Six weeks inside a physical theatre rehearsal.
I sat in the corner of a rehearsal room four mornings a week for six weeks. I took notes that I mostly could not read back. What follows is a diary, of sorts — by someone who entered as an outsider and left, by the end, mostly converted.
The ensemble had agreed to let me sit in on the condition that I write nothing about the work itself until after it opened. That bargain is now expired. The piece is in previews at a small venue in Vauxhall — the work is called, for now, Threshold, though the title is provisional and may not survive the run.
I am not, by training, a theatre critic. I came to performance late and from outside, and I had never sat in on a rehearsal before this one. The notes that follow are not a guide to physical theatre rehearsal in general — only to this particular room, on these particular mornings, with these particular five people.
Week one — the floor
The first morning was spent on the floor. By which I mean: the company arrived, took off their shoes, and lay down for forty minutes. The director sat on a chair at the side. There was no music. There were no instructions beyond "find the floor."
I was, I will admit, restless. I had spent twenty years writing about projects with measurable inputs and timelines, and the idea that the first day of a six-week process was to be spent lying still struck me, in the moment, as faintly self-indulgent. By the third day of similar floor work, I had revised this view. By the second week, I was beginning to suspect — and have since become more sure — that everything else in the rehearsal followed from how completely the company learned to inhabit the floor in week one.
I had revised, by week two, the entire mental model I had brought to the room. The floor was not preamble. It was foundation.
Week two — translation
The second week introduced text. The text came from a fragmentary source — letters between two siblings during a long absence — which the director had collected from a family archive donated to a regional museum. The company never spoke the letters aloud. They were instead given to each performer individually, read in silence, and then "carried" into the room.
The work of week two was translation: what does a sentence about waiting for a letter become, when the body has to make it visible? The morning sessions were long, often quiet, occasionally hilarious. There was one afternoon when a single phrase — "I cannot tell, from your last, if you mean to come back" — was worked on for three hours by two performers without resolution. They did not solve it that day. They returned to it in week four.
Week three — building, undoing
The third week produced the first sketches of scenes. By the Friday, there was something like a draft running order: nine scenes, totalling perhaps thirty-five minutes, all unstable. The director's notes were not "more of this" or "less of that" but, repeatedly, "what is this for?" — a question which I came to recognise as the central editorial instrument of the rehearsal.
By week four, perhaps four of those nine scenes had been completely dismantled and rebuilt; one had been removed entirely; one new scene had been added. The piece was no longer the piece of the third week, but it was recognisably its descendant.
Week four — the visitor
A dramaturg arrived on the Tuesday of week four. She watched a full run-through, took no notes during it, and afterwards spoke for ninety minutes. I had been warned that this was likely to be the hardest day of the process. It was not the hardest, but it was the most candid.
The notes were specific and unsparing — not about acting or shape, but about what the work was, repeatedly, failing to ask. There were three things, she said, that the piece had not yet decided about itself. Until it decided, no amount of refinement would help.
I expected the room to be defensive. It was not. By the Friday, the company had made decisions about all three. They were not the decisions I would have predicted from the Tuesday's discussion. They were, the director told me later, decisions the room had been quietly avoiding for two weeks.
Week five — repetition
The fifth week was the closest the rehearsal came to anything I recognised from other working environments. It was repetition. The piece was now in shape; the work was to make every choice repeatable. Mornings were spent running sections back-to-back, sometimes three or four times in a sitting, with the director watching from different positions in the room each time. Afternoons were given over to single-scene polishing.
This was the week in which I began to see how the piece would actually land in front of an audience. Several moments which had baffled me in earlier weeks became, in repetition, legible. Other moments which had seemed to me to be working stopped working under repeated attention — and were quietly cut.
Week six — letting go
The final week was tech, and tech is its own world. I went in once, briefly, but the room had moved from the rehearsal studio into the theatre, and the ecology of the project had changed: lighting designers, a sound engineer, a stage manager. The intimacy of the rehearsal room had become the scaffolding of an opening night.
I watched the dress run from the back of the auditorium. I will not write about what happens in the piece itself, except to say this: many of the moments I had watched being made, and re-made, and dismantled, and recovered, were present. None of them looked, from where I was sitting, like work. They looked, instead, like the inevitable next move.
What I learned
I came in expecting to see craft. I saw craft, but I also saw something else, which is harder to describe and which I have been trying to describe for the past three weeks. What I saw was the slow, patient work of a small group of people refusing to settle for what was almost-but-not-quite the thing. Every decision was provisional until the next decision argued for it.
By the end, I had stopped asking when they would "finish." It became clear that what they were making was not the kind of thing that finishes — only the kind of thing that opens.
The piece runs in previews this week, with a short run from the 14th. I will not be reviewing it. Someone less compromised by the rehearsal room is welcome to that job.