Baby steps.
I assembled a small collection of chosen ones this afternoon, bribing them with lunch, to enliven the prospect of plodding through a reading of what I've daintily entitled the "coarse edit" of Antony and Cleopatra to establish how hopelessly long it was.
For we shall have at absolute best 1 hour and 3o minutes to present Shakespeare's masterwork to a paying public in August. And you see, one hour and 30 minutes - a meagre total of ninety minutes in all - isn't really a sensible guide. As I have these ninety minutes to get currently 19 actors on and off stage, speaking (and forgetting) their lines, leaving dramatic pauses, getting (in several cases) killed or self-killing and finally (we hope) taking a curtain call.
It's not all that long for a play which I'd estimate lasts about 3 hours if you stick faithfully to the words as the man intended them.
And nineteen actors is allowing for a lot of 4 line only (thus £10 show fee!) parts being re-allocated to a bunch of far better served with lines characters. What a pecuniary opportunity missed.
So today was the first test. Would the hasty secret cafés before Secret Rapture rehearsals and dead-of-night-after line slashing hang loosely together and would - most crucially - it be short enough to be a contender?
Easy answer is yes. It lasted precisely one hour and twenty-one minutes. Even allowing for handfuls of "wtf's...??" But of course that doesn't allow a great deal of breathing space for anything. I think I allowed about twenty minutes of padding time in the Tempy Tempest and that had fewer scenes and fewer actors.
On the plus side, it's a zippy little thing that didn't immediately obviously feel riddled with inconsistencies and stupidities. The time thing - well, that must be much easier to fix. Right..?
I assembled a small collection of chosen ones this afternoon, bribing them with lunch, to enliven the prospect of plodding through a reading of what I've daintily entitled the "coarse edit" of Antony and Cleopatra to establish how hopelessly long it was.
For we shall have at absolute best 1 hour and 3o minutes to present Shakespeare's masterwork to a paying public in August. And you see, one hour and 30 minutes - a meagre total of ninety minutes in all - isn't really a sensible guide. As I have these ninety minutes to get currently 19 actors on and off stage, speaking (and forgetting) their lines, leaving dramatic pauses, getting (in several cases) killed or self-killing and finally (we hope) taking a curtain call.
It's not all that long for a play which I'd estimate lasts about 3 hours if you stick faithfully to the words as the man intended them.
And nineteen actors is allowing for a lot of 4 line only (thus £10 show fee!) parts being re-allocated to a bunch of far better served with lines characters. What a pecuniary opportunity missed.
So today was the first test. Would the hasty secret cafés before Secret Rapture rehearsals and dead-of-night-after line slashing hang loosely together and would - most crucially - it be short enough to be a contender?
Easy answer is yes. It lasted precisely one hour and twenty-one minutes. Even allowing for handfuls of "wtf's...??" But of course that doesn't allow a great deal of breathing space for anything. I think I allowed about twenty minutes of padding time in the Tempy Tempest and that had fewer scenes and fewer actors.
On the plus side, it's a zippy little thing that didn't immediately obviously feel riddled with inconsistencies and stupidities. The time thing - well, that must be much easier to fix. Right..?
posted by Claire at 10:15 pm
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