This was not quite how I envisioned my Saturday morning. In a small, darkened room in Harris Manchester College I was screaming at three strangers. Then I laughed to the point of hysterics with them. Next, I painted the walls. Milja Fenger, playwright and director, had invited me along to a rehearsal for her new play She was Yellow – a tale of the devastating impact that a cancer diagnosis has on the lives of Aurelie and her partner Ilona – and I had happily obliged, eager to observe the creative process of a play that was partially being devised in rehearsal with actors.
At first, I watched a scene between Alashiya Gordes, playing Aurelie, and Sarah Perry who plays her partner Ilona. There is a mesmerising quality to their performances and I am quickly drawn into the very personal register of the play.
As a critic, your ears are finely tuned for those phrases that retain the tang of the written word on them – those awkward utterances that may fit into a script but lose all their potency as soon as they leave an actor’s mouth. But one of the techniques we practised, ‘under-reading’ – being continually fed the lines and repeating them back – removes all need for the actors to recall lines and sharpens the dialogue until only the most natural phrasing emerges. I have a go, and am quickly immersed in the emotional landscape of the play, in a way that is almost frightening. Disconcertingly, it feels just as if someone is talking inside my head.
Next, I scream. But it is all part of an ‘Anger Run’, a technique in which we run through dialogue in different emotional states. Eyes closed, I quickly exhaust myself.
There is an odd moment when the exercise has finished in which Milja turns to me and asks me what I feel and the only response I can articulate is ‘strange’. And it was strange, as I briefly lost that boundary between what I really did feel and what I was acting I felt. Even now, several days later, some of the lines echo back to me.
As Milja described the intervening scenes, an intimate portrait of the deterioration of human body emerges. Buoyed by delicate touches of beauty, She Was Yellow does not shy away from the raw, animal unsightliness of dying. Yet Milja Fenger’s play also embraces another kind of beauty. Influenced by her Human Sciences degree, she celebrates the beauty of mathematics and natural process in her art. Running from the 17th – 21st May at the Burton Taylor, She was Yellow looks set to move us all alike.
The Play of Colour
