Monday morning, and the boxes arrive. They look a bit like coffins, even though they're not even painted black. Yet. When we describe them to the car hire agency to find out whether the MPV we've booked to take them up to Edinburgh would be able to fit them in, the man on the phone - who happens to be sitting somewhere in the States - asks, with just a hint of worry in his voice and maybe a tad incredulously: 'they're not caskets, are they?' - Well, funny you should say that...

Actually our two black boxes (which aren't yet black) are everything we need them to be. A stage-upon-the stage, a sofa, a bed, the benches at a pub, a confessional, or, indeed, a tomb. We love them and we feel pretty much at home on them already.

So Week Two continued with a Feldenkrais lesson (an exercise, really) to start with each morning, and this is doing wonders for us both, not least because after an hour or so of gentle 'neurological reprogramming' and awareness 'training' you feel about as relaxed and alert to your body and the space around you as you can be, both at the same time, of a weekday morning.

But of course the big step this week has been to put the play on its legs. The technical term is 'blocking', though that doesn't quite seem to do the process justice in our case, mainly because we're not so much approaching it as a matter of 'placing the moves' (which is perhaps best described as the 'don't-bump-into-the-furniture' technique) as finding the moves through what the text suggests, in an otherwise abstract space, and thus effectively shaping the space.

And we had our first costume fitting. The concept that has emerged might be called Chelsea Hipster meets Shoreditch Creative with the odd dash of Elizabethan flourish thrown in. We are keeping our tongue firmly in cheek with this, trust us... 

So now: four more days in the rehearsal studio, then nearly a day at the Landor for a tech get-in and some reblocking for the previews and then, if you're in London, you can already come and see what we've been up to with these glorious sonnets!

We've completed Week One of our rehearsals at the serenely secluded Vinters Studios, tucked away in Streatham, behind a hidden driveway, along which we're greeted daily by a tiny bamboo 'forest' (with, indeed, some tiny pandas) and it's been an amazing week of discovery, enquiry and learning.

Ros Philips, our director, has introduced us to Open Space 'Technology', which we both took to like ducks to water: it structures our day, gets any 'issues' right off our minds onto a wall in the form of post-it notes and organises our days into chunks of work that we can immerse ourselves in without having to worry about any of the rest or the clutter for the time being. Stupendous. 

After 'checking in', we start our day with the somatic methodology developed by Feldenkrais, a man who has apparently mastered both the art and science of how the human anatomy and its central nervous system relate to each other and whose gentle but thorough exercises bring you right in touch with the body you inhabit without strain or danger. Then we move on to contact improvisation which eases us into exploring the physicality both of ourselves and our characters, and after that, text analysis: going through the script - including the sonnets, of course - in fine detail, identifying just what exactly it is that is happening in the play, in the sonnets, and between our characters, from moment to moment. 

Next week: coming off the book and putting the play on its feet, from the page to the stage. Couldn't be more excited!...