The Guinea Pig Club Blog Post 5

Mon 01 Oct 2012

Time Fly’s ...

28.09.12

I don’t think any of us can believe we have a day left of rehearsals until tech week. We’ve got through the whole script again, adding extra details and neatening up each scene, and now we plan to keep running it through, tweaking the odd bit as we go. What’s been interesting about this week is the elements, such as bits of the set that have started appearing. Up until Wednesday we only had a few of the beds in the rehearsal room, for the others we used wooden benches as substitutes. I don’t know how it was decided which actors got the comfort of a mattress but for a play set in a hospital ward there is a lot of lying around being done and this is unfortunate for the unlucky few lying on wooden benches.

As well as having beds in we have acquired more surgical tools to use in the scenes. To learn the correct way to use these Damian played us a DVD of live surgery that was defiantly not for the faint hearted. What Graeme and Fiona (playing McIndoe and Sister O’Donnell) needed to know was the correct technique, using two implements, to sew a wound back together. In what I would describe as ‘glorious Technicolor’ we saw a man have his cheek reconstructed, incisions made to utilise the skin he had left like a fleshy lateral thinking puzzle. Not for the faint hearted, the stitches were forceful, the surgery quiet brutal but the overall results quiet astounding.

Yesterday we had the joy of hearing the sound effects in some of the scenes for the first time. What I was amazed by, even on the few speakers we had in the rehearsal room, was how realistic the effects were. It wasn’t just a track playing the sound of Spitfires overhead, there was a depth to the noise and the room vibrated so that you actually wanted to look up and see them overhead. (Obviously I know very little about sound design from that description but it really is all encompassing.) There are a few moments in the play where sound will play a big part and I can’t wait to hear this in the space, to feel like I’m actually in the middle of the action.

A quick update on things I have mentioned before. Firstly, we have all grown fond of Simon (the ventriloquist dummy). I think George, playing Tom, even took him home recently for extra practice. It does help that he has started his makeover so he is functioning properly which takes away some of our trepidation towards him as he is less likely to seem to move of his own accord. We have also done further work with the latex prosthetics which are starting to look fantastic, though it is a shame we are covering some of the actors lovely faces. I have also tried to teach the boys to knit, let’s just say we’re not quite there yet. Good job they don’t have to be good at it on stage, but we still have time.

I’ll let you know how our full run-throughs go next week as we make our way into tech.

Ruby Clarke

Assistant Director, Guinea Pig Club