THE PLAY’S THE THING…
Today I finally cast the play. Six jubilant girls & one jubilant boy. Some disappointed souls too who must be approached individually & reassured as to their talents. Faces, voices, physiques, ages are determinants too; yours, whilst perfect for a different play, were a hairsbreadth short of requirements this time around. (Fortunately on this occasion I could issue these consolations honestly: it was a strong field). With the first performance date settled as Wednesday December 10th, there’s a reasonable timespan ahead within which to accommodate illness, schoolwork pressures, emotional crises, power failures, flood, famine & pestilence & maybe a handful of rehearsals too.
It’s been the same every year since 1975. Months of pushing scripts from one side of the desk to the other, combing the texts of the favoured ones for ways of cross-gendering parts, cutting scenes, shifting contextual time-settings – all to adapt a challenging, original piece to the constraints of my casting situation here in a small school with a constantly shifting population. And then, after the play has finally been chosen, the process of prising it carefully, section-by-section, off the page & onto the stage.
Each production, regardless of general scale, presents itself at the outset as a task fraught with various impossibilities that first must be converted into improbabilities, then into barely plausible potential, & finally into realisation against all reasonable odds. And there would be no point in undertaking the enterprise were this not the case. Why should a production within a school demand less of its director & its cast & expect less of its audience than in the professional theatre? There is an appetite & a capacity for total commitment - & the potential for startlingly fresh, raw & intense performance - from young people. Young actors have no prejudices, no hackneyed stylistic gimmicks & nothing to prove. At its best their involvement in performance at all stages has a purity of focus & an overall honesty that is hard to find in professional theatre. So a strong cast should be nurtured but also driven hard. In a school with a long tradition of theatre, dance & music they would assume nothing else.
This term at St Christopher School we have three major productions. My department colleague is collaborating with the Director of Music on a production of that ‘70s extravaganza, the musical Joseph & his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Additionally there is a homegrown pantomime currently in the writing stages. These two pieces will be performed in the Theatre & will benefit from its professional standard lighting & technical facilities. I have chosen a small-cast play called Ask for the Moon by Shirley Gee. I’ll rehearse & present that in the Drama Studio, an equally well-resourced space acquired recently.
Ask for the Moon is not a well-known piece, although it drew rave reviews at its London debut in the mid-1980s. I came across the text shortly after the play had closed at the Hampstead Theatre &, because of the quaint peculiarities of British performing rights regulations concerning recent public performance, I had to approach the playwright directly for permission to perform it. We met up &, within the space of an afternoon’s negotiation in the local pub, became good pals. We’ve remained in touch ever since, although very sadly Shirley developed ME & has been more or less housebound for some years now.
Ask for the Moon concerns the lives, professional & personal, of six women. Three of them are workers in a contemporary East London garment factory – a sweatshop - & the other three are laceworkers in a tiny Devon cottage in the 1840s. The stage is divided into two halves with both sets immediately adjacent to each other. The sweatshop is a chaotic clutter of boxes, shelves, bolts of material, garments finished & half-finished & three industrial sewing machines. The cottage is small but virtually empty of furniture or decoration. The sweatshop workers comprise Anwhela, an Asian woman new to the factory; Carlie, a tough, capable, compassionate mother in her late 30s; Lil, a lively but increasingly incapacitated old lady in her 70s; Eugene, the harassed, anxious manager, himself a victim of the system that drives the women. The laceworkers are young: Mercy, in her 20s, consumptive & the ‘foreman’ of the team; Alice, 20 & losing her sight; Fanny, 16, passionate, ambitious & in love with a local farm worker.
The play’s serious concerns never emerge didactically. As the play progresses & time runs out as the women work against the clock to meet punishing production deadlines, we learn about their lives – their hopes, their fears, their expectations. Their interaction is depicted with warmth, great humour (much of it decidedly coarse) & great humanity. But we are caused to reflect too on the ruthlessness of a system of production whose obsession with profit bought cheaply has changed little in 160 years.
The play’s adult themes & content will be no obstacle to a cast aged 16 to 18. Their affection & respect for the characters they will portray & their fresh & unprejudiced interest in the subject matter will carry them through. I’m very pleased with them all & I’m looking forward to the preparation process. I’m even ready for the headache- & panic-inducing challenges of laying hold of three industrial sewing machines, creating the carefully planned & finely balanced chaos of the sweatshop, finding someone to teach the laceworkers their craft so that by the time we’re ready to perform, they can really shift those bobbins across the lace-cushions at speed, & tutoring the actors in the Devon & London accents that are essential for authenticity.
After nearly three decades of directing two full-scale productions a year this is my penultimate project. Next year I retire. Most of what I do as a teacher I shan’t miss for a moment. In recent years the processes of education in this country have been hijacked by successive nanny governments obsessed with results & qualifications & our working day is now stiff with form filling, queue supervising & target-reaching. But the adventure of piecing a production together from nothing more than a slim text & the energies of a team of young people retains all of its excitement. For those involved, all notions of school as institution recede. That deep, inchoate awareness of the random uselessness of the packaged information they have to ingest in the name of learning has no application here. This endeavour has a vitality & immediacy that so much of their curricular activity lacks. Its collaborative nature, gradual evolution, democratic functioning & mutual sense of purpose contain more educational authenticity in one month’s activity than is found in an entire term’s worth of fact hunting & formula chasing.
So off we go – Caroline, Amy, Zoë, Josh, Megan, Tala, Ayla & I. The read through was this afternoon & rehearsals start tomorrow. May Dionysus bless this ship & all who sail in her..!
12:56:06 AM 
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