Saturday 19 July 2008

Oedipus Rex - first rehearsal

The Oedipus group reconvene after just over a year to pull the show back together. Some of us went on to work on The Winter's Tale after last year's performance, some on the Ratman project, others we've simply missed.

Everyone's worked on getting their lines back up to scratch and is looking forward to getting started. Is this how professional actors work, I wonder? They know the whole Shakespeare canon and joining a new production is simply a matter of taking the script off the mind's shelf?

Director Richard is off to a wedding this afternoon, so we've decided to start an hour early, but 9:00am on a Saturday morning isn't the problem I'd imagined. We spend the whole day on dialogue. We sit in a circle, use the script less and less, relying on others to provide missing or incorrect lines, which makes them easier to learn.

Regular tea breaks keep us concentrated, but it's tiring. After four or five read throughs we feel we've made progress, so in the early afternoon, with Everton fans already arriving to see the match at Cambridge United's Abbey Stadium over the road, we finish.

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