Notes on process: The Watsons (March/April 2022).

I’m often keen to experiment with my own directing process. And I’m particularly keen to do so on drama school projects: Mike Alfreds refers to this in Different Every Night when he reminisces about his time at LAMDA. Beyond the usefulness to my own practice and curiosity, there is also something about the freshness of using new tools and experimenting in that setting that resonates with students and can create fantastic work. (My PhD supervisor, Charlotte Brunsdon, used to refer to this as ‘research-based teaching, I hear!’)

In March 2022, I directed a workshop studio production of The Watsons by Laura Wade with a fantastic group of second year actors at Mountview. Having recently read the first book in the compilation ACTIVE ANALYSIS by Maria Knebel (compiled by Anatoli Vassiliev and translated by Irina Brown), I was keen to test out some of these ideas. A lot of them, I think, exist in a similar sphere to Bella Merlin’s book about Active Analysis but I find that book very difficult to wade through. I also used this return to ideas borne from Stanislavsky as an opportunity to re-visit some methods I learnt from Katie Mitchell BACK IN THE DAY (like, 2010) and which I have moved away from.

I wanted to share my notes from this process for myself, and in case they’ll be useful for anyone else pursuing similar questions. It’s a bit like a Song Exploder podcast, for a drama project.

My goal at all times is to create nurturing and safe environments for actors to be creative, to create spaces where performers are free enough to make genuine play happen. I work, primarily, with fictional worlds.

I test out new processes to get closer to this goal, not for their own sake.

CHARACTER BIOGRAPHIES

In most recent projects, I haven’t done too much / any table work. I personally find it mega boring (and if I’m bored, then the company certainly aren’t being creative) and so usually we just begin at the beginning. However, I had worried in recent projects whether this was leading to more generalised actor choices as the lack of any boundaries could actually be restrictive for actors.

So I returned to character biographies, as I was originally taught it by Katie Mitchell, on this project. The objective would be to create a dated and itemised biography for the major events in each character’s life, before the action of the play begins. Knebel talks about a mental reconnaissance of the playtext, which must necessarily precede play, and this felt like a good structure for that.

I gave the company space and time - a couple of sessions of an hour each - on their own to work with the text, to record things that they knew were true about their character’s history and to note down any questions - however large or small - that they had. I also asked them to sketch up a timeline from birth to the beginning of the play, locating all those events. I purposely tried to avoid the phrase ‘facts & questions’ as it always comes with a degree of baggage these days.

(As a sidebar, I tried to avoid specialised vocabulary of any sort - I didn’t want people to think ‘oh we’re doing this bit I know how to do this’ at any point, and I didn’t want to get bogged down in tedious discussions about definitions, which can become an ideal vehicle for avoiding getting to work or for people who are good at talking about things in the abstract to dominate the space. None of the above outcomes are good for a creative atmosphere.)

We then got together in a group and reported back our timelines. One brave soul notated everything, and we spent a lot of time making sure that it all made sense with each other. I worked quite hard here to keep this conversation creative - making connections between events and things that happen in the play, being very light and playful about it, being exacting (”give me an exact date!”) to encourage actors to think carefully about their choices.

Crucially, I wasn’t leading them to a timeline that I had pre-prepared. I had an idea of what made sense, but I wasn’t sneaking glances at a pre-prepared sheet with ‘the answers’ to ensure that it all matched up. This meant that I had to be open enough to be wrong, to offer the actors options and to be like ‘well if you were born then then it means this, but if you were born then it means this’, to allow them to make choices that perhaps I wouldn’t have made in their shoes, and to - sometimes days later - be like ‘nope i was wrong there, we need to change that back.’

This exercise did give the characters a frame to work in, to create, and it fuelled all of the early improvisations (both solo improvisations and group back history improvisations). I reflect that they understood the play more clearly because of the exercise. It also offered me a backpack of circumstances to draw upon when we were building the situations or layering the situations later in the process.

However, it also takes ages (I think it spanned 3 or 4 days, broken up with other exercises because no-one can do this in longer than one hour chunks) and I later wondered if the time would’ve been better spent working on the action of the scenes. And I do always feel like this should only be done if you’re really going to commit to it though - I found myself, later in the process, saying ‘because it was - what - five six seven eight years ago?’ because I’d actually forgotten the detail. This exercise had got the company in the right ballpark, and I was happy to let it go. But I’m not sure that I should be letting things go when I had been so exacting earlier in the process.

ETUDES

This is the good shit.

I told the company, in a pre-rehearsal email, that we wouldn’t be rehearsing with script in hand. I also told them that they shouldn’t learn the lines before we begin rehearsal, and that all of our early rehearsals were going to be ‘improvisations’ of the text.

These etudes formed the backbone of our process. I followed the Knebel method quite closely here - probably to a fault at first, as I tried it on and fiddled around to make it my own. This is quite simple:

  1. when we come to do a chunk of text, we would read it first (including all stage directions).

  2. we would talk about what we read.

  3. we would play, on our feet, the scene that we had just read, improvising the actual words but experiencing the thoughts and the different dynamics of the scene.

  4. then we would talk about what happened.

  5. and return to the text to read the chunk again, finding out what we missed out.

I thought that this approach was pretty magic. It was especially successful in the scenes which only have two people in them. The Watsons has several scenes, with two characters, which are very dialogue-heavy. I was really happy in the final showing that there was always story in these scenes. There was always something going on between the two actors in these scenes, it was never just two people talking.

It was more challenging for scenes with several people - particularly in the first week or two as the company and I acclimatised ourselves to this way of working - as actors either assume that, with so many people on stage, they should sit back and let others lead the scene, or they go the other way and drive it in a completely different direction.

Here are some things that I learned about how to run these exercises:

  • the actors need a structure of events before playing the scene for the first time - now, I wasn’t forcing actors to draw lines into their script & looking over their shoulder to see that they all had them in the ‘right’ place, but we were identifying the main events of a scene and describing them to ourselves in language that made them feel playable - the type of thing that you go ‘oh yeah I know exactly how to play this’.

  • as a director, you need to be exacting from the very beginning about what events are not being hit or what thoughts are coming in an inaccurate order. I think that, early on, because I recognised how challenging it was to ask actors to make up all the lines, I let a lot of things slide. And some of these things were never really corrected in the final showing.

  • but, conversely, you also need to steer your actors away from trying to remember the lines too early, as this defeats the purpose of the exercise. It is to get them to experience story and thought, rather than words. I used every one of my stupid tricks to try to free people up if they got locked in - including, but not limited to, encouraging them to do the worst acting they’ve ever done (and criticising them if the acting was too good), singing with & serenading blocked actors mid-scene, and getting people to repeat the same thing over and over again until it loses meaning. Everything apart from showing them how to do it (which is the key to death).

  • you need to keep it moving - in his book Ostermeier has a great note for theatre directors:

    The only way to ban these worries [am I good? what do the audience think? etc] from the rehearsal room is to create a flow that is so strong that it puts the actor into a different physical state, like a chemical element that may need a certain energy level to react.

    the repetitive nature of the etudes exercise - read, play, read, play, read, play - can appear deathly, and so you need to keep working, keep throwing in challenges to the acting company, and so it doesn’t feel like that at all. This is one of my super skills as a director - and I think I developed some new tools on this process, particularly on the more challenging end which had some really good results (to be really clear, this was never, ever from a place of anger, and only when I felt that that particular person would respond well to being challenged quite intensely for a short period of time). However, when you’re following someone else’s process, it can at first feel like you’re reading from a recipe book & so you need to be very aware of this.

CHECK-INS

Up until last year, I would habitually ask everyone in the room ‘How are you?’ at the beginning of each day of work. I have stopped doing this because I discovered that the person who taught me how to do this in a theatre room was dishonest with me about how they used it. And that revelation made me consider all the times when I’ve asked everyone and some people have clearly not wanted to be asked. So, I discarded the tool from my backpack like toxic waste.

However, on the first day, one of the company mentioned that they find it really useful to have a check-in moment at the beginning of each day. I decided to have a Community Notices each morning. We’d sit down together at the beginning of the morning, I would give a broad sense of what we were doing that day and report back on any reflections of my own about work. And I’d give the space for anyone else who wanted to offer anything to do the same - you had the moment to share any reflections or anything that is on your mind, and a moment to be with everyone else before we really get into a creative flow, but you didn’t have to say anything.

We often did this after dancing together (which remains a cornerstone of my practice ever since stealing it from Imogen Knight) for - depending on the day - one or three songs.

FUTURE QUESTIONS

Some of the things that I want to continue to develop in my process:

  • rhythm (spatial & temporal) - building up a precise rhythm in space and time across the whole show, as well as within scenes - this isn’t quite there yet. I think I probably need to sharpen my sense of rhythm generally so that I’m really sniffing out for it when making work.

  • psycho-physical work - encouraging actors to use props and space in ways that tell us even more about the situation and the drama. I think that I care more about this than a lot of people with this, but I think that there’s a lot further to go in my own work. I really want to get to a place where you wouldn’t understand the language but you’d still understand what was happening.