Four days to go before opening night, and Cilgwyn Theatre Company's inaugural production, Chekhov at the Chapel, is ready for its first audience. But will the show survive its open rehearsal at a sixth-form college or will it be death by students, worries co-founder Bronwen Wilson.
To recap in bad soap opera style: we have been devising for the last month a show based on Chekhov short stories. The devising process is a slightly insane one in that there is no "script", no set way of starting the process and no guidelines on how it's meant to work. Simon McBurney from Complicité puts it best: "Nothing is off limits apart from not turning up... " I had a pretty firm vision of what the show would end up like, but until you've worked all those ideas through with a cast there's no way of knowing if it'll work. It might just be that you've completely led yourself down a self-indulgent garden path.
So doing this in an open rehearsal at City and Islington College in front of forty savvy 17- to 18-year-olds four days before your show opens might be kindly described as suicidal. But part of our remit as a community theatre company is to work with local schools and try and get people excited about theatre and theatre practice, so we all took a collective deep breath and went in.
Devising on a good day is hard a) because everyone has lots of ideas and b) they want to try them all out. On a bad day no one has any. Luckily today was a good day: I was bowled over by the students' maturity, enthusiasm and concentration, especially after I got them to do a series of progressively sillier warm-up exercises. But they went with me and then outran me.
Our play's set in the round so this was how we'd set up the students - which meant I spent all day spinning like a top as their hands shot up with increasing speed. They really helped with the scenes as they cut to the chase, and if it wasn't working they let us know. I got them up at various points to take on the role of director which they loved, especially one boy who tried to get two of my actors to re-enact a certain sort of film I shall call blue (and I'm not talking about the Three Colours Trilogy).
The intensity of the afternoon was increased by the presence of some local press and Frances Beckerleg, who records our podcasts. It was almost as if we had our own entourage. The cast came away buoyed by the whole experience and after doing a speed run of the show we all settled in a pub garden to a well deserved pint. I finally feel like we've arrived. We held an open rehearsal in front of a load of schoolkids and they didn't kill us. In fact it was one of the most inspiring afternoons I've had in a while.
Now in true theatre superstitious form I'm paranoid that because we've had a good day something awful is going to happen. Ah well, it's only the technical and dress rehearsal - what could possibly go wrong?
~ For more information about the company go to cilgwyntheatrecompany.co.uk or myspace.com/cilgwyn.
