Read on to experience the excitement of the rehearsal room for The Commotion Time with an exclusive rehearsal diary from Associate Director Hannah Mulder.
Week One
Day One
It’s always a thrilling moment when you gather on the first day of rehearsals and recognise how many people it takes to make a piece of theatre. Here are our actors, director, writer, music director, designer, lighting designer, technicians and stage manager; those who look after marketing and front of house, production management and all those who keep the cogs whirring of the intricate organism that is the theatre which will be our home for the next month. We are a makeshift family gathering at the start of a reunion, but a family that has never met before. We know these current strangers are ones we will be diving deep with: sharing vulnerable moments, laughing until we cry, needing to trust and rely on and having conversations about the stuff of life and the themes that this play illuminates.
Fi Russell, our Set and Costume Designer, shares her digital model with us, zooming us from the audience perspective to hanging above the set, so we can see the ground plan and start to imagine our way around the space.
She’s made exquisite costume drawings based on photos sent by the actors, so that they see their faces in the characters. We talk about shoes, joke about codpieces and inspect mood boards with historical costume references. Then it’s time to sit and read the play, letting ourselves hear it, asking questions and lapping up some of the historical context from writer Sarah Dickenson as we go. We just reach the end as it’s time to go home.
Day Two
We start at the beginning. The tables are cleared away and it’s time to find the first scene on its feet. It’s always a bit of a moment to break away from the comfort of the circle, but everyone jumps in. Sarah makes writing tweaks as we go, in response to questions and thoughts and what everyone is finding. Our director Martin Berry quips that it’s a bit like having Mozart in the room, live composing; the speed she can work is definitely a little bit of genius. Occasionally a new page is printed off but otherwise it’s pencils and crossings-out, scribbling in and reading through. Jay Seldon, our Deputy Stage Manager, makes notes of everything in the “book”, the document from which she will cue the show. Then we are off again into the next scene. Backstories are discussed, both personal and historical as we interrogate what particular moments mean or are driven by. Our characters and world start to fill out.
Photo by Lillie Sherry
Day Three
Today is the day of crackly moments; there are tears-in-the-eye moments and little thrills and wanting to bite your knuckles and laughter lifting you off your seat. We are starting to feel the play coming to life, and this is still early days; we aren’t that far into the drama, so it’s exciting. There is so much richness and tension in the writing, informing the moments of play and tactics and fondness and grief, which are being found by our skilled actors. We’re all having a lot of fun: the sort of fun that comes with hard work and curiosity and discovery.
Photo by Lillie Sherry
As anyone in the room fills in the multiple voices of the community chorus, we anticipate having them with us tomorrow evening and the added energy that will bring.
I head home with some research questions to answer. Would people have knelt to pray in that period? Were handshakes a common way of agreeing a business arrangement? The intricacies matter, or at least we need to know if we are choosing the theatre of a moment over the accurate history, such as we can ever know it.
Day Four
We continue to work through the play. Apples are inspected for worms and bruises and sorted into piles, whilst discussions about religious reforms happen in the farmhouse kitchen. We explore the ways in which daily life rubs up along the epic and political. We map out a touching moment which reveals the intimacy of the relationship the women of the community in our story had with the Virgin Mary, bringing her their cares, longings, griefs and desperation. The simplicity of the human stories amongst the financial and social pressures they found themselves under and the actions they took to protect what deeply mattered to them. It’s a rich day.
We all head out for a meal together, refuelling for the evening ahead. This evening the community ensemble and choir come together with our professional cast for the first time. The atmosphere is excited and buzzy. We all squeeze into the Clifford Studio at the Barnfield, chairs around the edge mapping out our set. We share our names and our character names or our roles in the project. Our community cast has been sketching out details about their characters and we hear some snippets from each person: who works in the dairy, who has lost their husband at sea, who loves sheep and who prefers to dance rather than talk at a party. Some share their characters’ fight levels: how likely they are to take up arms in response to the events of the play.
Soon we are up on our feet starting to work through the play from the start. We make good progress. Having crafted scenes as two separate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, Martin and the cast start to piece them together and we find they fit well. And starting to see the whole picture is a thrilling process. Moments which thrive on the reaction of the community come alive and there is a palpable energy. The range of the reactions from the community cast to different moments mirror what surely would have been the case in this community we are portraying. There is delight in the diversity.
We pause for a moment while the choir sings for some filming, then continue and finish the day, tired but inspired.
Photo by Lillie Sherry
Photo by Lillie Sherry
Day Five
We continue our track through the play, getting into the meat of the scenes as pressures build for our characters. We get to a scene that Sarah and Martin know needs some work and we all discuss the beats and shape of it. That leads us into a discussion of what each character wants and needs overarchingly in their life: something that has been coined a character’s “super objective” in various schools of theatre. It’s useful and clarifying. Sarah goes away and works like a demon on a new draft of the scene while we move on through the play.
At the end of the afternoon we tackle the freshly minted scene and spend time working on it together, grappling with some big questions. It’s the end of a long but productive week and we head home for a day off before gathering with our community cast again on Sunday.
Week Two
Day Six
The main takeaway from today’s Sunday rehearsal is that I want to live in the community in which this play is set. Not all the time, of course, because things get pretty sticky, but today we worked on some of the community celebration scenes. A Christmas Mummers scene gives a little sense of how it might have felt to come back year after year to a piece of joyful fun you all anticipated keenly, laughing and joining in and dancing and generally making a bit merry. What’s so lovely is that it is in projects like these, working with a community cast, coming together in a shared endeavour, singing together, eating together, telling a story together that we, perhaps, recreate a little taste of that in our more fractured times. A play about community told by a makeshift community that will, no doubt, continue in some of the connections that have been made beyond the bounds of this particular project. In short, today we had a lot of fun and the show is starting to take more shape.
Day Seven & Eight
Having been away yesterday, I’m happy to return. We continue our work through the play. We cry. In a good way. The actors are doing beautiful work and there are deeply touching moments. The backdrop of protest and war starts to grip tighter around our characters’ lives. Difficult choices have to be made and, under those pressures, things are said that have been buttoned up for too long and revelations made.
We all go a bit bonkers at the 4pm witching hour, letting off some steam. Tea and birthday cake are had before we knuckle down for another hour of concentrated work before the end of the day. The final scenes are beckoning for tomorrow.
Photo by Lillie Sherry
Day Nine
Today we reach the “denoument” scene with lots of fiddly action to map out. Once we are able to run it in sections and get the flow of it, we start to feel it more and more. It’s fast paced and heart-breaking and by this stage in the story we have hopefully earned it. It feels good to get to this scene.
Just before lunch we have an hour with historical consultant Mark Stoyle, an expert on this period and moment in history. His book, A Murderous Midsummer, is the definitive text reframing and deepening our understanding of the Western Rising, around which our play circles. With generosity and insight he answers our cast’s questions about moments in the play, character’s choices and experiences and details of everything from whether a priest would fight in battle to how likely it is that wounds would have become infected. My takeaway fascinating fact was that 10% of armies in the period would have been made up of women, supporting the encampment with tasks like cooking, tending to the sick and also foraging for wild food around the areas they were camped.
Tomorrow we will reach the end of the show, having worked through a first bash at each scene.
Photo by Lillie Sherry
Day Ten
There is some serious drama in this play and today we got to even more of the meat of it. By this stage of the story we are (hopefully) deeply invested in our characters lives, know them intimately and their inter-relatedness and the complexity of their inner lives. So the action cuts deep. In the evening we all come together for the third time with our community cast and choir. There are tears and much needed laughter in equal measure as we piece together some chilling, stirring and hopeful moments.
Day Eleven
We start at the beginning again. It feels strange to go back to the start of the story, knowing all the moments we have been exploring are yet to come for our characters. We let scenes run more and find the shape of starting to run scenes together, once we have worked on them individually a little more. Our actors start to venture into the territory of being “off book” and we set up the rules of how to ask for a forgotten line from our DSM, Jay, who is also busy plotting the route of props and set as we go.
Sarah, our writer, who has been with us in the room for these two weeks, rewriting sections, bringing fresh pages for us to read and explore in response to us all investigating scenes and offering quick fire explanations as we work, ends the day with a farewell until the end of next week. Martin says it’s like having the stabilisers removed. We know next week, our last in the rehearsal room before tech, will be another stage into having the collective stabilisers off and moving towards more free-wheeling. But meanwhile our actors head off for a much-deserved weekend of, no doubt, plenty of line learning and hopefully some rest.
About Hannah Mulder
Hannah is a writer and director and for eight years was Co-Artistic Director of The Wrong Crowd, resident company at Theatre Royal Plymouth.
Recent credits include: as writer: Love Riot (Miracle Theatre, SW tour), as director: Count Me In (Carriageworks, LIPC), with The Wrong Crowd as writer/director: The Girl with the Iron Claws (Soho Theatre, UK tours), HAG (Soho Theatre, Bristol Old Vic, UK tour), as director/co-director: Snow White and the Happy Ever After Beauty Salon (Ovalhouse and TRP), Swanhunter (Linbury Studio ROH, Opera North and UK tour), Kite (Soho Theatre, London International Mime Festival, UK and China tours), as assistant: The Firework Maker’s Daughter (Linbury Studio ROH, UK and US tour), A View from the Bridge (Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse).
She has also worked regularly on community projects with organisations including Theatre Royal Plymouth, RSC, Young Vic, Barbican Plymouth and with The Wrong Crowd.
Hannah trained at Oxford School of Drama and on the National Theatre Directors Course. She is currently writing Duffy and the Stiltskin for Miracle Theatre at Princess Pavilion, Falmouth.
The Commotion Time will be running at Exeter Northcott from Fri 18 Oct 2024 – Wed 23 Oct 2024. Opening night has already sold-out, but some of the best seats are available for the other evening and matinee performances. You can even sit on stage for an extra immersive experience!
Book NowThis project is funded with the support of the Creative Arc Programme, an initiative funded by the University of Exeter, Exeter City Council and the UK government through the Shared Prosperity Fund.
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