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One challenge of putting together four and a half hours of theatre, whilst only rehearsing part time, is that by the time you have worked through the entire play it's several weeks since you looked at the opening scenes. The stage manager makes notes during rehearsals of exits/entrances etc, but there is still lots of acting detail that can fall by the wayside.听 I am trying to avoid this so I decided to take a step back and spend a Sunday looking at the scenes in France, which were amongst the first we worked on. A constant string of military conflicts, following siege after siege as the English lose and regain territory in occupied France, these scenes are a huge challenge, and I am really glad that we have tackled them vigorously early on.听 A really hard day was spent by everyone, but it was worth it as there is now growing confidence about these scenes, and as a result about the production as a whole.听We ran about 15 minutes together without stopping. It had a real pace and vigour about it, and the cast were mostly off script, which was excellent.听Very heartening all round. | "They [the actors] seem to really like behaving as an unruly, riotous mob" | |
This was followed up by Fight Club.听 I have invited Simon and Caroline Buckley, who do a lot of medieval re-enactments, to help choreograph the fights. So we had a great evening indulging in a bit of (fake) ultraviolence.听 Many of the cast haven't done this kind of work before and seem to really enjoy it. Although I think I might have let the genie out of the bottle - there was an awful lot of testosterone in the air by the end of the night. The other big event this week is that we moved to our second half for the first time.听We spent an evening working on the Jack Cade rebellion scenes.听These are great - fast, funny and violent.听 Jack Cade is a popular demagogue who leads a tradesmen's revolt, bringing temporary chaos to the streets of London.听 The scenes are written in prose rather than verse, i.e closer to regular speech, and are hugely accessible and fun. The actors involved have a great time.听They seem to really like behaving as an unruly, riotous mob.听I don't know what this tells us about them, but I think it means that this bit of the play is going to one of my favourites to work on in the weeks ahead. Mark | 
