Rehearsals Week One and Two
Welcome welcome one and all to our Officially Earnest rehearsal blog for The Importance of Being Earnest!
My name is Chani and I’m the assistant director (on a 6 month placement through the Birkbeck, University of London Director’s Scheme) on this wonderful show. Drop in weekly for insider scoops, gossip and hot takes straight from the rehearsal room— tracking our journey from first day of rehearsals to opening night. I invite you to read these entries in the knowledge that my aim is both to inform and entertain; whilst these anecdotes are fully rooted in the reality of our day-to-day work, in the spirit of one of the most famous comedy plays in the world, we must never take ourselves too seriously.
FIRST DAY
What a miserable week of rain to perfectly juxtapose our glorious start to rehearsals. Lines were deliberated, sets designs debuted, and foolish farcical fun was had by all.
The first day of any rehearsal process is always a big deal. At the Mercury, we start on the Monday of Week 1 with a meet-and-greet for the new cast of the show to meet the permanent staff in the building and vise-versa. Once everyone has said their hello’s, we got straight down to business with a first reading of the play. This reading is a great chance for everyone in the building to get excited about the play and also for the actors to get a flavor of what is to come.
Next up, the designer— in our case the incredible Katie Lias— gives their Model Box Presentation. Katie and our director, Ryan McBryde, talked the cast through the set and costume designs for the show using a scaled-down model of the set and reference images and drawings for the costumes (these are always very exciting affairs with sufficient ‘ooo’ing and ‘ahhh’ing from the room— and I’m happy to report that this Monday was no exception). The design can be perfectly summed up as ‘English Fantasia’. Ryan and Katie want to emphasise the intrinsic Britishness of the play whilst also acknowledging its absurd and fantastical nature. We are updating the play to the 1950s, which places the action right at the beginning of the post-war fall of the Aristocracy in Britain. This shift allows for an even more scathing look at the upper-classes, but also unlocks a gorgeous cultural well of 50s music, colour, and fashions for us to draw from. Think Alice-in-Wonderland-meets-Bridgerton-meets-Wes-Anderson and you won’t be far off.
To round off the morning, the cast and creative team played two truths and one lie as a ‘get to know you’ game. Some room-favourite truths were: Harrie (playing Gwendolyn) worked on a goat farm in Transylvania and Martin (playing Dr Chasuble) recently sent in an application for series 3 of The Traitors.
TEXT WORK
With an exciting morning behind us, the hard work began. For any play, and for Oscar Wilde especially, text work is crucial. Wilde’s humor is sewn into the precisely chosen and ordered words on the page so to do his plays justice, the text must be properly analyzed and understood. We began reading through the play again, but this time stopping whenever there was a question to be asked or discussion to be had. This work is thorough, and the whole company always comes out with a far deeper understanding of the world of the play, it’s characters, and it’s contexts.
As we made our way through the three acts, we made lists and diagrams as we went: key themes, family trees, characters mentioned offstage, a timeline, and dates to be updated/fact-checked. These all become important character resources and reference points for the room. Maybe what we discovered most was just how much homoerotic subtext Wilde has hidden into the lines. The rule became, ‘if it sounds like a euphemism it probably is’… even ‘Cecily’ was a Victorian nickname for callboys. And although many of these references do not land for us today, they shed so much light on how densely packed the script is with double meaning and subversion of societal norms.
Going through the text inspired Suz (playing Lane and Merriman) to go home and dive headfirst into butler school research and Harrie into 50s finishing school for aristocratic young ladies. But perhaps the most controversial debate we had, was over the pronunciation of the name Cecily. ‘Seh-Si-Lee’ or ‘Sis-uh-lee’ (like the country) ? Which did we go with? You’ll have to come and see…
UP ON IT’S FEET
By Wednesday afternoon, it was time to start to play in the space. For the rest of the week, we worked section by section: at first reading the scene in the space and then beginning to improvise and stage how it might look— sofa choreography, teacup etiquette, and sandwich routines. We always tried more than one version of events, with the understanding that nothing was too silly and you never know what might be discovered when you let loose.
The first order of business every morning is a vocal and physical warmup; tongue twisters to help with diction being an absolute must. Often Ryan uses ‘actioning’ – giving a verb that the actor can play on a line— e.g. Miss Prism’s line, ‘Do not ask me Mr Worthing’ could be played as pleading or scolding, with very different outcomes. Actioning is a great exercise for both distilling what is often the very verbose way characters express themselves in Wilde’s world, but also giving directing notes in a practical way allowing an actor to still experiment and play.
At the end of the week the company learnt a musical number— with the incredible Suz on the accordion. And by the end of week two I’m very pleased to report we have made it through the entire show- ready for week 3 of touch-ups and perfecting. Tune in next time for some animal studies, an intense muffin workshop, and lots and lots of tea.
Fact of the Week: £130,000 in 1895, is equivalent to £14,000,000 in today’s money.
Book for the show: mercurytheatre.co.uk/event/the-importance-of-being-earnest-2/
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