Globe Education Online

This is the last blog entry from Naomi [Frederick, Rosalind]. In it, she discusses press night, the impact of the audience and that age old question: "To read or not to read reviews"?

Press Night

I didn’t invite my friends and family to press night because it’s too busy! There are so many industry people and afterwards you need to mingle with agents and things like that. On press night I was calm in my head but (ridiculously) I was obviously feeling the nerves somewhere deep down and I did the whole show with this lump in my throat and in my chest. I remember eating a banana in the interval hoping the lump would shift, but it didn’t! Trying to perform being madly in love with somebody with a great big rock stuck between your chest and your neck isn’t great! People who know me said “We couldn’t tell” but I thought to myself “Oh for goodness sake! What are these nerves about?!” … so it wasn’t particularly enjoyable.

It is never the best show anyway; other people might disagree, but it’s never my best show. Press night is usually near the beginning of the run but the production ripens the further you go; it is very exciting seeing a show later on, when things have started to settle down and make deep roots.

Reviews

When I was first in the profession eight years ago, I read reviews because I was fascinated and curious. I remember reading nice things and reading very insulting things and even though it is just one person’s opinion, you take it very personally. When my first big part came along and I thought back to my experience of reading reviews, I realised I just didn’t want to know actually – I thought if I read good stuff it’d go to my head, and if I read bad stuff, it would send me off course. I have got to stay on course to be able to do this part, any part, so at that point I stopped reading reviews. But I read them after the shows! I’m curious, I’m fascinated – of course I want to know what they’ve put!

Audience

The audience change the performance show by show; they don’t change how we do things necessarily, but just the mood. Pockets of types start to colour the audience as a whole, so having school groups and children, for example, is thrilling actually. I’ve watched very young faces beaming away with pleasure, even though when you’re nine, you can’t understand all the language, but seemingly they understand the story. Some of the schools have been quite quiet and some have been quite easily distracted, but it’s so funny when they quickly realise we can see them – they think they can’t be seen, but we pull them up on it by interacting with them.

When the sun is shining in a clear blue sky, direct sunlight hits a lot of the yard and the auditorium and it is very hard to watch theatre when you’ve got sun beating down on you, so I prefer the mellower evening shows. The evening audiences tend to be able to commit more energy to the show because they haven’t got the same kind of heat problems.

We did a midnight matinee (a show which began at midnight) and in the second half the audience were tired, we were tired, and so I felt the performance suffered. We added four minutes on to our normal running time, just through pure tiredness! Actually, it is mostly me in the second half so I know why that happened – the audience ran out of steam and gave very little, whereas usually they give us so much of our energy. So there we were at 2am, trying to drive this thing along, but we didn’t have any petrol! The audiences here are really extreme; because there are so many people, it is a big old space to fill, but when they’re giving it all their energy and attention, wow! You can really start to jump and fly!

Development

The more we do the show the more things come out and you think “Oh, now I know what that line means” or someone else says something and you think “Oh, that’s why I say that a couple of lines later!” The writing is so detailed and so strong that you can’t really pick it all up in rehearsals. It is just a pleasure that the play reveals itself to you as you go along. So you just keep doing the show and every now and then you go “Wow – I’ve never understood that before!” You do step up a level but that doesn’t happen through anything other than just keeping on playing.

These comments are the actor's thoughts and ideas about the part as s / he goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply his / her own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsals progress.

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