New Adventures |

We started our second week by going over some of the big movement phrases in the show that we are all involved in. This included the section at the end of the show where everyone apart from Ralph and Piggy has joined Jack's gang, even if they have been forced to join against their will and are being tortured on clothes rails like Sam n' Eric. We had been going through the show chronologically but thought it was better to teach the younger guys the big sections early on so that they had more time to go over it. This section includes all the boys doing sequences with sticks, learning how to fight and hunt, there's even a little prison for one of the little uns!

Something I had completely forgotten to say was that there is a man called David in rehearsals who has been filming the project since its very beginning, about a year ago, in the hope of making it into a documentary. I do hope he gets a commission for it (not only because it would springboard my career into television) but because I personally would love to see how all this came about. It's something that is easily forgotten I think, that we (the performers) are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the project as a whole. I was speaking to one of the kids was quite shocked at how many people the show needed that he hadn't even seen; he thought it was just us.

Then came the time to loose ourselves completely to the fear and savagery, the part where we mistake Simon for the beast and tear him to pieces. It was much shorter and quicker than I had imagined it would be, but it probably works better because of it. It's all a flurry of madness and chaos until Simon's body is revealed dead amongst us. It actually turned out to be one of the easiest parts of the show! The hardest part was getting Simons body off stage. This entailed trying to get all the boys to lie on the floor and roll backwards with Simon's body on top of them, so that he seemed to float away on top of water. After a few failed attempts where he somehow managed to veer off course, getting some faces squished and legs trapped, we finally got him traveling in a smooth, straight line.

During the second half of the show the story line starts to unfold at a faster pace, gathering momentum to the moment where Piggy is killed by Roger and we all turn on Ralph. We are starting to feel that pace as well as we go from scene to scene with very little time between (it's been a while since Swan Lake and it’s surprising how quickly the body can loose stamina!) Once we were still getting off stage when the next scene we were in had already started, so it's definitely not a show with a lot of tea breaks. I personally prefer them like that, it helps you feel the continuous arch of your character rather than constantly going on and off stage.

We've had quite a few cameras in this week for publicity. We've had the BBC’s The Culture Show, one or two radio shows as well some newspapers too! Bruce and Fraser, two of the younger boys, had an article each in their local papers about their participation in the project. I also had an interview for what I thought was a newspaper but turned out to be for a podcast! I didn't realise people would actually have to listen to my voice!! Poor, poor unsuspecting victims.

Eventually we actually finished the show, with enough time left after for a deep breath too. The most challenging aspect of it all was figuring out the journeys of the baskets, clothes rails and barrels throughout the show. There are four baskets, four rails, and about six barrels, all of which change place continuously during the show. Trying to get them where they needed to be was a bit like figuring out a Rubix Cube. I'm sure if you drew all of their routes on a sheet of paper together it would probably end up looking like a painting by Pollock.

We ended the week by doing a run of the whole show, stopping after each scene and doing notes. It was a great help to all of us as some sections had started to bleed together into an indistinguishable blur making it difficult to tell them apart, like a 3D magic vision picture going in and out of focus. But after much struggle and toil we got to the end and finished our first ever run through of the show, three days before the premiere! I just keep reminding myself that according to the bible God made the universe in seven days, with a day off. If he can do that then surely we can get this up and running in time too. Either way we will find out next week when we get to the theatre and start out technical rehearsal with lights, costumes and makeup! For a lot of the boys it will be the first time they have ever been inside a theatre, let alone on a stage. I'm sure it's going to be quite a new experience for all of them! Maybe they'll actually get distracted enough to forget how much they think I look and sound like Dr. Who. One of them even asked me if he could record me saying, "Bow ties are cool" so he could take it home and play it to his brother, who is now apparently my biggest fan!