What a Week!

The set begins to take shape: my personalised on stage dressing room

After a long 6 days of rehearsals today marks a well earned rest from the week’s exertions, of which there have been many.  If there is any truth to the age old axiom of “no pain, no gain” then judging by the amount of aches and pains that ran through my back as I woke up this morning I think we’re in line for a West End transfer.

Well, maybe that’s a bit much but we have been working incredibly hard: the entirety of Friday and half of Saturday was devoted to movement sequences and dance work (hence the pain); by the end of the week we’d successfully pieced together the play for a second time and, as of tomorrow, we will have begun to go through it again in even greater detail. The week ended on Saturday where, when not dripping in sweat, we were learning all the magic we will have to perform from our resident magicians: James and Ben. This, of course, was immense fun and a particular highlight of the week as the magician’s plethora of physic bending impossibilities reduced the male cast member’s expressions to those of a 10 year old boys.

Learning magic with James Freedman (2nd from left)

However, this doesn’t mean that we haven’t been having a thoroughly good time. Our arrival in Leeds has marked a renewed social vigour in the cast and, aside from when pesky late night rehearsals got in the way on Thursday, we’ve been happily taking advantage of the local pub ‘The Wardrobe’ every night of the week. The week’s social antics reached their nadir in the form of a cast visit to the astoundingly tasty curry restaurant ‘Aagrar’ just round the corner from the theatre where the food was exquisite and left the company in merry cheer. Friday was more of a cultured social affair as the company were kindly given complimentary tickets to see Phoenix Dance Company's new dance show which was good, however, for me, it was slightly overshadowed by the fact that I saw this on the wall and realised that we will be following in some very big footsteps:

Christopher Eccleston in 'Hamlet' at the West Yorkshire Playhouse

However, this week has also been busy off the pitch due to the fact that as opening night gets closer the business side of things begin to creep in. As actor’s we are classed as freelance artists which means that we are our own business. Therefore, along with their agent it is an actor’s responsibility in the run up to a show to unashamedly promote ourselves via e-mail and post to local casting directors, theatre directors and radio producers our headshots, C.V’s et al with an invite to the production in the hope of future employment. This means printing out headshots in an industry standard 10 by 8 format, finessing letters so that they are to the point yet neither too cold nor too sycophantic and sent with a knowledge that this won’t actually make any difference whatsoever in a vast majority of cases but hopefully will on the one, and that is worth all the work. I began by citing the old adage of “no pain, no gain”; the maxim that most aptly sums up the naive hopefulness of letter writing? “Shy bairns get nowt”.

‘Dr Faustus’ is on at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, from 23 Feb to16 March, and at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, from 5 Apr to 27 Apr. For all tickets please contact the respective box office or book online at www.wyp.org.uk or  www.citz.co.uk.