One day this week, I come in and tiptoe my way through the wreckage – toys, books, bits of a cot. This is the morning after the night before, the night before being the end of the world. There’s this Edward Bond quote that I bang on about all the time anyway, but it really is appropriate here:
“Drama is about the relationship between the kitchen table and the edge of the universe.”
As we put the play on its feet this week, the journey of these two people between their domestic life and global and even intergalactic systems becomes clearer. Someone said in a rehearsal that they go from ‘it’s not our problem’, to ‘it is our problem’, to ‘the end of the world is our problem’.
This is a stage of trying out loads of different ways to do something, excavating the play and looking for different games, tones and contexts that emerge when you start doing it and see the relationships between bodies and stuff and space. George experiments with layering different sounds (what does it sound like when you’re in space?), and we try out several different incarnations of the baby, which results in more than one of us having dreams about creepy dolls.
By the end of the week, we’ve gone through every scene, and our keepy-uppy score is 35. I didn’t want to embarrass anyone else, but in case you were wondering what our warm-up games look like frame-by-frame, here’s a photo of me from when Bill Knight came in to get some rehearsal shots. Until next week!
(Anna Himali Howard attempting Keepy-Uppy. c. Bill Knight)
Catch In the Night Time (Before the Sun Rises) at the Gate Theatre, 4th-27th February.
