Begin/End on the road

The tour is on. The van headed off into the sunrise this morning taking Amy, Rachel and Trevor off on the Begin/End national tour: first stop Riverhead Theatre, Louth. They arrived safely and the show is on as I type!

Hopefully the show will be as well received across the rest of England as it has been at Half Moon. If you get a chance to see the show then do and then we are happy to post any reviews onto the blog just drop us an email at marketing@halfmoon.org.uk or alternatively leave your comments in response to the individual posts on this page.
Click here to see the full tour schedule and how to get your tickets.

We've also had our first review in, click here for the thoughts of Susan Elkin from The Stage.

I've just seen the dress rehearsal - look out for the textback

I have just watched the dress rehearsal.

The opening performance is almost here (tomorrow at 2pm!) and everything seems to be in place. The dress rehearsal went very smoothly and the two actors have really got into their characters and are bringing David's script to life. As part of the dress rehearsal we also had the chance to see the textback in action. The textback comes after the performance and is an opportunity for the audience to ask the cast and stage manager questions about Begin/End and any issues that arose while they were watching the play. We threw some pretty tough questions at the team today (including asking how old they all were!) and they certainly rose to the occassion. So if you come and see the show don't be afraid to pitch the team your questions either with a text message or an old fashioned hand in the air.

Other high points for me were Paul Hithersay's stunning visuals of Limehouse at the start and end of the show - so look out for them and a very moving scene towards the end from actor Amy Costello.

Patrick Baldwin our photographer is in the building now so hopefully there will be some great production shots to share very soon.

The view from the control box from Trevor Nichol, Stage Manager

So we're now in the final week of production, and this is where it really starts to hot up for the stage manager.

Up until now I have been looking after rehearsals taking notes on the action of the actors, called 'blocking' which creates a record in the master copy of the script, which we call 'the book'. Along with Anna the designer, we have been finding props for the show as they come up in rehearsal notes. The rehearsal experience at Half Moon, although intensive, has been great fun and Angela (the director) has been fantastic in allowing me to have input to decisions regarding the show; which with some directors is not always the case.

This week is perhaps the most challenging for the Stage Manager. On Monday we had the technical rehearsal or 'tech'. The tech is where all of the different technical elements (lighting, sound, video and props) are combined with the dialogue. It is my job to run the tech and ensure that everything happens in the right place at the right time in the play. Each change, such as a lighting change or sound effect is called a 'cue'. During the tech, I write all of these cues in the book as we stagger through the play, cue by cue. During the process, scenes are often repeated many times and elements altered, for example the volume of a sound or brightness of a light. We only move on once everything in that scene is just right and recorded into the lighting desk or VJ console. It took us 10 hours to tech Begin/End!

Today we had two dress rehearsals. This was pretty nerve-racking for me, as it was the first time I operated the show continuously from beginning to end (excuse the pun!). During the show I operate the lighting, sound and the video, so my hands have to be able to move quickly from computer to computer! The dress rehearsal went really well, apart from the odd little blip, and the energy in the theatre is high. I can't wait until the show tomorrow... it should be a good one!

Work experience student Lucy Long shares some thoughts.

Hi my name's Lucy and I'm at Half Moon on work experience. Every time I watched a play at Half Moon I wished I could watch one in the making and luckily this week I got to sit in and observe Begin/End in rehearsals. I enjoyed it so much; it is such a powerful play and some of the lines made me shiver. The actors are so good at getting in to character even when things get really tough. I also did not have an idea how much time and effort goes in to the simple things like the lights and how much effect they have on the play. I really can't wait to see when it's finished.

Rachel McKenzie who plays Yaz says a few words

The Last week!

So today's 'Tech day' where all the lighting and sound and VJing come together. It's quite exciting and nerve racking to see the show in its near finished state, but it is all good preperation for Wednesday [Begin/End opens this Wednesday 3 Feb].

The process for this show has been extrememly creative and it's interesting to see how far our characters have progressed from the first day. I'm still personally trying to tie down the choreography that JC taught me 2 weeks ago, but I know it'll all come together. The show will be fantastic, it's just believing in the work we've created and owning that process.

Designer Anna Harding talks costumes and paper

Really pleased with the way the set for Begin/End is looking, and the costumes are all sorted now.

This week I've been adjusting the 'paper coat', a very important item in the play. During the rehearsal process they have developed a whole sequence around this coat and now it has to come apart in 3 sections, but I don't want to give too much away...

Also, I have covered all the props in newspaper so they go with the 'paper coat'. The props come out of filing cabinets, they belong to Lili's memory so that is why I have chosen to cover them in paper, they are not quite real.

I'm looking forward to it all coming together for the dress on Tuesday!

You asked for more, so Begin/End writer David Lane is back with thoughts from his last few visits to the rehearsal room.

It's been amazing to see Begin/End change week by week at each of my rehearsal visits, and watch the layers of the production build little by little. Two weeks ago the scenes were being scrutinised in some detail; there were long conversation about single pages of script, thinking associatively alongside the actors, director and stage manager to draw up images, stories, and experiences that might parallel the journeys of the characters and help the performers access what Yaz and Lili are going through. Loose improvations of each section of the play were also being developed, which you can really see in the way the two performers now relate to one another physically and emothionally on stage; it's underpinned with that playful, spirited and imaginative impro work that's helped them (from my perspective at least) to take ownership of the text.

Then a week ago, the work in rehearsal was obviously getting more specific: longer sections were being built upon with movement and sound, emphasis on lines and exchanges being pinned down, and as the writer I began to take a back seat and just watch them focus on their own craft, rather than worry so much about mine. This is a lovely experinece for a writer, as you start to believe in the foundations that the script is providing and allow yourself to be surprised with where they take it. However I was soon collared by Angela to run through some of the teenage language in the piece; the actors had been on a reseach trip on a local school and spoken to the youth theatre at Half Moon, and there's been some essential updating of the vocabulary! This ear-to-the-ground stuff is great as you know you'll be giving a young audience something they recognise with a high level of detail.

And then this morning, just over three weeks in, I've been to a 'stagger-through' and the whole piece has lifted again: it flows around the space and the music, movement and performances have reached a new level - even though the actors told me there'd been several slips and director Angela had lots of notes, it was beginning to look like a complete production. The digital / video work has yet to be included, so the dress rehearsal will be the first time I see all the elements of the project combine. Seeing the play as a whole three-dimensional thing also means that little snippets of text start to stand out as not quite right; lines start to get trimmed as the silences between the actors, the space and the audience begin to speak louder than the text. This fine-tuning requires a different way of watching and listening - with earlier drafts, the overall structure and shape is what you're grappling with, wheras now you want everthing to be as precise as possible. You learn more about writing too, so this is all development time for my own practice as well.

Next time I see Begin/End will be the day before the play opens, and from what I've seen so far I think it's going to be an incredibly exciting production.