Opening night review

Here is the first of our opening night reviews to come in:

"It was slick and smooth...acting straight out of the top drawer"

"The play moves along at a good pace, with some truly excellent comic timing from the cast, and the loud laughter it received was well-deserved."

"Sam Caird as Moritz was particularly effective, succeeding in drawing out emotion from his sweet, pathetic character. It was always going to be important for him to have good chemistry with the other actors; fortunately, this is comprehensively achieved."

"Lizzie Davidson was particularly noticeable out of the background characters, with her portrayal of the abused Martha Bessel one of the most solid and moving of the evening. For someone making her Oxford theatrical debut, she was impressively confident, and is worth watching in the future."

The run begins

Wednesday was not bad for an opening night but it threw up a few details which needed to be ironed out. The problem with the Playhouse shows is that the actors are afforded very little time in the theatre. They come in for the tech on Monday (but this is really for the backstage crew and the actors do not get to perform any scenes - they just walk the stage), go straight into the dress on Tuesday and open on Wednesday.

Effectively you end up putting on a show with no real rehearsal time in the performance space.

A quiet matinée on Thursday - it's not really a grannee/kiddee play - afforded us the opportunity to smooth the creases (we were delighted that a girl appeared to have come all the way from America to see the show) and we had a happy show in the evening with an unusually large Thursday night crowd. This was good as we had quite a few parents of the cast there.

Reviews

The usual two papers came to our press preview. The reviews were published on Thursday and Friday

The Cherwell said:

***** "Compelling to watch"

- "The professionalism throughout the performance is very impressive...exciting and believable."

- "Sam Caird's acting is incredibly powerful, a tumult of fear and sexual frustration. When he grasped his own neck and his face filled blood red, I was truly gripped."

The Oxford Student said:
**** "Franker and more vivid than Skins"
- "Excellent acting...even a week before the première, the cast are engaging and expressive."

- "Director Richard Jones saves the play from dullness and melancholy by emphasizing the comedy."

Trailer

We made a short trailer which shows brief highlights of what occurs in the play. It only scratches the surface really:

Homosexuality?

It is possible to read sexual tension into every single one of the children's scenes to varying degrees of explicitness. From Wendla's persistent quest for details of how Martha is beaten by her father, to her own rape by Melchior.

In the penultimate scene, two of the boys get off with each other in the late afternoon sun.

Is the position of this scene indicative of its being an afterthought, thrown in as a final piece of moral filth to complete the set of rape, abortion and masturbation? Or is this point, the last 'real' scene before the supernatural deus ex machina, a carefully chosen moment of emphasis?

Moreover, are we really witnessing homosexuality or simply gushing adolescence and urge for sexual contact? We have toyed with readings in which both boys are straight, both are gay.

?

Reducing the cast

37 characters is OTT. A lot appear in only one or two scenes each, as a result of the vignette-style in which Wedekind writes. But I felt conventional doubling would be confusing since the turnover of characters is quite so high - this affords the actor little chance to establish the assorted roles.

Apart from the parents, all the adults who appear in the play are grotesque caricatures as they appear through the eyes of the children. This gave me the idea that the adults could be doubled by the children in character. That is to say, the adults are caricatured not by the actors, but by the children portrayed by the actors. In short, the children will appear to be taking the mickey out of their elders and betters.

Crucially, the parents, who are not caricatures but perhaps the real victims in the play (cue another post) are played as themselves.

This process of doubling and the visible transformation between adults and children that necessarily occurs in the burial scene is still being explored in rehearsal. It seems to highlight the polar reactions of the two groups. It is also adding a surreal quality to the burial.

Ilse

Ilse is the girl who has run off to lead a debauched life posing for painters, getting into murderous scrapes and generally running riot.

While all the other characters are hemmed in by the constraints of society, Ilse is the mad one who escapes to Bohemia. Originally I saw her as a bit of a nutter, loopy round the edges and corrupted (although she relishes it) by what she has seen. And this is how we took her for the first few rehearsals.

Then we had rather a shift.

As the only person in the play who has broken free and followed her dreams (for better or for worse), Ilse represents normality, or at least what normality should be. In this sense she is the most ordinary of the characters even if this means she now has extraordinary stories to tell.