Fear not, till Tom Ross-Williams do come to Dunsinane
A very nice lady called Fiona from the RSC came into the ensemble’s first rehearsal last Saturday and suggested the idea of a blog. Now, despite my wariness of up-to-date technological ways of communicating (I haven’t quite mastered tweeting yet), I thought I’d give it a go. So, having read the script and two rehearsals down the line I’m happy to report Dunsinane is going to be epic – set over a year, a cast of 24 and battles galore (it isn’t in verse, that was just my poor attempt at 11th century flair). In all honesty, plays like this don’t come around very often and “excited” doesn’t quite do it for a completely overwhelmed how-did-the-RSC-le-me-slip-through-the-ropes newbie like myself.
Yesterday was only the second rehearsal for the ensemble (even though it’s just over two weeks before previews) but this week we got to meet some of the other actors who play the principle soldiers – Jacob, Alex, Sam, Josh and Tony (that ball name-game clearly paid off). They joined us for a session with a Drill Sergeant who was teaching us some army protocol – a sharp wake-up call to the fact that perhaps the military is not for me. During these drills, I somehow managed to forget the fundamental principles of moving. Why I thought (or didn’t think) that marching was another world from walking is beyond me – swinging my same arm as leg and forgetting to bend my knees resulted in me looking more like a constipated duck than any sort of soldier. Ah well, it at least made me very grateful that Dunsinane is about guerrilla warfare rather than all that regimented stuff!
And while we’re on the topic of guerrilla war, it seems that the apes that I thought were associated with that kind of fighting, share the look I’m currently sporting. A couple of weeks ago we were called up by the always helpful and informative Kristi (our stage manager) and told that we were not allowed to cut our hair or shave. Now I should explain, as a blog can’t truly portray the phenomenon that is my facial hair, I’ve never grown a beard. Partly because I always get to that itchy stage and then shave it off and partly because I do genuinely start to look like a gorilla. I’ve always said that I could have a heart-shaped beard that went from my chin all the way up my cheeks and to my eyebrows…. You get the picture and it’s not pretty. So exactly 11 days after Kristi has told me that I cannot shave, I now look about a decade older and far more like the middle-stages of those Darwin Evolution posters you see… More on the trials and tribulations of facial hair growth in the future, I’m sure.
But just because it’s guerrilla war in Dunsinane, doesn’t mean we don’t have fancy weapons like swords and pickaxes and maces and daggers and crossbows and other medieval fighting equipment I don’t think have names anymore (I had to Google-image “maces”…). And when Anna, our movement director, said “just pick up any weapon” when we were playing Scottish rebel soldiers, you’d have thought you had witnessed a bunch of teenage girls on hearing that Topshop has 50% off and we were promptly told that “that’s enough axes for now”. And honestly I don’t think I’ve ever felt more “kick-ass” or “bad-ass” (you can probably tell from this blog that those are not the most frequently used words to describe me) in my life than yesterday when our fight director, Terry King, taught us how to swordfight. So be ready for some more “bad-ass” blogging soon…
Tom
