Reviewing the Damages

Instead of launching on another directionless waffle, I've resolved to stay securely on topic with this entry. This be serious business, this be: a dry, clipped and unerringly prudish report on the very first week of rehearsal. After braving immersion in the bottomless legal quagmire of 'Bardell and Pickwick' for five solid days, I've emerged relatively unscathed. It's the celebrated trial scene from The Pickwick Papers, and, with the sole exception of A Christmas Carol (what else?), the most popular and beloved of the public readings in Dickens's own lifetime. Although it's not the word-for-word text I'll be using in performance, Chapter 34 from the novel will give any curious parties a clear insight into what I'm up against.

Unlike 'Nicholas Nickleby at the Yorkshire School', the reading that follows it, 'Bardell and Pickwick' promotes no instant sense of connection. 'Nickleby' is in some ways simple by contrast. Almost everyone has an instinctive response to classroom injustice and the cruel authority figures who perpetrate it. Our indoctrination in this notion covers a very wide cultural field: Jane Eyre, A Little Princess, How Green Was My Valley, Dead Poet's Society, Matilda, the Harry Potter books - even Dickens's own David Copperfield and the loathsome, cane-wielding Mr Murdstone. I'm confident that audiences will be repelled by the nastiness of Wackford Squeers without the least previous experience of Nicholas Nickleby. But with 'Pickwick' I get the unsettling feeling that much of its impact rests on an audience's prior familiarity with the characters. In a piece where contained disorientation is in so many ways the central comic point, narrative goes out of the window with surprising suddenness, all coherence dissolving into a Dickensian greatest hits parade: PICKWICK! STARELEIGH! BUZFUZ! CLUPPINS! SKIMPIN! WINKLE! WELLER! The names wouldn't look out of place on a nineteenth century playbill. Actually, the names frequently did appear on nineteenth century playbills after unscrupulous writers took to illegally adapting Dickens's novel for the stage - and this before its serialisation had even finished! Lord knows what solution the dramatists concocted to the insane plot rammificatons of 'Bardell and Pickwick', because it's as convoluted a stretch of pettifogging obfuscation as I've ever encountered. The challenge then lies in devising a theatrical short-hand sufficiently bold and vivid to save these characters from becoming a cavalcade of cardboard cut-outs.

One particularly great terror has sprung from the rehearsals. It doesn't strike me as all that funny yet, which stands to be a bit of a killer. However, I'm basing this purely on the audio recording, which opens up even more problems. Does the language of the piece depend entirely on physical comedy to liberate it? Despite all efforts to the contrary, I still find it easier to pull an outlandish face than extract the required venom from a particularly acidic put-down. But should language and physicality be separated out like this? Surely it is their union that will provide the most delicious dramatic frission! I don't want to lose the integrity of the text, but I do start to feel that gags will have to be pasted on to it as though with a trowel to restore a little of the comic genius acknowledged in Dickens's age. On a brighter note, the recording is slightly under the predicted half hour length, which grants a bit of safety time with regards to dramatic pauses, physical routines and any number of fluffs. It also allows for an 'interval' of a few minutes at least - a short break in which I can cleanse myself of sweat, change my shirt, have a quick drink, lay out the required bits and pieces for part two, and then venture, wearier than ever, into the more sombre dramatics of 'Nickleby'.

Certain characters have emerged quite distinctly, whilst others are still paddling hopelessly about in the search for substance. Buzfuz is coming across fairly well I think. It's an unexpected godsend that the first half is dominated by this shouty, belligerent, semi-operatic monster, for anyone with the faintest idea of my acting knows how completely at home I am with characters of that nature. The Judge is also good fun. On a personal level, I feel like I'm unseating the demented justice in residence at The York Dungeon from his original context in favour of an energetic new scenario. Wild improvisation aside, there's a certain forlorn loneliness to the characters in the Dungeon; you're always dictating to the public rather than interacting with your fellow ghouls. It's as though the walking dead have fled the crypt and you've been left behind as their unwilling ambassador. So in spite of the other characters being played by myself, it's nice to give the Judge a few other rehearsed personalities to bounce off against.

These two are in many ways the principal grotesques - the most ostentatious and showboating of the 'Pickwick' crowd, at any rate - so it's reassuring to feel at least vaguely comfortable with them. I don't think that the other characters have quite gelled yet, but with any luck this will only be a matter of time. There's a certain hierarchy of character in the piece that might excuse this unsatisfactorily patchy result. There is no way that Serjeant Snubbin, who has about three lines of note, either can or should be realised with the colour of Buzfuz, who contrives by turns to eat up over a third of the segment's dialogue. The minor characters are to some extent doomed by the very state of being marginal - but then there's the counter-argument that the bit players must be even more vivid than the principals to have any impact at all. Mrs Cluppins is a good example. There is no way in hell that I'm going to be equipped to offer a sensitive and nuanced portrayal of the coquettish charwoman during her perfunctory one-page appearance. It has to be gimmicky, it has to be ridiculous, and this should be a cause for joy rather than guilt.

Sidetracked in my merry jaunt into York to celebrate Tim Elsy's birthday, I got hold of some of the last few props for the show. (A profitable day, that - I had no idea that 'I've Got a Luvverly Bunch of Coconuts' had such a generous number of verses!) I'm now besotted with a fetching felt stovepipe rather than the top hat I'd first planned on purchasing. Let's face it - the vast majority of joke shop top hats are ridiculously overpriced, paradoxically look very cheap, and, most heinous of all, stubbornly refuse to fit on my head. Yet for some pernicious reason, the same manufacturers are capable of knocking out a decent quality stovepipe. I'm hopeful that the length of a stovepipe will make it all the more absurd onstage - and since it's not in use for terribly long, this is an entirely desirable effect! Another acquisition was a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, which should make Mr Pickwick look suitably bemused and owl-eyed. The frames came without lenses, so I'm fortunately in no danger of tripping off the perilous raised level of the Larkum stage and plummeting into the orchestra pit. More challenging is the Judge's wig. As much as I champion full bodily transformation in theatre, I'm not the world's biggest fan of the practical experience of wig-wearing. I had a horrendous experience with Coupler's wig in The Relapse (when you can't see the audience half the time, overacting skyrockets), and this one is at least equally irritating where the little matter of living and breathing is concerned. There's also a fecundity of hairy horrors in The York Dungeon - though all a little pinkened for being so ruthlessly flecked with stage blood. One of the eternal delights of working there in sweltering summer temperatures is inheriting the previous actor's wig upon changing shifts. You find yourself instantly festooned with a coronet of sweat, a rime of saliva gilding the wisps hovering at your mouth. Lovely. Charles Laughton developed a lifelong phobia of hair from weeks of interaction with his bewhiskered and feral 'manimal' co-stars on the set of Island of Lost Souls - to such an extent that Laughton could never again visit a zoo, and persisted in the belief that great gobs of the stuff were hidden in his food. I hope I'm not headed in the same direction. I've also got hold of a copy of The Pickwick Papers with pleasingly yellowed pages. Breaking from my continued battle with OCD, I've been engaged in the serious task of ripping out every last page in order to provide thematically appropriate set dressing. At the very least, it'll be something else to fill that cursed clothes line straddling the back of the stage, which I worry more and more might appear outstandingly empty.

I'm going to have to return to 'Bardell and Pickwick' next week. Constant run-throughs are the only way to get a text like this into your bones, and now that I have the props to hand, the intensive stage of rehearsal can begin (physically, at least - the tough mental work is mostly over). I've got the internal geography of the performance pretty well realised in my own head by now thanks to some ruthless annotation of the script, but I've been more than a little backward about putting my instructions into practice. Lines aren't quite as secure as I'd hoped either. As with so many of these things, I was pretty uptight to start with, chastising myself pitilessly if I'd failed to learn the prescribed two pages by the end of the day. Things have slipped quite a bit now. In short, this stands to be the most tedious part of the rehearsals - the pestering re-centric bit. Redoing, reiterating, reinterpreting, revising, rereading, reviewing, redrafting, rethinking, rediscovering, reassessing - oh, a most terrible situation, winding further and further in yourself in these regressive (argh!) mental circles. No wonder that this is the stage where you feel utterly worthless - where you feel you'll never progress with anything again!