Rehearsal - Walk and Read through

About a month before the show went up, all mains, alongside the director decided to do a read through of the script without our scripts in our hands, so that, we could learn to flow nicely together because a lot of our scenes were static and sounded quite robotic.

We all sat in a circle and went through the lines, making sure we didn’t wait 3 seconds before we answered, this is because there would be dead air in those seconds and seem like we were not having a real conversation, plus it would look as though someone had forgotten their line. We were also making sure we had the lines correct, checking for words we had missed or randomly added.

The next day we went through Act 2 in exactly the same way. I think doing this helped us work together more and help each other out, as when we got lines wrong we spoke to each other about it and helped each other go through that particular scene again. Also, this helped with the relationships we showed on stage. As we were more comfortable with each other off stage it showed when we were on it.

After the read through, we did a similar thing again but this time we were acting and working on particular scenes. Taking out things that didn’t sound right, for example, in my first scene with the spirit, I had a line that read “could it come a little bit quicker because we only have about 90 minutes?” This was cut as it didn’t flow nicely into the prologue. As well as this we added lots of different things like, jokes, actions, etc. For example, the Dame has to shove me in a feminine way to reinforce her sarcasm, but because the dame is obviously a man the shove is a lot harder, so it makes it comical for the audience to watch as the impact makes Abanaza look as though she is about to fall off stage.