Plunging away at the block.

Blocked blocked blocked.

Slept badly last night. Couldn't figure out how I was going to work the next scene. We've got as far as the king succeeds in his exam.

Instead of trying to push past it and come to a point of inspiration - cause none is forthcoming - I went back a bit, and ran over previous stuff, getting the actors to understand staying in the moment, work on knowing what it is they're doing at every point, being receptive to the events transpiring around them, or things happenning to them. We ended up talking about Brechtian choise points. Not this but that. For some reason it really triggered something in me and I went at them with this, in great detail. Watching them come to terms with it, and how it could offer such a wealth of possibilities in performance was highly exciting. I had forgotten about the scene we have to do, and just worked with them on this scene purely using it as an example in which to experiment and try the ideas out.

Breaking down motivations into smaller and smaller parts, understanding the choices your character makes at each point, keeping the charachter and the actor separate. The idea that acting is hard work, showing them all the thought and all the doing that goes into a rehearsal in order to build a performance... i found myself saying to them, the whole point is to not know where the journey is taking you, to have an idea of where you want to go, and get up in rehearsal and try something, be open to things, and be open to failing, and through each expermiment, and observation of each experiment, and each re-experiment, find a way forward.

Wise words for a director who needs to find a way forward in the story he's trying to tell. Its pretty much the only reason I haven't posted part 3 here yet.

:-)

This afternoon will all be about improvisations. What it is to be speechless, voiceless, in a court where everything is communicated through speech. The politics of language begins.