Thursday morning

Arrived at rehearsal half dead with my cold, after foolishly walking there, a half hour walk along Dies Y Ocho. Took me a while to recover. Did writing exercise with F – I like the writing exercises – and then did some work with him on 1, looking at his posture, before V arrived. We ran 4, now fully operational before working on 2. Ana arrived around 9, followed by Karina and Omar, clutching a large bad of Macdonalds, and we ran the last two scenes together.

The run was fine. F sometimes tenses up a bit, but its part of his process. Relaxing into the part, not acting according to a pre-determined thesis (derived either from a rehearsal orthodoxy or the actor’s habitual working practices) is the hardest thing for an actor; that and being given license to play.

Afterwards Karina, Omar and I went to a bar to talk design. Omar sat up and said, in a slightly roundabout, Hispanic fashion – We have to be realistic. I wasn’t entirely sure what ‘realistic’ means in Omar world, and waited to see what would ensue. He said the production didn’t have three pesos to rub together, so we had to abandon fancy ideas of moving screens and rain on a skylight. Stick to the basic necessities which are two chairs and a table. All reasonable. Then he threw in the idea of a kind of magic lantern, which could project a single, changeable image, throughout each scene. This struck everyone as a simple yet beautiful idea, achieving the same thing as the magic panels he’s talked about before without the cost or the stress. As we all went our separate ways Karina told me she and Omar had, after yesterday’s meeting, gone for a coffee, where she’d told him that there wasn’t really a design budget at all. Omar had got feisty, understandably, and she’d gone home regretting she’d ever taken on the role of producer. But now he’d taken it on board, come back with a new approach, and she was happy oncemore.

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