The Cherry Orchard Diaries: First Steps
Happy Saturday, folks.
Another slight adjustment to intention: This newsletter is going to cover my first week of rehearsal because it's still fresh in my head and because it's been such a joy to be back in a rehearsal room for the first time in four years. As mentioned in earlier newsletters, the others involved require privacy and discretion to do their best work so I'll keep most of what gets written here focused around my own thought processes. This is my...sixth rehearsal experience I think? But every time throws up new learnings/terrors/delights...
Serious Enjoyment
In my origins newsletter, I realised there was a moment I could've tangentially included that I've thought about a lot in the last few days. When I was in primary school, there was an assembly where the kids could do like a five minute show for everyone else. The specifics of what was allowed elude me but I very much recall embracing my blockbuster instincts and deciding to tell a story of an epic moon landing. For days, I terrorised my grandmother, stealing all of her aluminium foil for space vehicle shielding and ripping apart boxes that had drifted home from the family shop. Eventually I had constructed a behemoth set (well, behemoth for a seven year old) that must've immediately alarmed the teachers when I dragged it into school.
During the actual assembly, I waited impatiently for my turn and then got to work constructing my scenario. There was a script ("We'll get medals for this!" is all I recall) and I had a co-pilot was for this dangerous mission (One of my "L" friends - Lawrence? Lyndon?) but no words or pals made it to the stage. The set took me SO BLOODY LONG to put up that I was unceremoniously ushered off by a teacher before the performance could even begin.
Thirty odd years later, as I watched Rosie, our Cherry Orchard designer, talk through the model box (a mini-model of the set), I wondered if this production was, in some small way, a moment of revenge for ambitious, broken-hearted, very inefficient child Vinay. I'd love that to have been the case. Instead, I encountered a familiar early rehearsal feeling. I believe there is a moment that every writer experiences as a production starts to firm up where, despite you having put hundreds of hours of effort into being taken seriously, you can't quite believe that people actually are taking you seriously. Listening to the technical needs of the show being discussed on Monday morning, the big thought in my head was:
"Why did nobody stop me?!"
How had this been allowed to happen? How had all these talented, kind, extraordinary artists been co-opted into Brown Chekhov in Space? Look how great they're making this look! These wonderful idiots! Yet, by the end of the first readthrough, I was pleased that nobody had in fact stopped this happening and of course the only idiot was me. I'd never heard this draft out loud before and it was properly lovely. Playful and moving, the actors throwing themselves into it. I'd carried this idea with me for ages, possibly since my attempts to paste foil to cardboard as my fellow suburban schoolmates waited impatiently, and now I could just sit and marvel at my hopes being carried along now on the dreamscapes of other talents.
Well. Not quite yet...
Playing Dead
The first week was spent doing table work, which was new to me as a process. Every director approaches each script differently so this newness wasn't an indicator that I'd been bereft of anything before, simply that my last few experiences had been very quick to get the piece on its feet. With this play though, it made a lot of sense to sit together and work through the script, essentially line by line, so that everyone was able to ask questions of the text and to start to form a shared sense of the world, their characters and their histories/dynamics.
For a writer, it's a strange situation to be in. The idea is that everyone searches for a communal understanding, a consensus formed by the whole company. The text is interpreted as a document in which answers may be divined. So you have to push down the instinct to just give an answer. Even when people are looking at you to do so. Your answers are probably not as interested as the one that will come out through the process. Of course sometimes you jumping in is useful: might be some technical wording, or something you've actually just screwed up a bit. But mostly it was me trying to dissociate from myself a bit and deflect that desire to answer, using the same terrible Dad joke to do it ("Gee, if only Chekhov was here to tell us what he meant!" was funny maybe once and even then...).
However! By the end of the week, I'd became comfortable talking about this text that I'd definitely written as if it was unknown to me. Only the occasional typo or one of those direct asks broke the illusion. I guess in a way the text was unknown to me because it was mostly put together by a version of me that was two years younger than I am now. By the end of the week I was exhausted but giddy for what was to come. I feel lucky to have collaborators who care. Many who look like me. All of who are willing to believe that the work matters. Enough to dedicate a solid chunk of time to debating how big this spaceship might be, which I found immensely charming to listen to.
I also came away from this week thinking of Chekhov as a sort of Rorschach test for misery. Can you make sense of the sometimes oblique patterns in this work? Or have you simply not had enough relationships gone awry? Certainly I sometimes got a little too into treating the text as belonging to someone else and waxing lyrical about past encounters to the room in a way that said more about me than old Anton...
KITTY KORNER
A guest entry to Kitty Korner this week. A bunch of folks are heading up to Edinburgh for the Fringe and I'm remembering taking my first play there 8 (!) years ago. I'd never been before, either as an artist or a punter so it was all a novel experience. My friend Caroline kindly let me stay in her place for the first week and little did I know that among my novel experiences would be my introduction to Scottish kittens.
Vin x
If you're new to Patelograms and like what you've read, you can subscribe by clicking here.
If you're an old hand, thanks as ever for taking the time.
(The Cherry Orchard runs at the Yard Theatre between 5th September and 22nd October 2022. It then goes to HOME from the 2nd to the 19th November)
Another slight adjustment to intention: This newsletter is going to cover my first week of rehearsal because it's still fresh in my head and because it's been such a joy to be back in a rehearsal room for the first time in four years. As mentioned in earlier newsletters, the others involved require privacy and discretion to do their best work so I'll keep most of what gets written here focused around my own thought processes. This is my...sixth rehearsal experience I think? But every time throws up new learnings/terrors/delights...
Serious Enjoyment
In my origins newsletter, I realised there was a moment I could've tangentially included that I've thought about a lot in the last few days. When I was in primary school, there was an assembly where the kids could do like a five minute show for everyone else. The specifics of what was allowed elude me but I very much recall embracing my blockbuster instincts and deciding to tell a story of an epic moon landing. For days, I terrorised my grandmother, stealing all of her aluminium foil for space vehicle shielding and ripping apart boxes that had drifted home from the family shop. Eventually I had constructed a behemoth set (well, behemoth for a seven year old) that must've immediately alarmed the teachers when I dragged it into school.
During the actual assembly, I waited impatiently for my turn and then got to work constructing my scenario. There was a script ("We'll get medals for this!" is all I recall) and I had a co-pilot was for this dangerous mission (One of my "L" friends - Lawrence? Lyndon?) but no words or pals made it to the stage. The set took me SO BLOODY LONG to put up that I was unceremoniously ushered off by a teacher before the performance could even begin.
Thirty odd years later, as I watched Rosie, our Cherry Orchard designer, talk through the model box (a mini-model of the set), I wondered if this production was, in some small way, a moment of revenge for ambitious, broken-hearted, very inefficient child Vinay. I'd love that to have been the case. Instead, I encountered a familiar early rehearsal feeling. I believe there is a moment that every writer experiences as a production starts to firm up where, despite you having put hundreds of hours of effort into being taken seriously, you can't quite believe that people actually are taking you seriously. Listening to the technical needs of the show being discussed on Monday morning, the big thought in my head was:
"Why did nobody stop me?!"
How had this been allowed to happen? How had all these talented, kind, extraordinary artists been co-opted into Brown Chekhov in Space? Look how great they're making this look! These wonderful idiots! Yet, by the end of the first readthrough, I was pleased that nobody had in fact stopped this happening and of course the only idiot was me. I'd never heard this draft out loud before and it was properly lovely. Playful and moving, the actors throwing themselves into it. I'd carried this idea with me for ages, possibly since my attempts to paste foil to cardboard as my fellow suburban schoolmates waited impatiently, and now I could just sit and marvel at my hopes being carried along now on the dreamscapes of other talents.
Well. Not quite yet...
Playing Dead
The first week was spent doing table work, which was new to me as a process. Every director approaches each script differently so this newness wasn't an indicator that I'd been bereft of anything before, simply that my last few experiences had been very quick to get the piece on its feet. With this play though, it made a lot of sense to sit together and work through the script, essentially line by line, so that everyone was able to ask questions of the text and to start to form a shared sense of the world, their characters and their histories/dynamics.
For a writer, it's a strange situation to be in. The idea is that everyone searches for a communal understanding, a consensus formed by the whole company. The text is interpreted as a document in which answers may be divined. So you have to push down the instinct to just give an answer. Even when people are looking at you to do so. Your answers are probably not as interested as the one that will come out through the process. Of course sometimes you jumping in is useful: might be some technical wording, or something you've actually just screwed up a bit. But mostly it was me trying to dissociate from myself a bit and deflect that desire to answer, using the same terrible Dad joke to do it ("Gee, if only Chekhov was here to tell us what he meant!" was funny maybe once and even then...).
However! By the end of the week, I'd became comfortable talking about this text that I'd definitely written as if it was unknown to me. Only the occasional typo or one of those direct asks broke the illusion. I guess in a way the text was unknown to me because it was mostly put together by a version of me that was two years younger than I am now. By the end of the week I was exhausted but giddy for what was to come. I feel lucky to have collaborators who care. Many who look like me. All of who are willing to believe that the work matters. Enough to dedicate a solid chunk of time to debating how big this spaceship might be, which I found immensely charming to listen to.
I also came away from this week thinking of Chekhov as a sort of Rorschach test for misery. Can you make sense of the sometimes oblique patterns in this work? Or have you simply not had enough relationships gone awry? Certainly I sometimes got a little too into treating the text as belonging to someone else and waxing lyrical about past encounters to the room in a way that said more about me than old Anton...
KITTY KORNER
A guest entry to Kitty Korner this week. A bunch of folks are heading up to Edinburgh for the Fringe and I'm remembering taking my first play there 8 (!) years ago. I'd never been before, either as an artist or a punter so it was all a novel experience. My friend Caroline kindly let me stay in her place for the first week and little did I know that among my novel experiences would be my introduction to Scottish kittens.
Vin x
If you're new to Patelograms and like what you've read, you can subscribe by clicking here.
If you're an old hand, thanks as ever for taking the time.
(The Cherry Orchard runs at the Yard Theatre between 5th September and 22nd October 2022. It then goes to HOME from the 2nd to the 19th November)
Don't miss what's next. Subscribe to patelograms: