‘Orchid’ debuted on 22nd May 2017 in the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre. Since this is a retrospective post, I would like to take this time to discuss the performance and my thoughts on it. In order to get sentimentality out of the way first, may I just say that the show would not have been nearly as engaging or spectacular as I believe it was without the talent I was surrounded with during this process. So, I thank my fellow company members for that. I did, however, already pay them this compliment in my director’s note in the programme, so that is all they will be getting here.
Firstly, the response to the show was overwhelming, with numerous audience members speculating and taking their own unique meanings away with them. Whilst this was indeed what we wanted ‘Orchid’ to achieve, I have always felt that the show is particularly tragic and macabre in nature. So, I was interested to hear some people discuss positivity and relief in relation to it, them seeing the show as taking them through the Cyclist’s grieving process from start to finish. In earlier posts, I have discussed the importance of pacing and the integral part it plays in theatre. In that respect, I believe ‘Orchid’ hit all of its marks. The frantic nature of the madness scenes melded well with the slower and dream-like Interludes. Perhaps the only section that felt jarring was the fight section during the Sadism scene. It had been noted on a few occasions that this section did not quite fit with the rest of the material. Whilst I most certainly see its merit (it intertwined with the uncomfortable feeling and twisted humour of the scene), had we had more time I believe we would have revisited the entire scene, building it from the ground up again to see what we could create. Indeed, we had very recently introduced blindfolds into the section, but this proved somewhat difficult, as it was completely within the audience’s power to remove it at any point. As I said previously, I believe taking the scene back to the workshop and deconstructing it would have been useful for us to do, as we had done with scenes previously. The only other aspect to mention is just to simply sate our curiosity. After the show was over, we instantly began discussing the malleability of ‘Orchid’ as a show. To give a few examples, we spoke about moving the tech box (which had been onstage) directly to the centre, doing the same with the bike, swapping the order of scenes etc. All this would be extremely interesting to try, stretching the limits of the show and testing its boundaries.
My first full-scale foray into directing has been a journey of discovery. In his foreword to Katie Mitchell’s ‘The Director’s Craft: A Handbook for the Theatre’ (2009), Nicholas Hytner describes that young directors are sometimes “given opportunities to discover how clueless they are” (Hytner, 2009). Whilst this may seem self-deprecating to include, I assure you I do not mean it that way, although I do believe it applies to me. My experience directing ‘Orchid’ has been engaging and educational, and I am excited about the possibilities it has opened up. I hope that this experience will allow me to “start to piece together a version of how the theatre actually works” (Hytner, 2009).

Works Cited
Hytner, N. (2009) Foreword in The Director’s Craft: A Handbook for the Theatre. London: Routledge.

When beginning the process of devising ‘If An Orchid Was All You Had’, one of the very few rules set by us was that the show would sit on the foundations of absurdity and surrealism. Whilst this was by all means a company consensus, it would feel disingenuous to neglect my own personal fondness for the absurd, more specifically the works of Samuel Beckett. With this basis in mind, it is important to note the influence of Beckett’s works on ‘Orchid’. Indeed, ‘Orchid’ began its life as a pseudo-anthology, if you will, of some of Beckett’s short plays. Whilst our philosophy on process allowed us to quickly expand on this idea, I believe the influence remained, and permeates throughout ‘Orchid’. Let us start with the plays themselves (Beckett, 1990). In ‘Orchid’, the Cyclist meticulously cares for the orchid during the Interludes, and longs to be with it when he is ripped away. It mesmerises him, just as Krapp is with his recordings in ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ (1958). From ‘Not I’ (1972) the mouth is shown during Denial, hanging over the scene, trapped by the very screens it is broadcast on. Another came after we invited Michael Pinchbeck to view our work-in-progress, where he suggested to us that the text of our Memory scene should be the main focus (we had previously been performing the scene in an overly-exaggerated manner, and the text had been suffering for it). After experimenting with new ways of presenting the text, I suggested we perhaps look at an adaptation of Beckett’s ‘Play’ (1964), a video of which can be found below:

This fast and emotionless delivery brought the text to the forefront, and again proved to us that our grounding in absurdity (forgive the oxymoronic nature of that coupling) was integral to not just ‘Orchid’, but Rubbish as a company. As Vladimir and Estragon are doomed to wait for an elusive Godot, talking idly to pass eternity by, the Cyclist is just as trapped, with talk replaced with regimented movement. As the wheel of a bike infinitely spins, so too does the Cyclist’s ritual. This cyclical nature, seen frequently in Beckett, is key to the atmosphere ‘Orchid’ creates, namely one that is warped and macabre. Aesthetically, ‘Orchid’ scavenges from dystopia and post-apocalypse. This is in no small part due to the ramshackle-yet-incredible set and the menacing appearance of the Creatures, and reminds one of everything from George Orwell’s ‘1984’ (1949) to the ‘Fallout’ game series (1997-). Of course, with this comes the atmosphere, the Cyclist always being watched by the Creatures. His solace is an orchid in a world of rubbish, but he is continuously prevented from this by an ambiguous power.

Works Cited
Beckett, S. (1990) Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber & Faber.
Marinela Paspali (2015) Samuel Beckett Play 2001 (beckett on film) [online video]

As seen from the pictures above, ‘Orchid’ is particularly episodic in nature. The Interlude scenes provide the backbone of the show, adding a certain continuity, and allow us as a company to explore different avenues when it comes to the other scenes. When I say ‘different avenues’, I am referring to the multiple madness scenes, for which many company members wrote text for. These scenes are, for the most part, wildly different in style. In any other situation, this would be a worry, but I believe that it is this continuity of the Interludes that allows us to perform all this material coherently. The logic set down by the Interludes allow us to flick about episodically, as it will always come back to familiarity. A more trivial note now, as through this I have discovered the undeniable usefulness of whiteboard and marker when mapping out a show (as paper and pen can get quite tedious when working organically).

I do not believe I would be misrepresenting anyone in the company when I say that we do not feel comfortable when material has stayed the same for an extended period of time. Whilst this has both positive and negative aspects to it, I do not think Rubbish could work in any other way. Taking material back to the workshop, deconstructing it and building it back up has proved invaluable to our process. In fact, this was done with the whole show not long before ‘Orchid’s’ debut, a situation no theatre company wants to be in. However, stripping the entire show back and revisiting all the material we had created made us realise how much there actually was. From there, the show was pieced back together, and was better for it. Working in this way allows for boundaries and conventions to be broken and warped. We wanted everything to be on the table so to speak, and the Interludes gave us the ability to break those boundaries elsewhere in ‘Orchid’.

In his book ‘The Empty Space’ (1968), Peter Brook explains “A man walks across [an] empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged” (Brook, 1996, 9). It has always been apparent that ‘Orchid’ would be a heavily physical piece. Indeed, the very first material we began to explore were the Interlude scenes, which involve the Cyclist’s ritual with the orchid and the mysterious Woman watching over him. This is why I believe that Brook’s words have relevance here. The Interludes, considered by the company as the thread that runs throughout ‘Orchid’, must engage the audience without the use of words. They must show instead of tell, using space and proxemics to their advantage. With the four Interlude scenes and the final dance we have in their current form, the choreographer Kerrie and I worked very closely to achieve the vision we all wanted. We began by deciding to work on these scenes separately, with only her, Jacob (who plays the Cyclist) and myself present (in fact, we have only just begun bringing the rest of the company to these rehearsals). We felt workshopping these scenes with just the three of us allowed us to be more focused on them, and also allowed the main rehearsals to be entirely for work that included the whole company. In the earlier smaller rehearsals, I began being surprised at how passive my role was. I felt as though I should be doing more but, at that point, there was not much more I could do. As Katie Mitchell puts it, “it [is] best to rely on people who [are] trained in these specialised fields to lead the work directly” (Mitchell, 2009, 96). As I quickly began to realise, my role early on was to make sure that I was very clear in communicating to Kerrie what I needed from the movement, so she could adapt and develop her own ideas in the rehearsals, and to avoid the rest of the company being “pulled in two different directions” (Mitchell, 2009, 96). It made sense to me in these earlier rehearsals to make notes on the other aspects of the scene e.g how I saw the lights and sound to be, were the proxemics/sight lines looking correct etc. When the specific movements were decided upon and rehearsed to a degree, then we began looking deeper into the performances of Jacob and Kerrie. Of course, I had always used words like manipulation and envy to describe the Woman’s movements, but here was when we began implementing them rigorously.

Although a contradiction with the title of this post, music was extremely useful to not only the show itself, but to our process. Focusing before a rehearsal or workshop is integral to the success of it. I found using one track at the beginning of most rehearsals very effective in focusing the company, as it eventually became routine to get into the space, lie down with eyes closed, and listen to the song in its entirety before beginning. This is the song I used below:

Works Cited
Bianca S (2012) Enter Shikari – Constellations [online video]
Brook, P. (1996) The Empty Space. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Mitchell, K. (2009) The Director’s Craft: A Handbook for the Theatre. London: Routledge.