This month's activity has been dominated by directing my first short film. Film has never been a medium that has particularly grabbed me - I'm naturally drawn to the life and energy that theatre brings. Plus one of the joys of theatre is the rehearsal period which is much shorter or non-existent in film. Since the end of last year though, I have been subscribed to a website called MUBI, which provides you with 30 films to watch at any one time, introducing you to great and innovative cinema from around the world (highly recommended!). This has helped develop my interest in film but it is only really once you make a film that you start to really appreciate the art form. And this month I can safely say that I have found a new passion!
When I first agreed to direct the film I naively thought that it would be fairly straightforward! "Yes, there will be a few technical things you don't understand", I thought, "but how hard can it be?" Turns out quite hard! This was one of the steepest learning curves I have ever experienced but also one of the most rewarding.
The biggest thing I learnt was the remarkable level of preparation - both practical and creative - that goes into the making of a film. When working to a very limited time frame - (we had one day to shoot in) - and limited budget - (essentially nonexistent!) - planning the shoot in meticulous detail is a must. This meant storyboarding. And storyboarding. And more storyboarding. As someone for whom drawing is not a particular strong point, showing 60 odd hand-drawn pictures to a production team was an experience that resulted in multiple parts of my insides dying a slow, shameful death! But once I got over my shame, I realised what a brilliantly useful tool the storyboard is. In simple terms, it literally allows you to see the film before you've even shot it. It allows you, as the director, to visualise every single cut and change of angle. Visualising a film to this level of detail I found was a skill that needed practice in itself. It took hours of reading and re-reading the script, followed by long sessions with my eyes tightly closed imaging exactly how the finished film would look on the screen. I found that watching 5-10 minute clips of films that I admire and imagining what the storyboard for those would look like was a really useful starting point and would recommend that to any first-time film maker.
After a few drafts and some discussions, we produced a storyboard that we were happy with. The next step was to use the storyboard to work out exactly what shots were required and what order it made most sense to shoot them in. This film had the added complication of the actor (also me!) playing two different characters who talk to each other!
All of the pre-production headaches, however, meant that we arrived at the studio for the shoot armed with a full shot list and a storyboard. Both things I had never created before and both of which enabled us to shoot a 5 minute film in less than 6 hours - and that's including a brief hiatus when the fuse blew and we lost all lighting in the studio!
As you might imagine the film hasn't turned out exactly as I had envisaged but for a first film I am really pleased with the result. What made the experience all the more special was that an abridged version of the film was screened at the Raphael Gallery at the Victoria and Albert Museum throughout the bank holiday weekend. It was a peculiarly humbling experience to see our film in such an impressive space surrounded by Raphael's monumental tapestry cartoons.
The film was produced as part of a project with the MA Costume Design students at the London College of Fashion based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. The main focus of the film is, therefore, on showing the beautiful Prospero costume (designed by Pallavi Patel) in action. Pallavi has been absolutely fantastic throughout the whole project - she has worked astonishingly hard and I'm incredibly grateful to her both for her superhuman effort and for letting me direct this film. The relationship between a director and a designer is so important and I hope that this will be the start of a long term collaboration between us both in theatre and film!
We are just finishing the sound editing on the full film. As soon as it's ready I'll be sure to bombard you with links to it through various social media channels!
Back to the theatre and it was lovely to see an old friend, Paapa Essiedu, on the NT's Olivier stage in King Lear this month, starring the ubiquitous Simon Russell Beale and directed by Sam Mendes. Paapa made headlines at the very start of the run when he had to step in mid-performance to replace Sam Troughton's Edmund, after Troughton lost his voice mid-speech. As Mendes said - two of the worst nightmares for an actor occurring on the same night!
This was in many respects a very accomplished rendition of one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies - though I do often feel it's more of a joy for the English student than the theatre-maker. As one would imagine, SRB's Lear was played with incredible detail and intelligence - coming into his own in the second half particularly when his portrayal became more subtle and nuanced. I also thought Sam Troughton was excellent as Edmund - now with voice fully intact, he engaged the audience in his evil scheming, whilst his bitterness and resentment towards his brother Edgar (and indeed the whole world) felt very understandable and believable. Stephen Boxer was also exceptional as Gloucester (outshining SRB in my opinion) and the scene between the blinded Gloucester and the mad Lear was undoubtedly the highlight of the production (as indeed, it probably should be).
In fact, most of the performances were pretty strong - with Kate Fleetwood's Goneril being particularly strong out of the three sisters, with Olivia Vinall doing a good job as Cordelia as well. Where I had problems with the production was in the lack of coherency within the world on stage. I really struggled to believe in the setting of the play. The rules that governed it were blurred and uncertain, making the whole production rather fuzzy and disappointing for me.
I don't understand why directors don't seem to realise that the world of the play does not need to be forced into a setting that is directly reminiscent of real-life (whether historical or present). The play exists in a world of it's own, the rules of which should all come from the words of the play. If a world is well conceived there should never be a moment that feels out of place. The director who has really nailed this in recent times is Jamie Lloyd - who, quite rightly, continues to go from success to success.
To use a rather obvious example, it frustrates me when I see a play in which one character attacks another with a 'sword' - which is, in actual fact, a rather pathetic looking knife - when he has an automatic pistol in his pocket and is surrounded by soldiers with machine guns. It immediately and unavoidably creates a moment of ridiculous irony and throws the whole reality of the world into doubt. This is not to say that I don't think we should do modern-dress Shakespeare - I absolutely do! What I'm saying is that if the text says there are swords give the characters swords!! There's absolutely nothing wrong with characters wearing suits but also carrying swords, as long as that is established as a convention of this particular fictional world.
Finally, this next month will see action with my new production company Cyphers. We will be interviewing and auditioning members of the King's Shakespeare Company at King's College London to give them the opportunity to assistant direct and act in our autumn production of Henry V. One of Cyphers' primary aims is to help bridge the gap between professional theatre and student drama - we hope this will be the start of many more collaborations with KSC. Our website is currently under construction but the Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/CyphersUK) and Twitter (@CyphersUK) pages are up and running, so 'like' us and follow us for all the latest news! If you are a member of KSC and would like to find out how to get involved, details are available on the Facebook and Twitter pages.
Showing posts with label National Theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label National Theatre. Show all posts
Friday, 9 May 2014
Tuesday, 8 April 2014
This year just keeps 'March'ing on: New Writing Nights, RiverRun and Jane Eyre
As a director, actor and theatre-goer my attention has always been grabbed by the classics - new writing has never been especially appealing to me. I suspect the main reason for this is that, to be completely honest, I'm not very interested in 'current' or 'relevant' 'issues' which, quite naturally, tends to be the focus of most new writing. My interests lie in more abstract universal themes and questions. In short, the very things that the classics are so good at. Although Shakespeare and Marlowe (for example) were undoubtedly grappling with the 'relevant' issues of Jacobean England, they hardly ever set their plays in their own contemporary world (only one of Shakespeare's plays is set in Jacobean England). Instead they created distinct and separate worlds from their own - foreign worlds, historic worlds, fantasy worlds - and allowed their audiences to spot the 'relevancy' for themselves. As a result, these plays are still as 'relevant' today as ever and will continue to be so. I fear this is a skill we have all but lost.
Having said that, the two young writers whose work I have directed this last month (Marietta Kirkbride and Piotr Klinger) can certainly make strong claims for attempting to create timeless, universal work. Marietta's short play, The Land in my Blood, tells the story of someone struggling to leave their family home before it is demolished to make way for a new A-road (ok, that bit's not so timeless!). The struggle this character is going through is cleverly portrayed through the inclusion of an off-stage actor voicing her internal thoughts through a microphone. As a result, her internal monologue seems to come out of the very land that she is having to leave, creating quite a moving sense that a part of her belongs in this land. Plus it allows for some beautifully comic moments during an argument with her, not especially sympathetic, partner. One of the key challenges in rehearsals was to get the two sides of the main character's personality, acted by two different actors, to feel like one person. As such, despite the piece only being a little over 10mins long, I thought it was really important to spend some time doing detailed character work. We thought about super-objectives, emotional centres, past experiences. We also spent time building up a detailed collective image of the family home - sitting with eyes closed, we described the house and its surroundings, going round the circle using one word at a time. This meant that the image created was necessarily shared by all of the actors. After these sessions on character and environment, the play (as I had hoped) essentially took care of itself, so that what might have seemed like overkill actually saved us a lot of rehearsal time - in my opinion anyway!
The other great thing about working on this play was that I had the opportunity to spend time in Bristol. (On the flip side, this also meant that I got rather too well acquainted with the M4!) Bristol is quite simply a great little city, with quirky independent cafes and bars, beautiful street art and a thriving fringe theatre scene. It is definitely one of the top places I'd be looking to live as an affordable alternative to London with lots of opportunities to make good theatre and to get noticed.
My second New Writing Night this month was, however, back on the old stomping ground in London, with a company called Blackshaw Theatre. This was a truly brilliant evening, with a lovely warm and welcoming atmosphere - largely created by the bubbly compering of Ellie Pitkin (Blackshaw's Artistic Director). Blackshaw run these nights every other month - I highly recommend going along if you get the chance. The piece I directed was a character study on Gertrude from Piotr Klinger's playful reimagining of Hamlet. The Blackshaw team couldn't have picked a lovelier writer to team me up with and since I am borderline obsessed with Hamlet this was an ideal piece for me! I think we learnt a lot from the process, gaining a fuller understanding of Gertrude's relationships with all the characters around her. My staging of the piece owed a lot to Owen Horsley's rehearsed reading of Thomas of Woodstock at the Barbican with the RSC Richard II cast and to Jeremy Herrin's staging of Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies (another RSC tour de force!). I was inspired by the fluidity and simplicity of transitions in these pieces and (I hope) used that to good effect myself.
Speaking of Hamlet, I don't listen to radio dramas anywhere near enough, but the recent version of Hamlet on BBC Radio 4 with Jamie Parker in the lead role has been quite sublime. I would actually go as far as to say that it is my favourite rendition of the play that I have experienced to date. The opening scene with the appearance of King Hamlet's ghost is particularly effective and Parker captures the method in Hamlet's madness perfectly.
Which leads nicely on to the stage works that I have seen this month. I haven't had the chance to get to the theatre as much as I would like - or as much as I normally do - this month but both plays I have seen have been exceptional.
Firstly, RiverRun at the NT's Shed, a dramatisation of the river in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake by Olwen Fouere. I have loved all of my encounters with Joyce so far (I am currently enjoying Ulysses very much - even if, at times, it can be a little hard-going) but I did have concerns that this would be a bridge too far! I need not have been concerned, however. This was theatre as I have never experienced it before - which is appropriate since reading Joyce is unlike any other reading experience I have had before. Fouere takes you into what I can only describe as a semi-lucid state, I literally could not tell you whether it lasted 5 minutes or 5 hours (the NT website informs me it was approx. 70 mins!). In that time I truly felt like I was living a dream. The space was entirely bare except for Fouere, a microphone and a light dusting of sand. This created a blank canvas upon which our imaginations could paint vivid moving pictures - I almost felt like I was hallucinating. This was a truly special experience which is simply impossible to describe in words.
The second play was the two part adaptation of Jane Eyre at the Bristol Old Vic. Another reason to be grateful for the New Writing Night in Bristol, this was one of the most inspirational pieces of theatre I have seen. I have wanted to adapt novels for the stage for some time but never quite had the confidence to do it - I think Sally Cookson's Jane Eyre may just be what I needed to see before diving into an adaptation of my own. Cookson deliberately distanced her adaptation from the typical period drama, taking lavish costumes and sets out of the equation completely. This allowed us to focus in on the characters and, again, allowed our imaginations to paint pictures. The great power of a novel is its ability to transport us from place to place at the turn of a page. This is simply impossible in theatre if we are constrained by elaborate sets. If, however, we strip the scenery back and invite the audience to use their imaginations, our minds can change the setting in an instant. This is also a much more engaging way of creating theatre, as the audience is actively involved, working with the actors in the creation of a world. Music was used to great effect with a live band on stage throughout, making me realise that the sound-world of a piece of theatre is central to the atmosphere created. The play also confirmed to me the joys of a multi-roling cast, whilst also demonstrating that it is often necessary to have one central character played by one actor throughout, in order to give the audience a grounding focal point. All in all, this was a fantastic production and I congratulate everyone involved!
As all artists will know, finding ways of earning money alongside your creative projects is often the biggest challenge. The beginning of April has seen me start what I hope will be a lucrative venture into the world of corporate training, running communications workshops at the Informatics department at KCL. I really enjoyed my first session last week and have had very positive feedback. Fingers crossed this will be an area where I can continue to get work. It is an excellent way to keep money coming in, whilst utilising specialist theatre skills and allowing time for other creative projects.
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