Like every theatre in the country, the one to which I'm attached, Progress Theatre, has been dark since last March, and, like many other places, has been trying its best to provide online offerings - check out our Vimeo page for some of the performances we've filmed over the last decade or so. We've also been busy with a digital theatre performances. In the past year, I've reprised a couple of roles, as well as perform in a scratch theatre event, and now, I'm in rehearsals for an evening of monologues, titled Life Lessons. As the name suggests, it's a series of monologues that deal with life events from the perspective of people of differing ages.
I'll be performing from Oedipus The King, though exactly what life lesson it has to offer is a bit uncertain, unless it's 'don't kill your dad, marry your mum and have kids' - which, to be honest, I don't think needs much drumming in. Anyway, I thought I'd keep a series of blog posts chronicling this, going from start to performance.
The first couple of rehearsal meetings were mostly exploratory and introductory - last Sunday, the whole case got together to say hello, run through some exercises, and consdier the joys and pitfalls of performing on Zoom. Following that, I had a meeting with my director, Beckie, with whom I worked on a pared-down, weather-blighted performance of Mother Courage back in 2018. We talked about the space we were going to use: I'd firstly considered just using my sound studio, but as that is a bit on the poky side, I offered this:
Yes, my living room-cum-dining space. Moving the table will provide more room to move about, and we spent some fruitful time shunting things around (well, I did, with Becky shouting encouragment), opening curtains, closing them, turning on various lights and burning candles.
Eventually, we got on to performing a bit, but as we haven't decided which translation we're using yet, we weren't too bothered with ramping up the dramatics.
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