Sunday, June 15, 2008

Goodbye to Mr Still's play; hullo to Narnia again

The play is finished; one of the cast lost her voice because of a heavy cold early in the season and struggled to make herself heard during the rest of the performances; two more of us have succumbed to a similar bug, and apart from a nasty moment when the video froze at the Saturday matinee, things in general went fine.

I can’t say it’s my favourite play of all time – I think James Still doesn’t quite give the actors enough to work on in some scenes because of their brevity (the scenes, not the actors) – but it obviously works for the audiences. Every night there’d be snuffles and sobs, particularly in the scene at the end where all the cast light candles as a kind of memorial to the dead, and the unrelenting seriousness of the work plainly gets the message across.

As always we said goodbye to some people we’d got to know reasonably well during the last couple of months, and that’s one of the sad parts about doing plays with an ad hoc group. On the other hand, we had a read-through of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader today, and at least four of us from And Then They Came for Me are appearing in that as well. Some of us just don’t when to stop.

Another interesting aspect of the play we’ve just finished was that most of us are Christians, so every performance was preceded by a prayer in one of the dressing rooms. Another good way to knit people together!

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