Oysters: The First Two Weeks

So the first two weeks of "Oysters" rehearsals are done and dusted, and it's been quite a fortnight!      

On the first day, we had a read-through, and got the entire team behind the show together in one room, which is always exciting and a little bit scary. We looked at the animations which have been made by our designer Rosie Alabaster from James Dodds' linocuts, which were very beautiful and promise to be quite a talking point. We also had a listen to some of the original music composed by Jon Goddard. The music sounds wonderful and really helps to immerse the audience into the world of the play, especially during the dream-like section which takes place towards the end of Act One.

During the first week, there was a lot of time spent around the table discussing the script and developing scenes - which involved a fair bit of communal joke writing!- talking about characters and asking the questions we needed to ask of Ivan and of each other. I always love this part of the process because it's like piecing together a jigsaw, picking up clues that the writer has dropped for you along the way - especially with a show like this, which has quite an element of the mysterious about it.

In this first week we also made a company visit to the Pioneer Sailing Trust, who have commissioned the show. "Oysters" is based in a seaside town on the East Coast which is fictional but bears more than a resemblance to Brightlingsea and Wivenhoe. Similarly the boatyard in which much of the action takes place is loosely based around the Pioneer Sailing Trust. Therefore it was very important to us, given that our four actors are coming to us from London, that they get to visit the yard and have a look around the place that inspired the play. 

This was a great experience for the whole company, as we got a chance to meet and chat with the apprentices, shipwrights and tutors working in the yard, and get a window into an industry and a way of life that many of us have little or no experience of. The PST was alive with activity, with at least four boats being worked on at once. Some of the apprentices have been involved with building props and pieces of the set for us, so we also got to see those in progress, which was exciting. 

The second week has been comprised of working through the scenes chronologically, getting them ‘up on their feet' and exploring how the staging of each scene will work. As we do this, we have been continuously developing the script, tweaking lines here and there to make the dialogue flow really nicely. We have also been asking lots of questions about the characters, fleshing them out and making them as real as we possibly can. The atmosphere in the room has been very relaxed but focussed, and we ended the second week very satisfied with the work we've done so far.

Let's see what next week brings!