Sometimes you have to kill your darlings!

A deep drive into the sometimes painful process of theatre making from our Artistic Director Nina Lemon.

Here at Peer, we are currently in the final stages of rehearsing my latest play Masking. It reaches its first audience in ten days time and yesterday, on the same day that the cast ran ‘books down’ for the first time, I decided to undertake quite a radical rewrite.

This long(ish) read deconstructs the painful process of making cuts and changes to work everyone is already invested in. 

I try to be fair to our young cast especially as, alongside actors with lots of experience including multiple Peer tours under their belts, we have less experienced performers including one actor with moderate learning disabilities in our cast. During the first week of rehearsal the script changed several times but then, barring small tweaks, I have tried to keep things the same.

We started running the play two days ago and that’s when I spotted a pacing problem around a quarter of the way through the one hour piece.  It wasn’t immediately obvious until we were running the piece. Two of my respected colleagues also fed back that they found this part of the play least engaging.  

We had a complex physical sequence with three voiceover monologues, followed by a funny, but overly long, naturalistic sequence. Both scenes had been invested in heavily not only by the actors but by our movement director and sound artist. 

But ultimately none of that is important. The play isn’t there to please the actors or the creative team but the audience. The time and effort invested in this original version wasn’t a waste of time but an important part of the creative process. Discoveries in rehearsals for this defunct sequence still inform character understanding and choices and the movement work we’d created went on to serve as a backbone for the remixed scene. 

So how did we fix the problem? 

As a writer and theatre-maker I rarely have the opportunity to deconstruct the problem solving process. In this instance, my solution involved considering various aspects of the production. Here are the questions I needed to ask myself. 

• What the problem? - In this case it can broadly be described as pace but why did it feel slow and long? Was it in the writing, the direction, the movement choices? 

• What did these sequences contribute to the play? - The scenes in question mainly focus on a relationship between three female friends and the at times challenging dynamic between them, as well as setting up the broader dynamic between the seven characters. 

• What did I need to keep to service the message and story and what could be abandoned? - This part of the process can be tricky especially as the team has invested really hard in the process. Ultimately I did think about losing the three monologues and movement sequence completely and I discussed this with our Creative Producer and Movement Director. However, ultimately doing this would have impacted on later moments in the play where the friendships are further developed. 

This meant that the solution needed to be more complex. Ultimately the rework involved:

• Cutting one whole monologue - Ultimately Holly’s monologue wasn’t really adding anything to the story so it had to go.

• Losing one very funny moment which the cast had improvised - It was brilliant but also potentially contributed to the slower pace and sometimes you just have to kill your darlings!

• Remixing - This involved breaking each scene down into smaller moments usually of a few lines each. This gave me three parts to scene 4 and 8 parts to scene 5! Scene 4c (Holly’s monologue) was cut leaving me with only two parts to scene 4 and I removed one part of scene 5 as realised it wasn’t really adding anything leaving me with 7 parts. Then I radically remixed the 9 sections together to create a sequence which:

  • Broke up the remaining physical sequences.

  • Allowed the humour to take more of a lead. 

  • Enabled the naturalistic scene to inform the more expressionistic moments. We see the jealously between Nadia and Rosie and then understand it more fully in their monologue. 

• Redirecting - Our movement director Ruth reworked the monologue sequences to make them more dynamic and meaingful adding in new beasts to underline the story telling.

Then I needed to communicate the suggested change to the cast. The team were amazing at taking on the new version and working with me to perfect it.

Here’s how did we make the whole process painless.

• Clear expectations were set out from the off. The cast have been with the work from the beginning so have already seen various changes and re workings. They knew that, although I was not planning to change things, that it could be necessary if something isn’t working. 

• I was careful to explain my rationale. The problem with the work had nothing to do with the individual actors and everything to do with the play as a whole. Nothing got cut because actors were doing a bad job. The cast for this project are very much co-creatives as well as performers. They deserved to be let in in the thinking behind my decision. 

• The changes were communicated very clearly. I printed up new remixed  versions and we read it together. Amazingly the cast were able to perform it all off book that afternoon.

No actors were harmed in the reworking of this script and we are all now confident that these changes will only benefit the play and our audiences. audience.