Come and eavesdrop

Susie Trayling takes us behind the scenes of The Seagull where actors are bakers, notes are not what they seem and you are encouraged to eavesdrop…

We are now in our fourth and final week of rehearsals at Z-arts. There are ten actors, one director, one assistant director, at least one member of our brilliant stage management team and, of course, our eponymous hero, the seagull. And if we’re really lucky, there is also cake (at least two of our actors are also amazing bakers!). We are just about to start our first run through of the play, and it’s all starting to get really exciting…

Running through a whole play for the first time can feel daunting, but can also be incredibly exhilarating. The moment the actors (in our case, Victoria Lloyd and Tom McHugh) start the lines of the first scene we are all playing together. It is invigorating to watch a scene and know that in a minute you too get to step out into that space and play and weave your character into the story on stage. One of the lovely things about performing in Chekhov’s plays is that there are no minor characters. Granted, some people may have more to say than others, but they all go through the same events and each of them is given a unique voice and a complete journey to go on.

After the run through we gather together to get some notes from Chris Honer, our director. A non-actor friend once told me that, in his head at least, when actors talk about “getting notes” from a director in rehearsals after doing a scene, he imagines the director literally giving out handwritten notes in envelopes to each actor. The actors read and digest their “notes” in silence and then run the scene again. His imagination was running riot, full of Basildon Bond’s watermarked finest I’m sure, and I would love to know what he thinks happens to all of that discarded stationery but the reality is, of course, somewhat different. We tend to sit in a circle and have a conversation, led by our director, about the work that we just did.

Last week Chris gave us all a really useful note, suggesting that we think about allowing the audience to feel like they are eavesdropping on our conversations. It brings an amazing sense of intimacy into the work even in the more busy scenes. This play may have been written nearly one hundred and twenty years ago but the themes are still universal: love, family, money, success, fame. And in Anya Reiss’s version of the play it all feels zingy and vital and, yes, exciting. And we’d love it if you wanted to come and eavesdrop too…

The Seagull runs from Fri 21 Feb – Sat 8 Mar 2014. You can book tickets online here or from The Lowry Box Office on 0843 208 6010.