27th August, 2009 - Ideas About Directing #5

Idea 5 – Pay As Much Attention to the Second Half of the Play as You do to the First

This is something I consistently got wrong for ages. Because of Rule 3 (correct everything you don’t like), I had a tendency to break down the opening scenes of a play to a huge extent, and then realise with about two weeks of rehearsals that I was going to have to skim through the remainder. Invariably, the end of the show suffered.

This was a big mistake. After all, the end of the play is the most important. It is what the audience goes out of the auditoriul talking about. You either leave them feeling as if they’ve had a good night or you don’t. So the end deserves your full attention.

I suppose that if you’re disciplined you could follow a rigid timetable, but that doesn’t really work for me. You invariably find that there are areas of the play that need much more time than you thought (usually anything involving sword fights or kissing in my experience) and therefore, you can’t be too rigid in the timetable. What I tend to do is to alternate rehearsals between Act 1 and Act 2 where I can. This is probably a bit annoying for the actors, who generally feel happier building chronologically through the play, but on the other hand it does give you a feeling of progress and comfort that all bases are being covered.

However you do it, look closely at the end of the play.