And just like that, we are somehow already halfway through rehearsals for our graduating production of Caucasian Chalk Circle!
The last three weeks have been some of the most exciting, creative, sapping, and completely absurd devising work I have ever experienced as a theatre-maker. Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Epic Theatre’ masterpiece demands a certain level of crazy, and our director Jesse Jones (acclaimed founder of Bristol’s Wardrobe Ensemble) has been fostering an environment where any-and-all ideas are welcome. This has allowed a freedom wherein our show can continually evolve. When I think about what our vision for the play was just a week ago…
In a full-time rehearsal period, massive shifts can happen every day.
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Perhaps one of the fundamental problems that Bristol Old Vic (and indeed many theatre schools, I imagine) faces is finding plays that can provide enough performance opportunity for a cast of fourteen graduating actors. Caucasian Chalk Circle has over forty characters, some with significant journeys, and some that appear onstage for only a few lines. In any case, it is an ideal show in that it gives everyone plenty to work with.
We were given an initial casting list a week before we returned to school/began rehearsal, with the proviso that everything was up for potential change, depending on the plethora of staging decisions that had to made. Thus, much of the first week of rehearsal was spent reading the play, discussing what character-doubling would and wouldn’t work, and casting the characters that had not yet been assigned. Our first full read-through was an experiment (to say the least), but we finished the first week with a decent understanding of the play as a whole (which has five acts) and our numerous roles within the story.
The goal of week two was to get some bare-bones version of the show on its feet. Each day we tackled one of the acts, and I’ve got to say we exceeded expectations in terms of how solid our concepts were by the end of each day. I completely agree with Jesse’s ethos that its much better to have a very rough idea of the whole show early on, than to focus on perfecting small sections of the show in the early stages. “If they have somehow f***ed up the date our season, and its next week, at least have something to show.” Obviously the show is confidential at the moment so I won’t go into details, but I can say that every day brought out new ideas of genre, style, music, movement and overall vibe.
Week three is yet to be completed (I’m writing on Thursday night), but so far we have been working on refining the through-lines and thematic elements of the show, doing a full stumble-through of the show to see which bits are good, and which are a complete disaster, and developing the musical elements of our show.
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Working on the show has been a refreshing change of pace from the first 27 weeks at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Our class has been itching to sink our teeth into a big project, and Caucasian Chalk Circle is certainly proving to be a mammoth task! There is a long, long way to go until we are ready to show to the general public at the end of June, but the skeleton of a brilliant show is there.
Further show diaries to come…
JCL xx
"Doing The Work"- Reflections on Drama School. 