Guest Blogger, Talking Bird’s Nick Walker reports on rehearsals for Forever In Your Debt.
Hello from Director of Talking Birds Nick Walker!
Like many blog notes for a new piece of theatre, this one is being written in the rehearsal room while the actors devise. I can see Graeme scattering ashes into the sea; I can see Jill weeping over a snow globe; I can see Emilia eating grit; I can see Ali dropping pennies in a cinema queue; and I can see Sarah looking back at me and whispering ‘you getting this?’ Shona comes through the door with a harmonium ‘is this what you wanted?’ Derek pumps air through it, and the chords fly. Janet’s set is in a van which is backing up towards Warwick Arts Centre’s beautiful new rehearsal rooms. There’s snow outside the window and Kate asks ‘Should we get more snow into this thing? Or ice?’
This was on day two, and at that point we didn’t know how much, if any, of these things would end up in the show that will start off in Hereford and which comes to the arts centre at the beginning of March.
They were thoughts that popped out of an engagement with debt and the occasionally extreme reactions to it. As it happens, much of that material is still in the script, but one thing that’s been coming out loudly and clearly, throughout, is that everyone owes something to somebody – we’re born with it, and we’ll die with it, and most of the time it’s not about money at all – and it’s this complexity which has propelled all the activity over the last few weeks and is taking us into our last few days fine tuning. And as draft nine of the script is printed, off I’ll be in arrears to these people throwing themselves around the room. Still, that’s one of the debts I’m delighted to live with.
Forever in Your Debt is a Foursight Theatre and Talking Birds co-production and runs at Warwick Arts Centre on Tue 2 and Wed 3 March. More Information
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