating an astonishing range of vocal sound effects to bring the story to life. In the afternoon, Paul and the actors disappear for some rehearsal while Suzi and I take a whistle-stop rehearsal of the script we’ve developed for this group from the folktale. There are moments of great hilarity and some really nice work from the students. They’ll have another couple of rehearsals with Ged before they come back and perform in a couple of weeks. Can’t wait to see how it turns out...  
 
I join the company in rehearsal for the last phase of the day. There is some intense work going on around some moments from The Tempest. I leave with a page of scribbled notes, which I’m expected to turn into a script overnight. Surely this isn’t how W. Shakespeare worked?

Posted by rlights on 2004-07-01 00:00:00

  MONDAY 28 JUNE

ROBERT SHERLOCK, ACTOR

A weary and Henman-fuelled diary today (sorry, Mr Philippoussis). We mustered at 9.00am (hence weary). “On a Monday morning?” I hear you cry. [Actually that’s “Welcome to the real world, you work-shy thesp!” you can hear us crying – Ed.] Fear not – it’s all for a good cause.  
 
Manor School’s Year 9 students were in for a day of workshops – part of the Education Project running in conjunction with Hope Opera. Your trusty band of actors helped out in the morning providing demonstrations of mask work and the intricacies of musical accompaniment (with some hefty input from our Musical Director, Rachel).  
 
A semblance of normality returned in the afternoon and we got down to some physical improvisation on how to represent painful memories. As if these weren’t enough, there was a large amount of brown paper around, too. Sorry, no room here to explain – come and see the show…

Posted by rlights on 2004-07-01 00:00:00

  FRIDAY 25 JUNE

PAUL BURBRIDGE, WRITER/DIRECTOR

Today is the first day in which rehearsal doesn’t include baking bread – we must be getting a bit cocky about our newly acquired ability to turn out a respectable loaf, whatever the recipe. Anyway, whether it’s cockiness or guilt (what with everybody suddenly piling on weight with all this bread, butter and jam we’re consuming…), today we don’t bake but apply ourselves to pulling the key story out of Shakespeare’s the Tempest.  
 
We then put this story through one or two improvisational mincers and decide that the heart of the play is wrestling with issues of anger, injustice and forgiveness, but that we haven’t found the right way to tell the story – yet. No time : our mask-maker, Charlotte, is due at the end of the day and we need to give her some idea of the kind of masks we want her to make. A king? A princess? A fool? A giant? A baker? Decide that the most useful and truthful thing is to base the masks around exaggerated aspects of the actors’ own personalities. So we spend the afternoon wrestling with ourselves!  
 
… ultimately to some purpose, in that, by the time Charlotte’s train gets in from Cardiff, we have taken three photographs of each actor – neutral and in two extreme expressions of the positive and negative sides of each person. (Hope we haven’t got this too badly wrong and someone ends up spending years in therapy) The day ends therapeutically, however, with each actor laid out on the rehearsal room floor, unable to speak, giggle or blink, while Charlotte makes a plaster cast of their face.

Posted by rlights on 2004-06-29 00:00:00

  THURSDAY 24 JUNE

IVAN SCOBLE, ACTOR

We started the day by reading through a sketch that Bridget had written, called The Shepherd Boy. We then improvised with musical instruments for a sketch, Pandora’s Box. Adding masks to the piece, Rob & Sally went first with me and Hayley playing instruments, then we swapped round, all taking it in turns to play different parts. We ran through a sketch called King Alfred the Great – yes, the story of the burnt cakes – and, still using masks, improvised a comic scene at a bus stop.  
 
Today’s bread recipe was soda bread with white flour. Unanimous verdict: best of the week so far.  
 
We then dramatised a story that Rob had found, about a Sarajevo bread queue. Don’t want to say too much – wait and see the show on tour – but Sally played a cellist, and the improvisation involved the rest of us smearing flour across her cheekbones and all over her arms. Rob said it made her look like a statue. Hayley said it made her look like a statue over-visited by pigeons…  
 
We ended our day by breaking the hot new bread and eating it around the table, sharing our thoughts about holy communion – which Christians think of as sharing the body of Christ.

Posted by rlights on 2004-06-28 09:13:52

  WEDNESDAY 23 JUNE

ROBERT SHERLOCK, ACTOR

Last night’s homework was to write down the details of someone else’s story from the afternoon, in order to re-tell it today. This proved to be a simple way of finding the core details of a story. Discussions on how to present these stories theatrically proved less than conclusive!  
 
Started working on a short fairy story with a view to using it in the show: an intricate process of analysing the story, breaking it down into logical sections and then improvising around each section. Theoretically this created enough material for Bridget to be able to create a script from – rather her than me! Quick baking today – found a recipe for 45 minute soda bread (ideal for the 45 minute prisons version of the show, obviously). Excellent with jam.

Posted by rlights on 2004-06-24 00:00:00

  TUESDAY 22 JUNE

HAYLEY MASON, ACTOR

The second day of rehearsal. We all met and committed the whole day and rehearsal time to the Lord, asking for help and guidance throughout the creative process. An important part of the day…  
 
We brainstormed possible stories that we could use and came up with quite an extensive list. It ranged from factual stories to fictional stories to biblical parables. The task ahead – to choose two stories and tell them using two dramatic techniques. We managed one and a half, then played around with them. It was good to have something solid to show. [Some of yesterday’s bread was pretty solid, actually – Ed.]  
 
Baking bread next – making it whilst telling different stories from our lives, some serious and moving, others light-hearted. Maybe material to be used… it’s all part of the process!  
 
Shared bread. Tasted much better than yesterday’s. Then the final task of the day was to take a moment out of the stories we had told around the bread-making table, describe it using seven words and five gestures. We all came up with very different pieces – all very thought provoking.  
 
End of the day, with homework for tomorrow…!

Posted by rlights on 2004-06-24 09:40:10

  MONDAY 21 JUNE

SALLY OKAFOR, ACTOR

A week ago, those of us who could get to York – three of the cast with Paul Burbridge & Bridget Foreman (our co-writers and directors) – met up to do some workshopping and to give Bridget and Paul a chance to explain a little about this project. Today we brought the fourth member of the cast up to speed with what we’d done and discussed. The mainly consisted of discussing different styles of theatre and storytelling. We also talked about stories we might use. We discussed what we imaged our show might be – and look – like, and what hope means to us.  
 
We’d already decided that baking bread was going to be a big part of the piece, for a few different reasons, so the second part of the day was spent baking bread. Or learning to…  
 
While we were waiting for the dough to prove itself, then bake, we shared some stories. Bridget asked us to close our eyes and remember a place that we’d loved when we were young; what it felt like, what it smelled like and so on. We then opened our eyes and took the rest of the group with us to those places – either descriptively, or by leading them around the room. We did this acting the age that we’d been when our memory actually happened. Then we swapped stories and wrote poems about them, and shared those.  
 
Bread was ready! It wasn’t perfect, but we’re working on it…

Posted by rlights on 2004-06-24 09:39:28