Our final week in Hackney has been a haze of coughs, sniffs and wheezes. I've been trying to fight off a persistent and rather pathetic cold, striving to clear the fug in my head enough to see Mary and the Rev. J in a sharper focus. As we continued to work through the play, I've been making discoveries about both my characters. Trying to find a physical and vocal quality for the Reverend is a nice parallel I have with Mary. She talks about the difficulties of trying to play a man, Jack Wilful in the Recruiting Officer, perfecting the walk and way you men 'hold your head'. The difference being of course that Silvia is a woman pretending to be a man, whereas in Our Country's Good, I'm actually supposed to be the Reverend Richard Johnson....
Or am I?
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| Mark Rylance, one of my favourite actors, as Olivia in Twelfth Night |
There's not a huge amount of information given about him in the play. I don't think an impression of Tom Hollander will suffice! What I'm given are his limited views about theatre (something he doesn't seem to have much first hand experience of), his disapproval of 'co-habitation' and sex outside of marriage, (interestingly a disapproval which applies equally to convicts and officers alike) and the importance he places on teaching morals and encouraging holy matrimony. We also know he is married and one of the few men permitted to have brought his wife with him. During the debate his opinion waivers, and I've been struggling to find his status with the other officers. There's something interesting about the dutiful, perhaps in some cases even grudging respect paid to a religious figure: the man Collins refers to as 'our moral guide'. And I feel as well as his own motives for making sure this convict play does more good than harm, there's also a sense of social politics at play. Does he decide to go along with the idea of putting on a play because he has been convinced, or because the man whose idea it is just happens to be the Governor in Chief of New South Wales? What's in it for the Reverend if he stays on side with Phillip?
Perhaps rather than focusing on what gender I'm playing, I simply need to find what the Reverend wants and play his objectives to the full - then can I really start getting to grips with who this man is.
Why Our Country's Good? Why Now?
"It doesn't matter when the play is set, it's better if it's set in the past. It's clearer." Wisehammer Act 2, Sc.7
Our Country's Good was written in 1988. The Tories were in power, it was the height of Thatcher's Britain, and Max Stafford Clark describes in Letters to George how theatrical subsidy had taken a huge battering and the gap between rich and poor seemed to be larger than ever. (Ring any bells?)
However Timberlake decided to set her play in the late 18th century and I think Wisehammer has a good point.
I went to see the new play The Riots at the Tricycle Theatre recently, which couldn't be anymore 'current' if it tried. It's verbatim theatre so everything spoken in the play is a direct quote from real people: from MP's, to angry shop workers, to young looters. It's 100% a play for right now. It was a deeply moving, affecting and rousing piece - many people in the audience around me vocalised their response to what was being said, not something that's standard in usual polite British theatre. The subject of the play was something I and many of the other Londoners watching had been personally affected by. There was something so deeply personal and raw about watching the piece that my heart pounded throughout and my response was emotional and heated - so much so that I couldn't see any hope, I was despondent and unable to be quite so objective about the issues being raised.
The more I read and re-read Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore (also published in the late 1980s), the more this becomes glaringly apparent...
Fear of gangs:
NOW:
"Days after the disturbances in August, David Cameron said gangs were "at the heart" of the trouble and announced he was calling in the US "supercop" Bill Bratton to advise on tackling gangs. Only three weeks ago Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, claimed that gang members had played a "significant part" in the unrest.
But the Home Office found that only one in eight (13 per cent) of those arrested were gang members, rising to 19 per cent in London, but well below that in other parts of the country. It added: "Most [police] forces perceived that where gang members were involved, they did not play a pivotal role." [The Independent]
THEN:
"The perception of organised crime would not go away and in time it became more frightening to property owners. A single criminal could be singly met. The householder, armed with blunderbuss and paired horse pistols...could drive him away. But a collective of thugs and thieves, a united 'criminal class' working together in gangs - that was quite another matter. It was largely a fantastical notion, exaggerated by deep rooted territorial instincts. Gangs certainly existed in Georgian England but they were only responsible for a fraction of the deeds that the law defined as criminal... The failure of language - the tyranny of moral generalisation over social inspection - fed the ruling class's belief that it was endangered from below." [Hughes]
Punishment:
Punishment:
THEN:
In Georgian times, punishment for crimes against property and theft were severe due to the the fear of 'the mob'. The vast majority of convicts (431 out of 733 transported in the first fleet of the convicts transported for 7 years or more were for crimes of minor theft.
- Elizabeth Beckford, 70, got 7 years transportation for stealing 12lbs of Gloucester cheese.
- Elizabeth Powley, 22 and unemployed, was to be hanged for raiding a kitchen in Norfolk for a few shillings' worth of raisins, flour and bacon, but was reprieved and sent to Australia for life.
- James Grace, 11, was shipped off for taking 10 yards of ribbon and a pair of silk stockings. [Hughes]
NOW:
Communities Secretary Eric Pickles told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "We cannot have people being frightened in their beds, frightened in their own homes for their public safety.
- Elizabeth Beckford, 70, got 7 years transportation for stealing 12lbs of Gloucester cheese.
- Elizabeth Powley, 22 and unemployed, was to be hanged for raiding a kitchen in Norfolk for a few shillings' worth of raisins, flour and bacon, but was reprieved and sent to Australia for life.
- James Grace, 11, was shipped off for taking 10 yards of ribbon and a pair of silk stockings. [Hughes]
NOW:
Communities Secretary Eric Pickles told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "We cannot have people being frightened in their beds, frightened in their own homes for their public safety.
"That is why these kind of exemplary sentences are necessary. I think people would be rightly alarmed if that incitement to riot got off with just a slap on the wrist."
- Nicolas Robinson, 23, of Borough, south-east London, was jailed for six months for stealing a £3.50 case of water from Lidl supermarket.
- Mother-of-two Ursula Nevin, from Manchester, was jailed for five months for receiving a pair of shorts given to her after they had been looted from a city centre store.
"A Criminal Class"
NOW:
"The justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, has blamed the riots ... on a 'broken penal system' that has failed to rehabilitate a group of hardcore offenders he describes as the "criminal classes". Clarke said the civil unrest had laid bare an urgent need for penal reform to stop re-offending among 'a feral underclass, cut off from the mainstream in everything but its materialism'..." [Guardian]
THEN:
Belief in a criminal class was self-fulfilling...mainly because it made rehabilitation so difficult. Once off the edge it was not easy to find another respectable job. From 1800 onward literature [...] sought to describe the causes of crime; poverty, lack of work, dislocation, vile housing, addiction, the death of hope. But the official enquiries [...] tended to hold the view that its class nature mattered more than its causes. [Hughes]
Something About Mary:
On a lighter note, one of the the highlights of the week was finding the real buzz and excitement Mary experiences in the scene 'The Meaning of Plays'. It is one of the last Recruiting Officer rehearsal scenes we see towards the end of the play. It's been liberating to find that at this point, Mary's objective with the rehearsals are becoming less about getting it right, impressing Ralph and being a good student, and more about letting go and enjoying herself with Ralph. It's fun to feel the sense of release that acting gives Mary; the confidence and forthrightness she can unashamedly exploit being 'Jack Wilful'; and the licence it gives her to flirt her socks off with Ralph, under the protective coat of playing Silvia. Silvia's lines echo Mary's feelings and concerns about falling in love with Ralph so potently. Art really is beginning to reflect life. I'm relishing the way Mary can use Farqhuar's lines to express her true feelings. If it wasn't for her role in the play, perhaps she'd never be able to articulate herself so well.
Goodbye Hackney, Hello Basingstoke.
And so- after a heartening run of act one, and getting to see everyone else's (fantastic) work - it was time to bid farewell to our Bethnal Green home. We trundled off, cross country, to pastures new - The Haymarket Theatre, Basingstoke for our final week of rehearsals and (dare I say it?) imminent opening night....
Better dose up on those vitamins. Pass the sprouts.
"The justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, has blamed the riots ... on a 'broken penal system' that has failed to rehabilitate a group of hardcore offenders he describes as the "criminal classes". Clarke said the civil unrest had laid bare an urgent need for penal reform to stop re-offending among 'a feral underclass, cut off from the mainstream in everything but its materialism'..." [Guardian]
THEN:
Belief in a criminal class was self-fulfilling...mainly because it made rehabilitation so difficult. Once off the edge it was not easy to find another respectable job. From 1800 onward literature [...] sought to describe the causes of crime; poverty, lack of work, dislocation, vile housing, addiction, the death of hope. But the official enquiries [...] tended to hold the view that its class nature mattered more than its causes. [Hughes]
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| Riot police in Tottenham |
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| Gordon Riots. Painting by Seymor Lucas. |
Something About Mary:
On a lighter note, one of the the highlights of the week was finding the real buzz and excitement Mary experiences in the scene 'The Meaning of Plays'. It is one of the last Recruiting Officer rehearsal scenes we see towards the end of the play. It's been liberating to find that at this point, Mary's objective with the rehearsals are becoming less about getting it right, impressing Ralph and being a good student, and more about letting go and enjoying herself with Ralph. It's fun to feel the sense of release that acting gives Mary; the confidence and forthrightness she can unashamedly exploit being 'Jack Wilful'; and the licence it gives her to flirt her socks off with Ralph, under the protective coat of playing Silvia. Silvia's lines echo Mary's feelings and concerns about falling in love with Ralph so potently. Art really is beginning to reflect life. I'm relishing the way Mary can use Farqhuar's lines to express her true feelings. If it wasn't for her role in the play, perhaps she'd never be able to articulate herself so well.
Goodbye Hackney, Hello Basingstoke.
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| Sunny Bethnal Green |
Better dose up on those vitamins. Pass the sprouts.
Emily x
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| Graffiti on the wall at our rehearsal studios http://www.originaltheatre.com/ |
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