Rehearsing the unknown

Sometimes I think it is expected of us (directors) to enter the rehearsal room on the first day knowing exactly what we’re doing. Expected that we know what the show will look like, or even what it is at all. Well this isn’t necessarily true.

A rehearsal process always starts with the unknown; the script. In a devising process the unknown is more accepted and expected. Invited in even. So should be the case in script-based work. In many regards of course the script is very known, too known perhaps. Everyone involved has probably read it more than enough times (should have at least) so it’s saturated their skull, body, their very being. This is the point where sticking happens; you’ve sat alone reading and re-reading, sticking to the words on the page and what they have to offer.

Here’s the point when, as a director, you have absolutely no idea how you’re going to work on this script – what you’re going to do to unlock it. And that’s the point, you’re not going to do anything. What happens next is down to you and a group of actors (maybe a number of designers too), and until you get into a room to work for the first time you absolutely can’t know what you’re going to do. Of course you can have ideas, but these can’t be set in stone before rehearsals have begun.

This unknown can often make a first rehearsal fairly nerve-wracking. Knowing a group of people will be looking to you to shed some light on the unknown. Well it’s okay, because the rehearsal process welcomes the unknown and what you really aught to do is illuminate the unknown so you can all explore if further. The early stages should be a journey through the spaces in the script led only by trepidation and a sense of adventure. A willingness to explore and to find out what this thing called ‘script’ actually is.

Not knowing in the early stages is okay, it’s when you reach performance and the play is still a complete unknown that you may not have done your job right…then again, some plays desire to remain an unknown forever…

Monkey Bars by ChrisGoodeandCompany

The overall highlight of my Edinburgh Fringe 2012 was an honest, playful and enthusiastic piece of verbatim theatre by ChrisGoodeandCompany in collaboration with the Unicorn theatre. The play was Monkey Bars and the theme was childhood.

In a lovely subversion of the convention when approaching this theme the voices of children were spoken by adult performers. An astoundingly good ensemble company – no surprise when you read the biographies of those making up ChrisGoodeandCompany. It is, to put it bluntly, a company made up of over-achievers (I mean this only as high praise, not insult). Put together the theatrical, televisual and filmic experience of the group and they could account for a large amount of the country’s cultural offerings in recent years. So the cast and production team are talented, but the subject of the play and the words spoken are what lift it into the realm of brilliant theatre.

A description of the company in the front of the play-text claims they produce ‘often uncategorisable’ performance projects. Well, yes, this seems to be true. Monkey Bars is the first I’ve seen of their work, but it takes the genre of verbatim theatre and treats it differently to how you might expect. That is to say that the term verbatim theatre often carries with it a certain heaviness, a serious weight as perhaps we’ve come to expect the verbatim to be all about “serious issues” for which fictionalised words (or indeed worlds) just won’t do.

Not that Monkey Bars was trivial, or trivialised any of the issues it was dealing with. But it was fun – obviously fun to perform and immense fun to watch. The natural comedy that comes from the strange things children say and do leapt out and the enthusiasm was infectious. The humour often came from the disjunct between the child’s voice and the adult performer embodying it – the space between what was said and our laughter served to highlight the two different worlds being portrayed. Because there certainly are two very distinct worlds – child and adult. Something I don’t think I’d truly considered before but that this play really brought to life. When you’re an adult you don’t seem to think so much about the transition from childhood to where you are now, always seeing yourself as the same person at heart. What Monkey Bars really documents is that transition – the fact that the child’s world is completely different, but brilliantly interesting as well.

One conversation between two boys on a park bench addresses the sate of ‘our generation’. Discussing the unacceptable shortness of girls’ skirts and involvement in the riots. It’s a world view and debate you don’t expect to be coming from young mouths, which begs to the question what do we expect?

In a world where young people are frequently snubbed and pushed aside, given disparaging looks and even feared Monkey Bars offers a glimpse of their world and shows that children are worth listening to.

This verbatim work is wonderfully entertaining, the actors perfectly capture the idiosyncrasies of their subjects in a way that offers parallels to Alecky Blythe’s London Road – another verbatim piece that plays with the genre by turning it into a musical. Interestingly I think I’d veer more towards the use of the word documentary over verbatim to describe this play. Documentary offers up more imaginative worlds as a phrase than verbatim does somehow. There’s such broad scope in the documentaries on offer in the film world, and documentary filmmaking is a highly regarded art in itself. Is this true of verbatim (or documentary) theatre making? Because it should be. What ChrisGoodeandCompany show with Monkey Bars is that the truth doesn’t limit theatre, there still remain realms of imaginative possibility when the words spoken and characters portrayed are very real. In fact, sometimes reality can spark the imagination far more than fantasy…

Monkey Bars is currently touring the UK and tour information can be found here.