Director’s Notes: On Recasting

Posted on by under Mankind, Musings, News, Production

Following our recent need to recruit some new cast members for our revival of ‘Mankind’, our Artistic Director shares some of her opinions on the idea and process of recasting.

I’ve always marvelled at the phenomenon of long-running shows, or those which tour multiple companies of the same production simultaneously. A sort of “quality control” aims to make sure that audiences in Beijing, Los Angeles, or Leeds are seeing pretty much the same thing; you can see the production in 1990 and again in 2010 and it looks more or less identical. It’s not so much the degree of planning and oversight it must take to pull this off. It’s the actors. Dozens of individuals, with their own talents and creative processes, somehow manage to inhabit the same character, and in very nearly the same way. I’ve often wondered what it must mean to them, creatively, to not only have to do their basic job of acting, but to do it knowing that there is, effectively, only one “right” result.

Since we have been faced with the task of recasting a few parts for our revival of Mankind, due to some actors from our November production being unable to return, I’ve been thinking about this a great deal. As we’re trying to keep it quite similar to that earlier performance, we don’t want a significant shakeup in the characterizations. But I also believe firmly that actors have to be allowed to find their own way to a character, to merge what is on the page with what they imagine. Performances aren’t things which roll off a conveyor belt, identical; you can’t just put Actor A into Actor B’s place and expect that everything will stay the same, not if you actually value their work and their contribution to the process.

This is especially true, I think, with medieval drama, where the “character clues” in the text are fewer. With characters drawn to type and non-specificity, their individuality and believability comes largely from what the actors bring to the table. The characters that are built, and their relationships with one another, are open to an awful lot of interpretation. Because we aren’t starting from scratch, in casting we needed to contemplate not only whether an actor would fit well with a part, but how well they might “click” with their opposite – Mercy with Mankind, or the two N’s. After all, while actor chemistry isn’t necessary, it certainly helps!

This was very much held in mind as we were recasting the vacant roles. As always in casting, there’s an element of gambling involved, of trying, instinctively, to imagine how people will work together and how the personality you meet at an audition or interview will translate into a working process and resultant performance. Parameters or pre-existing ideas, born of an earlier run of the production, definitely make this process more challenging.

We were fortunate to have a fantastic cast in November, and I think we’re equally fortunate in our April group. Our new people are talented and enthusiastic, and as always I’m looking forward to get into rehearsals and see where they go with their parts. Helping them find their own path into previously established roles will be an interesting challenge: I want to give them room to discover and create, without the results taking the production in a different direction than the one we’ve already set. Unlike a first performance, the sky isn’t really the limit; at this point, there actually are “wrong” answers. But if creating a performance is a journey, there are many different roads you can take to arrive at similar destinations.

If you had the chance to see our November performance of Mankind, I do hope you’ll come along for the April revival and see what might have come from our experiences on those different “paths”!

‘Mankind’: Defining Our Revival

Posted on by under Mankind, Musings, News, Production

We have had long discussions about what constitutes a revival and what we hope to achieve in April by returning to ‘Mankind’.  Our Artistic Director sets out some of our conclusions below.

Revival:

  1. The action of reviving something after decline or discontinuance; restoration to general use
  2. The action or an act of staging a new production of an old play, musical, etc.,
  3. Restoration or return to life or consciousness
  4. Restoration to activity or vigour; improvement in condition, strength, etc.

                                             – Oxford English Dictionary

Revival is one of those very tricky words, where everyone thinks they know what it means, but often you end up with different interpretations.

To give one example: during the 1951 productions of the York, Chester, and Coventry mystery play cycles, each one was referred to as a “revival”, because it was bringing back plays that hadn’t been seen for more than four hundred years. Yet none of them was performed in the original Middle English, and all of them were radically reworked. In York entire plays were cut to create one omnibus play; in Chester a few lines were kept from each play so that they could claim they’d performed the “entire” cycle; in Coventry, the two surviving plays were elided together into one. Are these revivals? Re-imaginings? Re-creations? And where does that leave the subsequent half-century of regular performances, most of which have involved a new (reworked) script, new music, new casts, and entirely different staging? Are these the revivals? According to the definitions given by the OED, they are also revivals, in any definition. And yet those other words also feel tempting, and perhaps more accurate.

All historic drama is revival, inherently, but they are always revivals of plays rather than productions. With medieval drama in particular, we simply don’t know enough about their original staging to revive those productions. And, given that the cycle plays, at least, were being performed regularly for multiple centuries, one would be hard-pressed to define any version as “definitive”. They were revivals even in their own – long – period.

When it came to our production of Mankind, we set out to define what we meant by revival very deliberately. Although our production is a revival in the second definition given above when compared to the medieval original, we are not creating a new production from scratch. We are, rather, dusting off the one from last autumn. There will be some changes, but we are keeping it as close to November’s performance as possible. These changes are more in line with what might be expected if a production is on tour: details change as venues do, but the essential aspects of the piece remain the same. Ours is a “return to life” rather than a new production altogether.

As a process, then, we have been careful to only change those things which are required of necessity, rather than desire. Just because we could do something differently, doesn’t mean we should in this case. Sure, it might be fun to let Titivillus enter with a fanfare and pyros going off, but that wasn’t part of the original plan, so it won’t be there now, either. The change in venue means we have to reconsider some of the entrances and exits; they will be kept as close to the original intention as possible, although their dramatic impact is more important than actual physical proximity to the November performance. How the relationship with the audience will change, when some of them are in raised seating, remains to be seen; the hope is that the answer is “not terribly much”. We have consciously tried to keep the intimacy of the audience/actor relationship, as we feel that this juxtaposition works particularly well for medieval drama, given that it was written for performance with a physically proximate audience and a lack of the “fourth wall” boundaries that we’re so accustomed to today.

No doubt there will be other challenges as we progress toward the performances in April. What shouldn’t change are the impressive talents and enthusiasm of the cast, or the distinct sense of fun that this most delightful of medieval plays offers.

Mankind’s Latin: A Conundrum

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Mankind, Production

This week our Artistic Director contemplates Mankind’s ability to read and write in Latin.

In the modern (and western) world, we take it more or less as read- pun intended- that people are literate. While I’m sure it’s exciting for parents, to watch their child take first, tentative steps into reading, it’s a normalised step in our learning process. Whether it comes easily or not, there is a presumption that we will acquire literacy at some point in our young lives. Of course, there is still illiteracy in the world, especially if we take a widely global perspective, but for you, reading this, it’s probably something that’s been taken pretty much for granted.

This is a relatively recent development. In the Middle Ages, an ability to read and write was nowhere near as commonplace as it is today. Most people didn’t need to read, and didn’t really have the time to learn. Class status mattered: the more wealth you had, the more powerful you were, the greater the odds you would have at least some degree of literacy. While there is a substantial argument that “literacy” can be auditory as well as actually accessing words off a page, it is the traditional meaning of literacy that matters for this discussion, and agreement seems to remain that most medieval peasants were not, in the usual sense of the term, “literate”.

And yet, Mankind, our eponymous peasant, who is clearly shown to be poor, overworked, and largely powerless in his society, is capable of writing. And not just writing, but writing in Latin, and understanding what he writes. We see him print onto a badge which he wears. These aren’t words we’ve heard him given by Mercy; it’s something he clearly understands on his own. What’s up with that?

There is no indication that Mankind has ever been of a higher station than he is at present- he’s not a down-on-his luck nobleman who might have learned as a child and just happens to find himself in poor circumstances. There was more social mobility by the late fifteenth century than previously: post-plague economic circumstances were to the advantage of the working class, as this labour force had diminished and was therefore more valuable, and a distinct merchant and middle class was rapidly developing. But even so, Mankind’s poverty is one of the central issues of the play, and why the Vices can tempt him away so easily- he is desperate for a life that is not all drudgery for little reward. Even in the late 1400’s, a peasant farmer would not have the resources of either time or money to be learning to read. (The printing press, invented around 1440, predates the play by a few decades, but was still a way from the mass-market-cheap-paperback phase, by a few centuries.)

A casual discussion with a colleague recently ended up with the question of whether he could be a monastic lay-brother. These were members of a monastic community who were not educated, or ordained, as clergy, but who performed the manual labour functions of the community, such as farming, cooking, etc. Although I have never found any academic suggestion of this possibility, I find it a rather intriguing idea. Titivillus suggests that Mankind should take a woman, “and your own wife betray”, which certainly argues against it. But this is the only real hint that Mankind has a spouse, and earlier Nought has offered to find Mankind a wife, which would suggest he might not be married. Of course, marital status is only one potential clue, but it would certainly make the Vices’ temptations more scandalous if the “spouse” they were encouraging Mankind to betray was the church to which he had committed himself. Mankind’s spiritual ignorance and weakness are perhaps the strongest arguments against his having any formal association with a religious order, but the idea, none the less, would be interesting to explore more fully.

The truth is that there is no immediately obvious, logical explanation for why Mankind is able to write, in Latin. And this is one of the challenges of medieval plays, which we have to keep in mind. Today’s theatre is so much the product of years of “reality” being the goal, it’s hard to come to terms with the fact that fifteenth-century playwrights weren’t really interested in writing “characters”, not the sort we think of today, who are fully realised and realistic. Their goals were the ideas of the piece as a whole, the moral lesson, not the individuals inhabiting the drama. As a rather amusing article argues, you certainly can use modern acting methods, including “The Method” itself, to approach medieval drama. (1) But you have to accept that everything won’t weave together with perfect smoothness, and there may be aspects that don’t entirely make sense to logic, either historically or internally to the character. Mankind should not, logically, be able to read and write, and yet he can, and does. These are the moments where medieval drama becomes challenging, and we have to accept that it is a slightly different species than twentieth-century drama. While I’m sure some actors would have a hard time working with the “you just have to accept” attitude that medieval drama occasionally requires of them, the vast majority of people seem to be able to get to the emotional core of the character, regardless of these inconsistencies. And that is exactly what the drama demands, and what it was intended to give its audience.

Our Mankind, of course, is set in the twenty-first century, when it’s entirely probably that Mankind can read and write (though Latin is still beyond the pale for most of us). That discrepancy had nothing to do with our decision to move the play’s setting forward, but it is rather nice that it can help with the difficulty.

 

(1) Tydeman, Bill, ‘Stanislavski in the Garden of Gethsemane’, Medieval English Theatre 5.1, 1983, p. 53-57.

Director’s Notes: Why Revive ‘Mankind’?

Posted on by under Mankind, News, Production

This week Laura, our Artistic Director, explains some of the reasons behind our upcoming revival of ‘Mankind’.

Given that there are several pages of “that would be an interesting project” lists in the HIDden files, it might come as a surprise that we’re dusting off Mankind and putting it on again. Although it is one of my favourite medieval English plays, there are a lot of reasons beyond that for why it’s coming back, and we thought it would be nice to let you in on our logic.

Our production last November was something we were really proud of. In our ideal world, it would not have been a one-off performance. Circumstances beyond our control, meant that we had to limit the performance to a single evening. And that was a shame, because we knew that there were lots of people who had wanted to come but could not be there on that one and only night. Moreover, we have a brilliant cast who put a lot of hard work and energy into the play, and they deserved more than one night’s showing of what they’d created. So we were toying with the idea that we might bring it out again, even before that performance happened.

Another major factor was an unexpected opening in our calendar. We had been in discussion with Charles Hunt about putting on the York Fall of Angels this spring, to go along with the Mystery Plays taking part in the Minster during the mid-summer. In 2012 we worked with Charles to produce The Noah Play on a waggon in the streets of York, as an adjunct to the large-scale production in St Mary’s Abbey. It was a nice reminder that the plays have a dual history, and that both forms have come to have a place in York’s heart and history. We were looking forward to doing it again.

Sadly, Charles passed away suddenly in November, on the day that Mankind was performed. We didn’t think that it would be right to continue with The Fall of Angels without him, as it had been his brainchild in the beginning, and so we were suddenly left without a spring project. With the cast still nearby and probably able to remember the production easily, it made sense to use the space for the theoretical revival of Mankind. The production is dedicated to Charles’ memory, not only because of the timing, but because if he had been in better health we felt he would have made a wonderful member of the cast. We knew he wouldn’t be able to take on that project, but one of Charles’s great gifts was for fostering new talent, and we’re sure he would have approved of how the character turned out.

Staging another medieval play in some proximity to the Mystery Plays, which have evolved far beyond their twentieth century status as “medieval revivals” into being a modern phenomenon in their own right, was important to us as a way of continuing to give the community a connection to the historic aspects of the plays of that era. But (without getting into the academic arguments about an evolutionary model of drama development) we are also looking at Mankind as a step forward in theatre, too. We are hoping it will be part of a greater exploration of some of the directions morality plays took as time went along.

Not all decisions are written in moonlight and dreams, some are utterly practical and hard-headed. In most respects, the revival of Mankind comes from that sort of pragmatism. But that’s not to say we aren’t excited about it. It will be nice to get this wonderful group back together, and to share this very funny and occasionally sweet story with more of you! We hope you’ll be there with us to see it!

Director’s Notes: Repeat, Replay

Posted on by under Mankind, Musings, News, Production

In anticipation of our revival of Mankind our Artistic Director contemplates the revisiting of art.

“That’s one thing that’s always… been a major difference, between the performing arts, to me, and being a painter… A painter does a painting, and he does a painting, that’s it, you know? He’s had the joy of creating it and he hangs it on some wall somewhere, somebody buys it, somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it… but nobody ever says to him, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, “Paint ‘A Starry Night’ again, man!”-Joni Mitchell

That quote is at the beginning of a recording of a song I’ve listened to over and over again – literally thousands of times, I’m sure, over the past twenty-five years. (“Circle Game”, on Miles of Aisles). I’m that person who will play a song on loop for days, or weeks. So I appreciate the spirit Mitchell is talking about – that some things are so loved, we return to them again and again and again. But it was only last week that I really stopped to think about it, and I came to the conclusion that “finished” art actually isn’t, and that you don’t truly perform the same thing over and over again, even if it may initially seem that way. And it seemed relevant, as we are preparing to return to Mankind again, to share that with you.

In fact, art (by which I mean “fixed” art- painting, sculpting, etc. – something where there is a tangible end product) is reproduced all the time. Today it is also photographed and digitised, but you can still see art students in galleries learning their craft through copying the masters. You’ve probably seen “Starry Night” on coffee mugs, or calendars. Is it the same thing as the original? Of course not, but you’d still recognise what it was – much like seeing two different performances of the same play. Different brush strokes, same overall impression.

Moreover, although we tend to see a painting as simply existing, that is not enough: like performance, it has an audience. There is a viewer who interacts with it in some fashion, even if that is just a glance; they contemplate what it means, or are captivated by its colours. Visual art is exactly that: meant to be seen. And just like a play, a different audience on a different occasion will see different things. Maybe the lighting will be slightly brighter, or the viewer is sleepy. It will change what they see and how they feel about it. The initial act of painting may be singular – it’s true that Van Gogh only really got to do that specific copy of the painting one time – but between varieties of copying and the long life of the physical painting, it is revisited over and over. The difference, then, between the kind of art you hang on the wall in a museum and the kind you see when you go to a performance is largely a question of tangible durability.

So… we’re coming back to Mankind. I’m not claiming it’s a masterpiece in any way comparable to a Van Gogh painting. But I am rather fond of the production. It’s one of my favourite medieval plays, and the cast are a lovely group of people who bring it to life delightfully. Unlike the performance in November, which was a further step from our initial staged reading in Bristol, we’re not making major changes: we’re pretty happy with the show we have. Last autumn, circumstances meant that we couldn’t give it the run we would have liked it to have. It deserves a wider audience. And so we decided to do it again.

It won’t be exactly the same production, any more than a photograph of “A Starry Night” is “A Starry Night”. Time changes things, and no two performances are identical anyway. We’re in a different venue, one which will speak more to the modern qualities of the production than the medieval. The cast will be slightly different. We’ll probably have the opportunity to perfect a few minor details. But it’s still our Mankind, brought back to life, and maybe with a few small adjustments. I for one can’t wait.

HIDden Theatre Presents ‘Mankind’, a Revival

Posted on by under Mankind, News, Production

We are very excited to be reviving our production of Mankind from last Autumn at Upstage Theatre, 41 Monkgate, York for a run of four performances 14th-16th April 2016, 7.30pm with a Saturday matinée at 2.30pm.  The Friday performance will be followed by a post-show talk and discussion.

Join us for a performance of the funniest of English medieval plays! Mankind is the story of a farmer’s temptation away from his work by a group of Vices and demons, intent on getting him hooked on the pleasures of the modern world at the expense of his higher nature. Will he be saved by the loyal friendship of Mercy, or will he give in to the fashionable whims offered him by Mischief, New-Guise, and Nought?

For further information please see our Current Projects page.

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Mind the Gap: Research Between the Lines

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Musings

This week our Artistic Director, Laura Elizabeth Rice, has been considering gaps in historical evidence and how this can affect both academia and theatre.

In my “other” life, I spend a lot of time working on my PhD thesis, which focuses on performances of medieval plays during the 1951 Festival of Britain. At first that must seem completely removed from HIDden. Actually, some days – many days – there isn’t that much difference between the two. I’ve written previously about some of the places I go to for theatrical inspiration, and it probably goes without saying that the first source of inspiration is, of course, the text itself: the play is the first place to look for ideas, suggestions, and what aspects catch your eye. I mention this because, while the text is the play, quite literally, it is also an artefact itself, a document which exists from some earlier point in time, and that’s where I start looking next for ideas: the past, the records, of what we know about that play from its previous incarnations. Research for my thesis or research for HIDden: in both cases, the documentation is similar, with frequently identical gaps in the record.

In both cases, a lot of the records that I have to work with are detached from the productions almost entirely: they’re actually civic records, minutes and accounts of city government which had some hand in organising and/or financing the plays. It’s more true for the medieval than more modern events, but in both cases, records from the people who actually worked on the plays are pretty limited. (This is especially true of the small towns which put on medieval plays in 1951. In many of those cases, the medieval records actually offer more information than is available for events just sixty years ago!) These records offer oblique information at best: for example, X amount of money was spent on the repair of an angel’s wings. That tells us that a) the angels had wings, and b) they were made of a material with a certain cost, which might hint at what that material was, but… that’s it. Put enough of these pieces together, where you can, and you can start to get a vague idea of what a play might have been like. (And to those who are really curious, I would direct you to the extraordinary Records of Early English Drama, a massive and ongoing compilation of these information nuggets.) You’ll never find a document that says, “This is what our play was like.” You always have to imagine it from the bits and pieces.

While the Middle Ages has been my area of speciality, the same concerns exist across most other eras as well. The need to create a documentary record of performances was never foremost in anyone’s mind, so what has been saved is haphazard rather than deliberate. “The play’s the thing”, not the archive. At some point, I hope to sit down and write about the issues, ideas, and debates around documenting performances deliberately (and whether we even should, or can), but for the present, suffice to say that for academic work, the random survival of records makes it very challenging to write accurately about what a play or performance might have been like. I confess that I was surprised by this: I had assumed that the 1950’s would be much better documented than the fifteenth century; just like that earlier period, it all depends on whether a performance happened in an area that was urban or rural, wealthy or impoverished, and whether the city government, rather than ad hoc groups of citizens, was the driving force behind a performance. In the latter case, even today, you can be pretty sure that it won’t leave much of a documentary trail.

For HIDden, unlike my thesis, in many ways I’m grateful for the gaps. I don’t want to re-create someone else’s production of a play, and if you know too much about the way things have been done before, you run that risk. I’ve been involved in productions that became, effectively, a staged version of a film, down to the way actors delivered lines; so even if there is a filmed or taped production available, I make a point of not watching it from the moment I contemplate working on a play to the day it closes. Where I’m reliant on limited documentation to understand a previous, historic performance, the gaps become the space where I have to make decisions and imagine, where the production becomes our own. The truth is that, in both my theatrical and academic work, it’s the missing pieces that intrigue. They can be utterly maddening at times, but those gaps are what keep us questioning, wondering, and dreaming.

Director’s Notes: Spaces

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Musings

“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage” is the very start to Peter Brook’s book The Empty Space. Although the question of what constitutes a performance space is not really the point of the book, it seems a pertinent statement to a subject that has cropped up repeatedly of late.

Since live performance is always in three dimensions, it has to happen somewhere, and the question of where that will be is paramount in getting started on a project. A company that has residence somewhere will generally have the same answer, while the rest of us have an enormous degree of variability. The choice is usually the result of a list of circumstances and desiderata. Availability and cost are unavoidable factors, but there’s also a long list of artistic considerations. A play might work better with a small, intimate audience, or it might require a central aisle. Maybe the concept specifically requires an out-of-door space, or perhaps that desire is counterintuitive to a production scheduled for January. It’s about finding the right balance.

All of that, however, still considers space as a canvas which, if not entirely blank, has only a few specific sketched-in lines, and treats space as an entirely passive factor. And it’s not. Because the facts of a space – how large or small it is, whether it is indoor or out, whether the audience will be sitting in rows before a proscenium-arched stage or on cushions in a circle around the actors – will have enormous significance for how the play functions, what it says, and what the experience will be for all involved. A performance does not just fill a space; it is shaped by that space as well.

It’s easy to get into a chicken-egg debate about space. Do you choose a venue first and then create a performance to suit its capabilities, or do you come up with a concept for a production and then look for a space that will fit its demands? There is a certain comfort and ease in developing a production in a place that you know well, but there is also much to be said for the challenge of creating a performance with new or unexpected parameters. Either answer is acceptable; either will have significant implications for the final result. And, of course, it’s possible to split the difference and have to cope with aspects of both: a production that is designed to tour has to factor in the flexibility to cope with an almost infinite variety of potential spaces, which will result in the possibility of extremely different experiences for both audience and company as those variables come in to play.

Historical drama is an area where the question of space and staging has long been considered especially important. The Georgian and Victorian eras solidified the dominance of proscenium-arch staging, which inherently created an invisible wall and separation from the audience. At the turn of the twentieth century, director William Poel began to question whether historic plays- specifically Shakespeare, initially- wouldn’t work better if staged in a manner more akin to the circumstances for which they were created. He started to produce plays staged on an Elizabethan model, bringing the audiences closer to and around the stage. As the first person to resurrect medieval drama (1901’s Everyman is considered the birth of modern medieval drama performances), Poel was also first to realise what has come to be seen as at least a general truism of medieval drama: plays written to be played in close proximity to audiences genuinely do benefit from being staged in that manner; some of their power is lost if they are separated from that intimacy and immediacy. (The Victorian conventions for staging may be part of why they were so dismissive of the performative possibility of medieval plays.) By the same token, many Victorian plays would be very difficult to work out in-the-round, as they were written with the implicit assumptions of a stage with wings, backstage, and distance from viewers. It’s probably not coincidence that the over-the-top characteristics of melodrama came into vogue at the same time that performers moved to a distance from their audiences. This is not to say that historic plays can only work if their original conditions are re-created, which is obviously not the case. It is rather to point out that space has significant impact upon plays from the past, and that one should at least be aware of that when deciding how to stage them today.

The next time you’re at a performance, take a moment to contemplate not just what you’re seeing but where you are. How different would the production be under different spatial circumstances? How might you feel differently about the performance or its characters? Chances are, the people who’ve put the production together have given thought to what your answers might be.

Director’s Notes: Finding Inspiration

Posted on by under Mankind, Musings, Vital Spark

Not very long ago, I became acquainted with the monumental time-sink that is Pinterest. I’d heard of it for years, but – and this will tell you everything about my own worldview slant – I could not for the life of me understand why friends were going on about recipes on a webpage clearly named for a playwright (Harold Pinter for the uninitiated). A personal aversion to websites that make you sign up kept me off it for years. But looking at images of medieval demons for Mankind, that website just kept popping up. Curiosity got the better of me, and down the rabbit hole I went.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed, I started with searches that were in some way linked to the play we were working on. My initial thought was that it could be a sort of appendix to writing and talking about what we were doing. Want to know how medieval peasants appear in artwork, or what kind of chair Jenny Hill might have for The Vital Spark? Head on over. Even if I have no intention of staging a play in its original historical period and trappings, I always use them as a jumping off point for research. The idea that you have to know where a play began before you can start intelligently departing for that place is very central to HIDden in general; it’s the informed part of “historically informed drama”.

Informed, however, is not enough. I started seeing lots of other images that just seemed intriguing, apropos of nothing. Maybe it was a texture (something literally missing in virtual boards, which I regret), or a slant of lighting, or a type of lettering. I started filing those away, without having any intentions for them at all. Very possibly they’ll never find a use. But in the aggregate, they already have. Finding them was a reminder that you can’t just look for what you want to find. Sometimes you have to just… look. Wander. Without an agenda, intention, or map, you might find something that sends you down a different path. That’s the very definition of inspiration.

The challenge, in any artistic field, is making yourself find inspiration. We’re accustomed to thinking of it as a bolt of lightning, something miraculous from out of the blue, and very often it is. But when your work relies on its presence being something of a constant, you have to find ways to trigger that lighting off in the first place. Maybe you can’t always guarantee it to strike right when you need it, but you can create conditions under which it’s more likely to happen. There’s no universal recipe; for me it’s a constant and conscious exercise in trying to notice little, unusual details, casting the net wide in terms of reading and experience, and then making sure that I surround myself with people who keep me on my toes. Around the right people, mundane conversations can be catalytic, and that dynamic is something I always try to cultivate at HIDden, with actors and production teams alike.

When I’m feeling more introverted, I can sit down at the computer and explore some of the world from the seclusion of my office, complete with a cup of tea, and try to create a little bit of electronic brain-lightning. Then I can turn around and share at least a pale snapshot of that moment with you, so that if you are at one of our productions, you can imagine the connections between that initial idea and what ends up on stage. It’s not always a direct path, but from information to inspiration to creation, getting there is half the fun.

Why not stop by and visit these behind-the-scenes idea-gatherings on our Pinterest page?

Director’s Notes: Technical Difficulties

Posted on by under Musings

This week, instead of getting done with the work I’d intended to accomplish, I have been coping with technical difficulties in the form of a non-working laptop. Although I’m sure this is a familiar refrain to modern life, it’s no less irritating, nor is the timing ever convenient. In this case, it’s just stopped my research project dead in its tracks, unable to continue until the situation is resolved. Vexed as I am about it, the truth is that I would much rather deal with my own personal, private technological hang-up than have anything go wrong at work, when problems affect everyone.

Stuff goes wrong in theatre. And the rule about more moving parts resulting in more potential for things to go wrong, means that these days, in most productions, there’s a fair amount that is just one power hiccup away from a problem. When it happens, it gets resolved as soon as possible (and bless the adrenaline spikes that my more technically inclined colleagues must live through when fixing it is their job!), and the usual question thereafter is, “Did anyone notice?” This generally means the audience, as you can be pretty sure that everyone involved was sharing in at least a flutter of the palpitations. The real question, though, is “did it matter”, because although there will always be some people who are attuned to such things, if the actors are doing a good job and the subject matter is compelling, most people won’t care about minor glitches. We’ve all seen someone sing through a microphone glitch, or ad-lib brilliantly when a cue got dropped; there’s a reason performers carrying on through illness or injury is stereotypical theatrical lore. Whether it’s due to technology or people, things go wrong, and you want everyone to keep going as if nothing had happened.

Sometimes problems are instructive and useful. Of course you’d rather have those lessons learned when it doesn’t affect a performance or an audience, but even then there can be occasion when it turns out surprisingly well. Although I rarely remember problems I’ve witnessed six months later, I’ve never forgotten one glitch that I witnessed in a performance. At the very climax, rather than telling the audience that one of the characters had died, the entire theatre just went black, before the lights returned to normal for the final scenes. Though my description makes it sound rather heavy-handed, it actually worked in a surprisingly effective and delicate matter. Afterwards, I complimented my friend, who had done the lighting, on that choice. “Oh, that wasn’t supposed to happen!” she told me. “That was a power problem.” But it had been so much more effective than the intended cue a few moments later, that I believe she went back and altered it to make the ‘mistake’ an intentional event for the rest of the run.

It’s rare that things go wrong quite so advantageously, but I think sometimes we should look upon those moments as challenges rather than “problems”. “Keep calm and carry on”, the classic British axiom, is one of the basic laws of the theatre. (Or, to put it in the terms with which I was raised, “If there’s a dead body in the wings, step over it and get on stage on time and don’t you dare drop character!”) The truth is that, although it’s uncomfortable, limitations sometimes push us further and create something stronger in the long run. If we have every “easy” solution right at our fingertips, perhaps we miss out on seeing something new and different and more interesting. I’m not advocating for technical problems as a solution to creative stagnation; I’m just suggesting that, when they do arise, hopefully we rise to the occasion and find something new in ourselves that we’re able to use in future performance, even if it’s only a stronger resilience through adversity. Difficulties during a show have to be solved right now; they demand our nerves and quick creativity.

Ironically, this tension between striving for flawlessness and the realities of fallibility is part of what makes live performance so appealing, both to watch and to create. Unlike film, there is no second take, no “do-over”. Every moment is on a knife-edge, a breath away from chaos. I suspect this aspect is subliminal in most audience minds, but when people ask me why I prefer live theatre to the cinema, part of the answer is probably that feeling of potential danger. In the grand scheme of life, it’s generally pretty low-risk, but it still manages to be high-adrenaline, mixed in with the dynamism of creativity and collaboration.

Domestic technological issues do not, unfortunately, come with any of these redeeming features. So it’s off to the repair shop, and goodbye to the academic work I had hoped to get accomplished in the next few days. But “there is no problem which does not come with a gift in its hands”: at least I can read through the scripts that are sitting on my desk and not feel guilty about temporarily putting that work first! Even in the cloud of ordinary, non-dramatic technical problems, a silver lining can be found.