Sunday and Sher

I have had no rehearsal calls on Thursday or Friday, so I got some time to learn lines, to prepare to chair a session on Steig Larsson on Tuesday and to go to a very fine String Trio concert on Friday night.

Perhaps most importantly, though, on the recommendation of my friend Roy, I started to read Antony Sher's The Year of the King. I was slightly put off at first by his confusion of 'compliment' and 'complement' (and later of 'lead' and 'led') but the more I read, the more the pedant in me became quiet, and the more I learned. I now have a new appreciation of how different the professional theatre is from what I am doing, and, since, both Brent and Barry have worked/are working professionally, I see that I need to be careful and be realistic about what I can and cannot do. For example, I'm not going to change my diet, and I'm not going to go to the gym, but it would make sense not to drink before rehearsing... I was so taken by parts of this book that I came close to stopping this blog altogether - it seemed too arrogant.

I have taken to heart the point about maybe not trying to learn all the lines before we've blocked the scenes - I remember showing up for the first rehearsal of Love's Labour's Lost back in 1978 having learned the whole part of Berowne, and I remember how irritated some (all?) of the rest of the cast were: they were probably right.

Reading the book also reminded me what I have lost over the years by not seeing plays when I could have done. I actually had a ticket for Sher's Richard III, but didn't use it because I was rehearsing something else, and day after day I walked by the theatre where John, Paul, George, Ringo and Bert was playing (Sher played Ringo), always thinking I might get round to seeing it.

The book does not seem to mention anything about Sher's sexuality (maybe that is later in the text, or maybe he didn't feel he could come out in the mid-80s?), and his anecdote about George Harrison coming to see John, Paul, George, Ringo and Bert is interestingly skewed: in Sher's version, the cast were thrilled to have him there - he doesn't mention that Harrison hated the show and left at the intermission, taking away with him the permission for it to include his songs...

It was, however, lovely to read about Pete Postlethwaite, who sadly died this last week.

I now have a call for tomorrow evening - full cast to review Act One. I am getting a sense of Gloucester and his relationships with Edmund and with the Cornwalls: the question is, should I tell Brent what I'm thinking? I've also realised that the current Duchess of Cornwall (and therefore the equivalent of Regan) is Camilla....

So I'll keep on working on lines. I listened to the Glenn Gould CD of the Goldberg last night (the one where you can hear him humming in the background). Hearing such different versions of the piece so soon after one another made me think about different interpretations of roles, and even different emphases in individual lines