Something wicked this way comes…
Thursday 25th February
Somehow, inexplicably, we have just over one week left of Dunsinane. And I’m pretty sure this is the longest run any of the soldier chorus has ever done, so it’s quite a marvel that we’ve found it to fly by. In fact, I think we’ll all be so gutted when it comes to an end that we may just have to hold fort in the Hampstead Theatre’s rehearsal room (our dressing room) until we feel rehabilitated back to the real world. Otherwise we’ll end up wearing medieval costumes to Tesco and trying to speak Gaelic at the Post Office and we all know how that story ends…
What’s seemed to really help keep each night fresh and exciting has in fact a lot do with the backstage banter. As in any show, there are lots of little rituals that accompany each performance, from very conventional ones like the warm-up and the fight-call to more quirky additions of our own like playing hip-hop music as we get into costume and finding ridiculous names for the two female members of the cast who have to dress up as male soldiers for the first scene. But it’s probably ‘story-time’ that takes the biscuit for my favourite backstage activity.
For the past couple of weeks just before the 2nd half, whilst the five of us who play Scottish prisoners are tied together by a rope attached to our feet and shackles around our hands, Catherine (our Assistant Stage Manager) tells us some horrific story or other to get us in “the mood”. This ‘mood’ that I talk of is the ‘mood’ of 5 boys who have been captured by the English army on suspicion that they might be the Queen’s son, having burnt all the other men in town: fathers, brothers etc before their very eyes. So spine-tinglingly abhorrent anecdotes about stage fights going wrong, childhood accidents and real ghost stories are all in fact very appropriate for this part of the play. But it’s just the sheer pleasure that Catherine gets from telling these gruesome accounts that is probably what makes them so dark. And there always seems to be some very obvious moral tacked hurriedly on to the end of them like: “and that’s why you’re meant to wear hard-hats”, says Catherine with a beaming smile…
I’m not quite sure how this ritual began, but I think it was just the fact of having us all in her power, quite literally, that she thought she’d inflict on us tales of the highest morbidity: “Are you sitting comfortably?….” – most certainly not! This week has marked a change in the proceedings however, as Catherine felt she wasn’t getting her own fair share of guts and gore and so it’s been our turn to tell the stories. Highlights have included Martin’s parable of “The dead dog on the tube” and Jeremy’s explanation of how he came to be called “Testiclops” (you can try and figure that one out on your own). And I think I may have succeeded in bringing the bloodiest story of them all but it’s still early days and I’m pretty sure it’s not a bloggable anecdote in any case!
So when you come and see the show, and you witness the shocked/terrified/appalled faces of the Scottish hostages at the start of the 2nd half – yes we’ll be “in the mood” of traumatised boys who have just watched their fathers burn alive, but also, we’ll still be reeling from Catherine’s delightful addition to Dunsinane of ‘story-time’.
Until next time!
Tom
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
