‘A good director is never sure what he’s going to do’, said the great Elia Kazan. Frankly, as I was negotiating one of those tiny, cobbled streets off St Aldate’s on the way to the august event of the first Brideshead rehearsal, I couldn’t have agreed more. However many scribbled and unintelligible notes you make beforehand in your black notebook (Moleskine, obviously), nothing ever quite goes according to plan.
It was one of those summer evenings at Oxford where the larks are singing and the spires are dreaming, and that flighty spirit of eternal youth that Sebastian was so desperately yearning for seems like it never left the place. It’s easy to forget, on such a balmy, idyllic summers eve, that Brideshead – contrary to what most people who haven’t read it think – is less about all this idyllic guff, and more about loss, and guilt and futility. Some episodes in the play are so heart-wrenching that it is quite possible we may all require the services of a good, or at least expensive therapist when all this is over, perhaps even before.
[mm-hide-text]%%IMG%%3183%%[/mm-hide-text]
It is customary, at the first rehearsal, for the director to give some sort of opening speech, ostensibly to motivate the actors but all this is, in reality, is an excuse for the director to inflate his ego to hitherto uncharted heights. However, I have a horror of self-important, pompous directors who like to give these speeches – I used to be one, after all – so I dispensed with the speech and we got started with a particular favourite of mine from the standard first-rehearsal repertoire: blocking. It is remarkable how, in real life, two people sitting down and having a conversation for half an hour without moving seems natural. However, if this happens in a play, half the audience will have run for the hills in boredom, or alternatively the bar – whichever is closer – before you can say ‘total flop’. So there we have it – every director’s and actor’s nightmare – blocking, where every single movement has to be analysed as if it were a Callimachean epigram. Unsurprisingly, despite all this careful choreography and close attention to the dictates of stage dynamics that, I can assure you, was going on, the best movements were hit upon quite naturally and entirely by accident. Of course, I’m more than happy to take the credit.
[mm-hide-text]%%IMG%%3186%%[/mm-hide-text]
On a similarly propitious note, the cast seem to be getting on very well, which always helps. It’s not always easy to stroke the hair of someone you’ve only just met with the love light in your eyes, even after a few stiff drinks. It seems bizarre how, on stage, you can portray vast, complex emotions like love or contempt just by distilling them into one simple gesture. That, I suppose, is the beauty of theatre.
