THE ROOM
The rehearsal room. The writers' room. Two different spaces, but both places where alchemy happens.
I think of the rehearsal room and the writers' room as sacred spaces.
Not because they're solemn. Quite the opposite.
They are both places where alchemy happens — disparate people come into the room, and somehow, through the process, something coherent, surprising and wonderful emerges.
In a rehearsal room, actors and director find the performance through exploration, risk-taking, communication and repetition.
In a writers' room, writers spend days and weeks throwing ideas into the air, developing a world, finding the shape of a show and discovering the stories that might live inside it.
The rooms are different, but the essential ingredient is the same.
Trust.
A room can be changed by the presence of a stranger. The people inside it have developed a particular way of communicating, and that balance can be surprisingly fragile.
Actors need to know that they can make mistakes. Writers need to know that what they say will stay in the room. Both need to feel able to offer something that might not work.
Trust can't be imposed.
It has to be earned.
In the rehearsal room, part of my responsibility is to provide a clear structure.
I don't try to solve everything at once. At any particular point in the process we're looking at one aspect of the play: a character, an intention, a relationship, a point of concentration, a tricky transition.
That focus matters.
It allows an actor to make a specific discovery rather than being overwhelmed by the demand to solve the whole performance. It also creates a sense of safety. If we're only trying to solve one thing, it's easier to take a risk, get it wrong and try again.
And gradually, as those discoveries accumulate, trust builds.
Then something starts to happen.
Actors stop working in their individual bubbles and begin to affect one another.
An impulse passes from one actor to another like wildfire. Someone makes a discovery. Another actor picks it up and responds. Someone else is changed by that response.
The room becomes playful and easy.
It can be like surfing on waves of focused play.
Those are the moments I love.
But collaboration doesn't mean that everyone simply does whatever they want.
Someone has to hold the whole.
In the rehearsal room, that responsibility belongs to me. I need to understand the text better than anyone else in the room, because everyone else is seeing the play through the filter of their particular role. I have to see the whole thing.
In some ways, I think of the director as a conductor.
A conductor doesn't play every instrument. The orchestra is full of highly skilled musicians, each listening carefully to their own part and to one another. But someone has to hear the whole piece. Someone has to understand its rhythm, its shape, its dynamics and where it is going.
That's my role too.
I curate the discoveries made in the room, but I also have to forge the overall rhythm of the piece. I decide when something needs to accelerate, when it needs to breathe, when a moment needs to be held and when we need to move on. I have to understand how one choice affects another, and how all the individual discoveries accumulate into a coherent experience for an audience.
Only I can do that.
I'm also the audience in the rehearsal room.
I'm constantly asking: Is this clear? Is it interesting? Is it true to the character? Is it serving the text? Is the audience going to understand what we're trying to tell them?
Sometimes I'll say: That's it. That’s working because…Keep that.
Sometimes I'll say: I know you think your intention is clear, but it isn't reading. Try something different.
Sometimes the most useful thing I can do is ask someone to surprise themselves.
My job is to curate the discoveries made in the room and gradually shape them into a coherent whole.
That process doesn't end when the audience arrives.
The actors affect the audience.
They create tension, release, laughter, silence and anticipation. The audience responds, consciously or unconsciously, and that response feeds back into the performance. The actors feel the room. They listen differently. They adjust.
Every performance becomes a conversation between the people on stage and the people watching.
That is one of the things I love about live theatre. The audience isn't a demographic. It is the particular group of people who happen to be in the room that night.
And every night is different.
There is a kind of complicity between performers and audience. A shared concentration. A tension and release.
A kind of communion.
It is the closest I come to understanding what a spiritual experience might be.
And then it disappears.
The season ends. The actors go home. The set comes down. The audience goes back to their lives.
But something remains.
Memories.
Friendships and connections that come from having shared an intense, sometimes terrifying experience.
The memory of waves of laughter coming back from a thousand people watching Bottom's death.
A sense of camaraderie.
A temporary family.
A tribe.
For a little while, we were all in the room together.