Updates – The Blog

Heading into our last performance, of this run, tonight, and the glorious answer to that question is, yes! and no!

Yes, because we are doing it, the script is being realised in voice and body, with light and sound to enhance the moments, in the company of an audience. Yes, because each performance is completely itself, the result of all the work that has gone into its preparation combined with the energy and delight that we and our audiences bring to it each night.

No, because there is – as Gertrude Stein once said – “no There there”. No, because it is always about the journey, it is always a process of creation, never a result. Of course, there are results, there are certain conclusions that each member of the audience will draw about the ideas expressed, the stories told, the relationships revealed (or concealed). That doesn’t mean we have to close off the journey, and hopefully there are enough questions posed and ideas proposed to keep us all pondering, imagining and finding even more questions well after the bump out happens later on this evening.

As I begin my preparations for tonight’s performance, I wonder where it will take me and my fellow performers, how we will be changed by the way our characters’ lives will evolve in the space with the particular people who will be in the audience on this occasion.  I know it will be somewhere else, a ‘there’ I have never visited before, and it will be somewhere from whence another journey will emerge.

Enjoy.

Last night was a whole new ball game.

This was posted on FaceBook:

Heather Jones: has just seen the extraordinary, subtle, arresting and amazing production of ‘The Fall of June Bloom’. For anyone who loves theatre, words and Shakespeare, it’s a must!

Considering that this is a play about an older actor who forgets things – her lines, as well as events in her background, it is hardly ironic that there had to come a time when I would actually forget my lines.  This was possibly one of the most useful things that could happen to me, because it reminded me that in ‘real life’ we don’t try to forget, we try to remember, so acting ‘forgetting’ is actually about trying to remember.

I must remember that… 

 

This was for me, one of the most engaging and rewarding pieces of theatre I have seen for a very long time.

I found it startlingly and brilliantly unsafe. A pretend lecture on Shakespeare became an edge of your seat experience. What was being asked of me as audience member? Am I suppose to chime in? Am I supposed to respond? The apparent plant, yes. But other audience members fell under the spell and responded as well. Were they ruining it? Were they making it better?

“We need to stop asking rhetorical questions in the theatre”, the character of June tells us. And with a single line brings the whole show into perfect clarity. This is not a performance. This is not a lecture. This is now. This is a moment. And for the first time in a very long time, I felt that I (the audience) was part of that moment. Trying to capture a theatre that we have lost. Memories that are no longer our own. Rules and guidelines have replaced what once was skill and human instinct. We have become creators of oh-so-clever recitals. What Flloyd has captured is the importance of that all pervading, all-powerful question that (at least for me) all great theatre is based on – “What Happens Next”?

Bravo.
Matthew Ryan