Mutabilitie Productions

Well, not exactly, but today was the last rehearsal before Christmas. Clockwork begins in three weeks and we’ve had around six rehearsals so far, with another two scheduled before the get in. Four of those rehearsals have been with the leading lady, and two have been with a full cast. It hasn’t been easy, but I think that it’s going to be okay.

Today, we cracked two of the most important scenes in the play. The first is when our heroine meets the boy she’s going to save. It’s been troubling us for weeks because the script contains no opportunity for them to really connect with each other, so the audience

a. doesn’t care about their friendship and

b. can’t understand why the heroine suddenly goes in all guns blazing in the next scene.

So what did we do? We set the stakes for the entirety of the final act in this one scene. The stakes are the highest you can get: the boy is dying, and dying pretty damn fast. We also added in some playing and dancing to show why the heroine cares that the little boy is dying (well, apart from, you know, him being a little boy who’s dying). We brainstormed it at the beginning of the rehearsal, and finally got around to putting it on its feet in the final fifteen minutes. Never have two actors worked so frenetically to achieve such a great results as Ellie and Katie. There were high fives all round when we finished.

The other scene was one between the heroine and one of our baddies. It mainly involves a key. Ellie and Tom play what has become known as ‘the key game’, where they try to get a key off each other throughout the scene. Up until now it’s been fine, but ‘fine’ won’t cut it for one of the most important scenes in the play. The intent has been there but it was sloppy. Today we blocked it out thoroughly. But more than that; I forbade the actors from raising their voices at all. The effect is so much more dramatic than two people having an all out shouting match at each other: it’s much more intense and focused and interesting to watch. The only problem was that the actor playing the villain, Tom, was stuck in Middlesborough due to the snow, so my co-producer Juliette was standing in for him. Which means that we’ll have to take precious hours out of our next rehearsal to teach Tom the new blocking etc.

As one of the actors, Carl, put it, “This is the point in rehearsals where you wish you had an extra month”.

Quite.