Thursday 2nd April

Two weeks left. My concerns are all surrounding design and the tech week. Design because we still don’t have two chairs and a table. Tech week because I thought I’d have the actors for most of the week but I won’t. The bittiness, as someone in my family might say, was manageable during rehearsals, but in the tech week I had hoped to have us all together, running the play as much as possible, ironing out any obstacles. I fear the lead-up to opening night will not be as smooth as I’d hoped.

Yesterday was our last in the garage this week. We have the theatre for four days, then during Easter week we’re back in the lovely Parking. I started work with F at 5, working on the end of his big speech, where he usually slips up on the lines. Discovered a mistranslation which had been missed earlier, changed it, and this helped. From then on it was bits and pieces from every scene as V&A arrived. Cleaning things up. This part of the process is very much like writing… you locate parts which aren’t quite right, change them, hope it doesn’t unbalance the whole, plough on…

Yesterday was the first day the temperature dropped and I was back wearing socks. Not cold, but a slight chill in the evening, pullover weather. We finished around 10.30, and I had a yearning to go for a drink with the cast, to be with them in another space. But this isn’t much of a drinking cast, which has probably been for the best, all in all, and I caught the bus home and chatted to Jorge for an hour or so about the G20, who was seated where, Jorge offering me the Guardian’s take on things, before going to bed and reading an article on Bolaño before sleep.

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