The Guinea Pig Club Blog Post 2

Wed 12 Sep 2012

School trips and Latex

12.09.12

And we’re off. Monday afternoon saw a handful of the cast, the guys playing the pilots, arrive into the rehearsal space to a rather unsteady table covered in sheets of skin. These latex samples were there to make up the prosthetics that may be used to represent the horrific injuries of the Guinea Pig Club. After a few hours of attaching the sheets to knicker-elastic and moulding them to the boy’s faces the room could have easily been mistaken for Leatherface’s store room, off-cuts found on every surface. We will be working on the face pieces, and the way they are used, throughout the process but it feels we are off to a strong start.

Yesterday (Tuesday) brought the whole cast together (bar Al, playing Mike, who was unable to attend) for what felt a lot like a school trip as we all piled in to a minibus to be driven off to the Yorkshire Air Museum. It was here that we had our first read through, in the chapel of an old air base surrounded by aircraft hangers and the odd Spitfire and Hurricane, with 40’s war songs playing over a tannoy. Though it was slightly eerie, as though we had stepped back in time to (a very calm) wartime Britain, this was the perfect atmosphere to read the script together for the first time as it really gave us all a feel for the play’s context.

We were also talked through the set and costume designs by Jo, the designer, who brought with her the maquette (a scaled down model of the set) to walk us through the stage as it will be for the performance. With this, and talks with Damian about his ideas for the piece and it’s staging, the cast and crew had a great overview of how the play will come together in the next few weeks.

Obviously, having got all the way out to Elvington we spent a lot of the day looking around the museum itself and were privileged to have a tour around some of the areas directly applicable to the play including watching fighter pilot footage from the war. The actors all said they could have spent the day hearing stories of war, not just as valuable research; it was fascinating hearing about the unbelievably difficult circumstances and limited technology the soldiers were fighting a war with.

The highlight of the day for me, and I’m sure many of the actors, was meeting Sandy: a member of the Guinea Pig Club. You would never know he was nearly 90 years old (at one point me and 22 year old Rollo, playing Nick, found ourselves looking for a bench after only 2 minutes of standing around only to look over at Sandy who was quiet content standing waiting and didn’t even look for a seat once in the room). He talked to us all about his own experiences of Ward 3 and Dr McIndoe, as well as his surgery and the other members of the club, answering the actor’s questions throughout. It was such a pleasure to meet him and a great opportunity for us all, we hope we will be able to be in touch with him again later into rehearsals as this is something he seemed eager to be involved in.

One of the reasons I love working in theatre is that with every piece you work on you get to learn about a whole new subject, whether it is just a circumstance you have never experienced or a historical figure or event that you knew little about. We have certainly jumped in with the learning, starting off by surrounding ourselves in research ready to get rehearsing. Which is where I am off to now.

Next step, getting it on its feet ...

Ruby Clarke

Assistant Director, Guinea Pig Club