(no subject)

[pedanther]

The Rep Club was incorporated eighty years ago this year; it's the oldest continuously-active amateur theatre group in the state.

One of the things the club did to mark the anniversary was to get a grant and invite Raymond Omodei to be a Director In Residence for a few months. Ray is a professional director of some significance, responsible for several milestones in Australian theatre history, but he got his start in amateur theatre with the Rep Club.

As his primary project while he was in residence, he chose to put on a production of The Playboy of the Western World. And he cast me in the lead role.

There were a fair number of lumps and hitches and transitory disasters, which I'm going to pass lightly over, but on the whole it was one of the most enjoyable productions I can remember being involved with. The Playboy is an excellent piece of work, which generally helps. I think another important thing was having a director with experience, both in general and specifically with the play. A production is often awkward if the director's still learning the ropes, and even if they have years of experience as a director they might still be learning the ropes of the play if it's the first time they've done it. Ray's been a director for decades and he's done the Playboy half a dozen times, in a variety of styles and in venues ranging from a rural amateur theatre to the Sydney Opera House, and he knows it inside out.

So, as I said, I enjoyed it, and I think I learned a lot too, both about acting and more general things about the process of putting on a play. One thing he said that's stuck with me is that although he has an ideal version of the play in his head, as who wouldn't after reading it so many times, directing the play is not always necessarily about getting that ideal version out onto the stage. Directing a play is about creating the best version of the play you can in the theatre you have with the people you have; you have to work with the size and shape of the theatre and the strengths and weaknesses of the actors, and sometimes that leads you in directions you wouldn't have gone in your hypothetical ideal theatre with your hypothetical ideal cast. (There was, I think, an example in our production, a character who was played quite differently from the way he's usually interpreted, with Ray's active encouragement; that's what worked for the actor, and if he'd been made to try and play it the usual way it wouldn't have worked.)

We seem to have succeeded in creating a good version in the theatre we have with the people we had; everyone who's talked to me about it (and people still are talking to me about it occasionally, months later) has said they enjoyed it.

Comments

[leecetheartist.livejournal.com]

Bravo!