Tom during a first costume fitting 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!
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!
The boxes in the making
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