I have just returned from a tasty meal of sausages and beans with the rest of the Hainault-residing cast. (Repetitive diet? Us?) The brunch was a neccesary next step to last night’s sequence – pickled cauliflower, visit from the Austrian embassy, gin, crazy seat-bound dancing and the inevitable tube ride home. Oh, and, of course, we performed the play for our first real audience. I shall avoid the equally inevitable analysis of every minor slip-up or triumph. Instead, a note on an exciting, semi-accidental change to the play.
Broken Glass, as I understand them, have always aimed to be transparent in their approach to theatre, with the phrase, “You can see the strings” being bandied around regularly. This approach is not in itself new. Companies like Kneehigh Theatre, and even large-scale musicals like Chicago (so I am told by Alex) keep the costume changes visible, keep the actors continually on stage and lay bare the mechanics of the theatre equiptment. And so with Broken Glass. It might not be Brecht, but there is certainly an element of estrangement and astonishment. However, arriving at the theatre yesterday morning at far-too-early-o’clock to discover that there were no wings, and thus no real “off-stage”, The Golem was forced to make its strings even more apparent.
We had previously performed a snippet of the play above a bar in a crowded, dim room filled with collapsing scenery. People were clambering in and out, the sound of SCLub7 and police sirens trickled in and the pool table Steve and I were perched on creaked ominously throughout every performance we sat through. Yesterday, we walked into a studio space with a lighting rig and raked seats. The words “neat” and “clean” were used of our expected movements during the scenes in which we were NOT on stage. The play was going to be very different this time around.
If I may say so without sounding pretentious, it seemed to me that this unforseen aspect of the studio space added a new intensity and clarity to the play. Rather than fumbling with props and whispering questions to my fellow actors, I was able myself to engage with the storytelling onstage, allowing the piece to seem more of an emsemble effort, and more of a unified whole.
I was also struck again by the thrillingly unpreditable nature of stage performance. I love the fact that you never know exactly what will happen each night. The play is well rehearsed now, and often runs smoothly. But it is a changing, evolving beast, brought to life each evening by living actors. You can never be sure that another actor is about to deliver the right line, or know exactly where you will place your foot. However many times you practice, nothing can remain fixed. In a play which implies an eternally, unflinchingly cyclical movement in its action, this becomes all the more interesting. Not even the wonderful Miss Flood who is responsible for putting the secret words in our mouths can prophecy precisely what will happen next. Predictability is utterly unable to “obstruct the emotional resonance of [the] performance”, even for those of us who have seen the play and heard its words numerous times.
The Golem runs for a further three nights at the Roundhouse Theatre, Camden.