Arab Nights - rehearsals

The rehearsals for Metta Theatre’s upcoming show Arab Nights started last Monday at English Touring Theatre in Waterloo. This was the stage of my work with Metta Theatre that I was most looking forward to, as I love being in rehearsal rooms.

These however are only the second professional rehearsals I have been able to observe and the process was extremely enlightening. It was also a relief to realise that professionals are allowed tea breaks too! The process started with a meet and greet with the company and the cast, and then straight into a read-through of the script, which was being videoed throughout to send to our six authors.

Hearing the script (which is six separate tales) read out loud by the actors and pulled together in its order really made the experience seem real, and the power of the work’s message was clear, even read sitting down in a circle with scripts. The rest of the first day was dedicated mainly to text work, so Poppy and the actors could start discussing how they had responded to the various authors’ plays, as well as getting to know our rehearsal spaces facilities, and working out a mark up, and what props each scene would require.

The next rehearsal I attended was mainly focussed around work on The Tale of The Dictator’s Wife by Tania El Khouri, and was attended by Tania herself. It was interesting for me to watch the three creative components of a play - playwright, director and cast – interacting in one room about the work. Tania told the two actors involved in her piece how she visualised her characters, and described to Poppy and Will the set she imagined for her piece. Poppy and the cast then worked on the movement of this tale. The tale is set on an extremely innovative set of an ipad/bed which the character of the First Lady must manipulate realistically. The session involved quite a lot of everyone in the room lying on the floor with their legs in the air, and I started to understand why actors don’t wear skirts to rehearsals!

I have also been in the rehearsal room while the company worked on one of the most complicated and also most beautiful tales The Tale of the River Brides by Chirine El Ansary. I watched as Poppy and the cast discussed back-stories for the characters and weaved speeches through a megaphone and a drum into a tale set on an aeroplane. I was impressed how simply by the way the actors were placed and how they moved the studio became transformed into what was clearly an aeroplane.

Yesterday Sue Buckmaster, the Artistic Director of Theatre-Rites, who is a leading expert on puppetry, attended rehearsals. She was there to help the cast learn all the rules of her art. I have loved puppetry since I was a small child but have never understood at all how it was achieved. It was almost magical to see how the company and Sue worked together so that what at the beginning looked to me like a book with a scarf round its neck, by the end uncannily evoked the figure of a bent over old man, and how that too could suddenly (with the help of a shoe box) be transformed into a goat!

All in all the rehearsals of Arab Nights so far seem to me to promise an innovative and moving play, with the power to tell a story using in some instances only shoes as both props and characters, and having the opportunity to watch the show develop has been a thrilling experience for me.

Mary Franklin | Tuesday November 6th 2012

Arab Nights - Mary's thoughts

In September I was absolutely thrilled to be offered an opportunity to work in the professional theatre world. I am interning on Metta Theatre’s latest production Arab Nights, which will be at the Soho Theatre from November 21st. My first task was not an unpleasant one, but an invitation to lunch at Will and Poppy’s house (the directors) to meet the cast and company, and lovely baby Noah. Everyone was very friendly and already I felt that I had learned a huge amount about what it actually takes to put together a production.

Since then I have been kept busy with a number of tasks. One of these was working on a timeline of the events of the Arab Spring (which the play is based around) for the freesheet. The events described in the play are such horrific stories I was convinced they were fiction. It was eye opening to realise that things like virginity testing (described in The River Brides) are real life events.

I was also set to work to find a rehearsal space for the company and given a preferred location and budget. This meant travelling around London to view spaces which has been enormously useful for me to find out what is out there and for how much, for later in my career. I also emailed a few people I knew about doing post show discussions and it was wonderful to get such a positive response about the play and its concept.

Every Monday I attend the company Production meeting, which each time manages to be both frighteningly professional and a lot of fun. Having only directed student productions the idea of having people who would actually do your publicity for you is very exciting. This week I had the task which I have possibly enjoyed the most, which was a ‘text reading’ with one of the three actors. I was daunted by this instruction as I wasn’t sure exactly what a ‘text reading’ was and a Google search did not help much. However when I met the actor I confessed I had never done one before and in fact wasn’t sure exactly what it meant, he admitted he was in exactly the same boat so there was no need for my worries. What we did do was read through the text, with me reading the other characters to check his pronunciation was correct. I have frequently found that a play on the page is not only much less powerful than spoken, but hard to read and almost incomprehensible. To hear Arab Nights read out loud, even in a cursory way really gave me an idea of what the production itself will be like, and how resonant and striking the script is.

We go into rehearsals on Monday so I will spend the weekend sourcing as many shoe boxes as possible (the reason will be revealed when you come to see the play) and I am greatly looking forward to being in the rehearsal room, and seeing how Poppy directs the actors. All in all I am immensely grateful to Metta for giving me this chance to see how a play is formed and also for the wonderful experience that is proving.

Mary Franklin | Friday October 26th 2012

research and development

By Poppy

Today we spent an amazing day at the rehearsal rooms of English Touring Theatre trying out some of the music with the singers. It was especially thrilling for me as I hadn’t heard any of the music until that point - and it’s absolutely stunning. Thankfully the singers also love it, which makes a real difference, and they’re raring to go away and learn it all for January. Of course Jon has to sit down and write it all first! But two of the twelve movements are done and they’re both stunning. We spent the morning working through the pieces purely musically and then in the afternoon began to explore some simple staging ideas and particularly how the character of Iris will be portrayed on stage as she’s played both by an actress and a singer simultaneously. Some good discoveries were made which will stand us in good stead for January and someone from the Wellcome Trust came to observe in the afternoon when we performed a work-in-progress showing of both movements. A nail-biting moment for myself and Jon but she loved it so that’s all good. Now I can’t wait to get started properly on it all in January.

Dots

By Jon

It's 5.30 in the morning and I'm in a rather insalubrious B&B in Bath, where I'm composing for some shows at the Theatre Royal whilst doing some work on 'Flicker' in the early part of the day before going in for technical rehearsals. I've spent a long time reading and re-reading the libretto, and asking the ever-patient Poppy if she'd mind changing a few sections and phrases that I think the music won't need. At the moment the score's a fairly random collection of bits of manuscript paper with scraps of vocal melodies and chords, from which I'm pulling together ideas as I start working through the libretto.

When I talked to Julian O'Kelly - the head of music therapy at the RHN - I was very struck by the idea of what music therapists call 'entrained improvisation'. This is a musical process used to establish connections with patients in low-awareness states; the therapist begins by humming, singing or playing a single note, which is precisely timed and phrased to the patient's breathing. Gradually more notes are added and the complexity built up before being taken back down to a single note again. There's something very attractive about this as a compositional structure, so I'm planning to use this basic idea in several different ways throughout. In fact I've got very interested in the whole idea of breathing patterns; we've decided to start and end the opera with solo arias for Iris which are not-quite-identical mirror images of each other, and I've found some low chord clusters which have a feeling of soft breathing which I think might work well as an accompaniment for these.

I've also decided that the three characters should have quite different kinds of music. Iris' music is going to be very chromatic and melismatic (stretching words over several notes), whereas Bridget's will be much more melodic. She discovers Iris is locked-in (rather than being in a low-awareness state) when she notices Iris blinking in time to her singing, so I've written a little slightly Ella Fitzgerald-ish song for her to sing, which I can develop into other ideas elsewhere.

I've (eventually) been having fun with the Joe scenes; at first I was slightly tearing my hair out over how to set phrases like 'neurophysiological response', before I realised that there was something quite exciting about setting his lines very close to the actual speech rhythms of the interview transcripts we drew on when putting the libretto together. His scenes are also an opportunity to introduce a slightly lighter tone, so I'm trying to make his sections as bouncy and upbeat as possible.

We've got a R&D day coming up, where we're going to workshop two scenes with two the singers who'll hopefully be in the final performance - the soprano Anna Dennis (playing Iris), and Alison Crookendale, the contralto who'll be playing Bridget, so I'm looking forward to hearing some of the music sung live. We're going to concentrate on Iris' opening aria and the scene in which Bridget starts working with Iris using an alphabet chart, which Iris can navigate by blinking. As we found when interviewing the patients at the RHN, this is an unbelievably slow yet crucial process, and I'm starting to think about how to convey that musically without the audience (hopefully) getting bored.

Lots to do...

Arab Nights - Tania's musings

Only five weeks now until Arab Nights opens at the Soho in London - and so this week I'm delighted to share Lebanese Live Artist Tania El Khoury's thoughts and musings on her contribution to the production. And for those of you especially interested in 1001 Nights her piece - both powerful and very funny - also has echoes of a great tale within the ancient Nights canon called 'Abu Kassim's Slipper'. It seems the precedent of shoes as powerful objects of provocation is even older than we realised...

The multi-functional shoes

I stared at the newspaper's photo of the shoes that Asma El Assad purchased from Louboutin. This must a joke. Even for a play, I wouldn't write that the character of a brutal dictator’s wife buys a designer pair of shoes with nails coming out of them. Does she use them to poke the eyes of political prisoners? Surely she doesn't wear them to a dinner party thrown by queen Rania or any other freakishly smiling royal.

Being a dictator’s wife who is busy buying shoes while the people are dying is beyond a cliché. Shouldn't a modern and educated westernised first lady find herself a more unique passe-temps? Imelda Marcos, the wife of the former Philippino president did it before her. She left behind over 1000 pair of shoes when she fled the country.

Shoes in the Arab world played a part in politics long before the Assads' shopping basket was leaked to the media. They serve a specific task, to be thrown at the faces of dictators, war criminals, state media representatives and any other enemy of the people. If the world was a better place, these revolutionary shoes will be worth more than the entire collection of Louboutin.

Dictators in the Arab world also use shoes as a political tool. Last year, Nazeeha a friend from Bahrain was arrested for reporting on-line that she had witnessed the killing of a civilian by the police. She was tortured by having one of her shoes shoved down her throat. This story didn't make it to Vogue but Asma El Assad did.

Tania El Khoury | Wednesday October 17th 2012

Some hard decisions

By Jon

I've just had the first draft of the libretto through from Poppy. It's fantastic, striking a careful balance between the human story of Iris (our central Locked-In character) and Bridget (the nurse who cares for her and guides her on her journey to communication), and the scientific material we're also keen in to incorporate, which will be delivered by a character called Joe. s a music-therapist delivering a 'lunchtime lecture' (a regular feature of life at the RHN, which many of the staff attend).

Poppy and I conducted most of the interviews with staff and patients together, and worked out an overall broad form for the opera: a twelve-part structure, in which each section is a snapshot of successive months over a single year, and alternates between Iris' story and Joe's lecture, which will occasionally be interrupted by Bridget. It's thrilling to get a fully fleshed-out version of the bare-bones skeleton we've been discussing for so many months, and I'm now at the stage when I need to start making some fairly major decisions that'll have far-reaching effects on how I write it..

Firstly, the singers. For budgetary reasons we're limited to three voices, which led to a hard decision about the number of characters. We always knew we wanted Iris to be played simultaneously by two performers: an immobile actor and a soprano who would voice his / her thoughts. We also wanted to include a scientist of some sort - this became our Joe character, who would be a low male voice - either a bass or baritone. We thought long and hard about who the third character should be; originally we were very keen to include a character who was a friend or family member of Iris', but were very struck when visiting the hospital by the particular quality of the relationship between patients and the nurses who care for them, and so decided to explore this via the character of Bridget, who will be a contralto. This gives me a nice range of voices to work with, and it's a combination whose ranges sit above and below each other quite well.

Secondly - instruments! I'm limited to five musicians (again for cost reasons), so I need to choose a combination that I can get the maximum flexibility from in terms of range, dynamics, texture, and the ability to play not only solo melodic lines but also accompanying chordal-type material. I'm also not allowed a piano (budget...).

So with all this in mind (and taking a slight steer from Schoenberg's choice of instruments in one of my favourite pieces 'Pierrot Lunaire'), I've settled on a combination of cello, violin (doubling viola), clarinet (doubling up on my favourite instrument of all time - the bass clarinet), flute (doubling up on piccolo, alto flute and the fabulous piece of plumbing that is the bass flute), and a percussionist playing marimba, vibraphone and various other bits and pieces. Very excited at the prospect that we might be able to work with the virtuosic Aurora orchestra....

writing the libretto

By Poppy

It's a curious experience writing a libretto for an opera - made even curiouser when one is working from the transcripts of real life interviews. I did a similar thing on our production Waiting in 2010 working from the verbatim text of British Muslim women whose husbands had been detained in Guantanamo and Belmarsh. But on that project the text already existed and I didn't meet the women until the piece was performed, which allowed me a certain distance from the material and possibly greater artistic licence. With Flicker - an opera about giving a voice to those unable to communicate - I feel so keenly the responsibility to do justice to the voices of the many patients and staff that we've interviewed - to try and preserve the idiosyncrasies of their speech patterns, to retain the accuracy of the science and also throughout all of that to carve out a narrative that hangs together and resonates, with characters who each have a consistent voice (although the truth is that each character comes from several interviews and partly from my imagination).

Hopefully I won't give Jon too much of a head-ache giving him phrases like 'We can use neuro-imaging equipment to show auditory evoked potentials' to set to music! But I think my role really is about finding the poetry in the every day - there are phrases and snatches of text that I'm weaving into the libretto that have come from the very beginning of the process - back in the autumn of 2011 when we first met with Sophie Duport, our scientific advisor she spoke very eloquently about the inability to express emotion when you are Locked In 'how do I [they] cry, the cry cannot come', and even a phrase from a meeting with our Wellcome trust grant manager 'suffer with less suffering' has made it in. Ultimately I have to write something that Jon can set and the performers can sing so I'm always drawn back to short phrases and repetition, although sometimes there's no avoiding the technical jargon for the scientist character - but I think those sections will have a more recitative-y feeling out of necessity. Also I hope to inject some levity into the piece - the last thing we want is 60 minutes of misery - with a few choice swear words. There's nothing like an opera singer singing the word 'fucking' to lighten the mood.