We are a couple of weeks away from our debut performance of If An Orchid Was All You Had (2017) and we had invited Michael Pinchbeck to one of our rehearsals, in which we ran a couple. His comments left us all a little lost to begin with. We were so sure we had nearly polished off our performance and then everything was put into perspective for us. Michael coming to our rehearsal was the BEST thing that has happened to us as a company. It was like all of a sudden something had clicked within us. We were more motivated than ever to finish creating our show.
The most fundamental requirement for devising theatre is a passion or desire to say something, a need to question or make sense of a starting point that encourages you to investigate further through a variety of processes and close enquiry
(Oddey, 1996, 42).
DENIAL
Michael Pinchbeck had previously seen the scene we had named ‘Denial’, which when we got to this point in the process we had cut this from the performance. After this meeting with him, he suggested that this was brought back. As performers this is the scene we come to life, and where the motif of our smiling faces begins. This scene enables the audience to feel a part of our world, also allowing them to feel relaxed as it is a comedy scene, with dark humour.
MEMORY
Pinchbeck made the suggestion that there was too much going on in the memory scene, and that the poetic text that James had written should be heard. We were influenced by Samuel Beckett’s Play (1963) for this scene. “Play, Beckett’s ultimate version of the Protestant Hell, everyone is trapped in a condemnation to repeat, repeat, versions of what happened elsewhere, long ago, not to their credit” (Kenner, 1973, 153). We chose to speed the pacing of our spoken text, yet slow down our movements, using Steven Berkoff’s ‘hypermotion’ to make our way onto the stage.
Works Cited
Kenny, H. (1973) A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.
Oddey, A. (1996) Devising Theatre a Practical and Theoretical Handbook. London: Routledge.