Last Eyes Blinded – Conception to Rehearsal

Well, hello there. I’ve been asked to write this shiny nice new blog for you all, to keep you all up to date with how the production is going. Ironically, we’ve actually already had the first rehearsal, but I need to write a bit about the conceptual stage first, so here we go.

As a few of you might know, last year No Answer produced the first part of this trilogy in the Salberg, which sold to not a massive audience, but a very appreciative one who were keen to see more in the future. There were no concrete plans to perform the second play, even though it had been written, but we had all secretly hoped that when the time got a little nearer, we might be granted permission to come back and perform again. If we wanted to put forward a production for the Playhouse’s approval, then we needed a decent idea of how it was going to shape up, so we started thinking about our approach to the second play quite early on, back at Christmas in fact, particularly with a view to casting. I was to be in the cast again reprising the role of Mundane that I played last year, and it was decided that Steve Bennett, who played Musk last year, should also return to play the role of Anguish, due to a certain connection between the two characters. We wanted to cast Tom Learner, who played the role of Also last year, in the role of Beaujolais, as in Paperwork he was practically mute and it might be nice to give him more to do. However, Tom was sadly uncertain if he’d have enough time to commit to the project, so instead we are rejoined by Ollie Malam, who played Gerard last year and conveniently enough has the same coloured hair as the actress playing his sister. This meant all the male parts were cast and in the female roles we have newcomer and fellow UEA student Frith Taylor as Miracle; Samantha Scott, founder of Haystack Productions as Bridget; and Alice Phelps, perhaps familiar as Hermione from John Cox’s production of The Winter’s Tale as Bella. General wonder boy Jake Anders will again be our Creative Support Director, sorting out all that complex behind-the-scenes stuff that we actors find so difficult ourselves!

With a cast and a general idea of what was going on decided upon, there was nothing else we could do until several months later, when we officially approached the Playhouse with hopes that we might be allowed to perform again. Our friends Mark Powell and Abigail Harte in the Participation, Education and Outreach department could see no problems with us coming back and sent us along to Tim Croall in Marketing, who helped Jake and myself out with how we should submit our production for inclusion in the brochure. After that it was back to uni for me, and I was notified by email by Mark that Philip Wilson, the Playhouse’s Artistic Director, had ok’ed the production and so we were officially placed in the brochure for the autumn season! After this major development it was time to think more actively about how to put the production together. It’s a massive honour to be included officially in the brochure this year, and it means that it’ll be a great help when it comes to the marketing side of things. The next job was to draw up a rehearsal schedule, trying as much as possible to avoid people’s absences, though sometimes this is inevitable and we’ll have to work on scenes without a particular person.

Jake had already started looking into marketing and suchlike by visiting printing companies and trying to find advertising slots, but for all of us on the creative side of the production it was simply a matter of waiting until the read-through, when the play would really start to take shape.