Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Continuing the Work
Trust Exercise. Two teams. Equal numbers of men and women. Two rows in each team, tallest at one end, smallest at the other, facing one another and linking hands. Then start with the smallest and lightest and invite them to jump into the cradle...
Once there, they're wiggled onto their backs, lifted by the whole group. Carried round about their heads and then dropped into the cradle again. Nice and physical. Slightly risky. Group responsibility. And only Georgina got a wound. Well, scratch.
We then looked at Scene 5 again and spent about an hour on it.
We reread it in groups - trying to find a 'missing element' that we hadn't found before and then asked Helen, Toni, Peter etc to show it us. Quite a few people had spotted it - the rain - but it took another 45 minutes to look at it in some detail.
How the positioning of Shen Te on stage is crucial. If we place the tree that Sun is trying to hang himself from off-centre, then is it a good idea for Shen Te to enter from the nearest side or the furthest?
The latter we decide. By a mile.
She needs to have to walk a distance because when she asks if she can shelter under the tree she cannot be a step or two from it. Her words about the rain are a reason for her to engage with Sun. And a decision. She is on her way to the Carpenter's. She could easily walk on. But she doesn't.
And so their relationship begins. She never gets to the Carpenter's.
We also asked for a couple of volunteers to read the script to see if we could pin down some other key moments. Alexa and Tom were volunteered. And apart from examining in some detail the 'handkerchief moment', the laughing/crying moment and the Shen Te wiping her runny nose on the back of her sleeve, the reading brought to life the two wonderful speeches in that scene that until that moment we'd totally overlooked.
The I'm a pilot speech and the crane speech. How beautiful they are. And how they work in relation to the beginning of Shen Te's love affair and growing attraction to Sun.
It was an excellent first half to the class.
Second Half.
In groups we looked at all the money events in the show, trying to see more clearly what is going on. Who owned what. Who owed what to whom. Who wanted to borrow what. Who hoped to earn what. Who was trying to diddle what out of whom. And who ended up with what. Actually quite a satisfying exercise. And a 'real' one. Because it is on this bed of nails that all the characters in the play have got to exist. No-one avoids the pinpricks of money.
As much so in the Arts as anywhere.
Even in the moment of getting the gift of the 1000 silver dollars, Shen Te is handed a poisoned chalice. Something that will make her life no less easy than it was before as a prostitute.
Once again, a very good start on understanding. Though a deeper understanding would repay the work done. For example, to look at each of the major characters in terms of their economic needs etc. Sun/Mrs Yang, Shen Te, Mrs Shin, Mr Shu Fu. Each one has a different set of needs and objectives - some of which change from scene to scene.
All of this could be plotted in some way. We even tried to do a Shen Te Income/Expenditure budget, but it didn't quite show the chronological ups and downs of her solvency. Particularly the juggling that has to go on at the point at which Sun arrives on the scene. Basically it's Shen's cash-flow problems that need to be documented accurately.
Maybe an accountant should come in and talk to us about how she would express this state of affairs in a budgetary form....
Again good work. And quite surprising some of the people who showed a good grasp of this money side...
Next Monday Steve will be away in Leicester so Jonathan Chadwick will be taking the class. Jonathan is a Theatre Director who often works with Acting Students but has an extensive international career. He works not only in the UK but also in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Steve first worked with him in a production of Caucasian Chalk Circle at Stratford East in which Azdak was played by Tom Wilkinson. Very well too.
