Stage Design (and how little I know about it)

Yesterday evening I met a member of the of the Steeple Aston Players to discuss the stage design for Dating by the Book - a play that is scheduled to be shown on March 22nd, 23rd and 24th at Steeple Aston Village hall.

The 'Player' is Jan Liberadzki who is also playing the part of Jacques Noir, a celebrity French chef with a dark secret! Jan therefore has a vested interest in making the stage, upon which he will be acting, look as good as it can be. Jan is also very experienced (in real life he is an architect) and is very good on how he puts his ideas across, and not backwards in pointing out why my ideas either won't work or would probably look a bit shit.

In particular Jan 'created' for me an extra stage entrance by using a physical door at the side of the audience to enter 'Pascal's Cafe' (Pascal is Jacques brother). This relatively minor suggestion had a major impact on the staging of Act 1 / Scene 1, allowing the actors to come up with some very funny physical humour based around the location of the entrance. It also changed pretty much most of the stage directions that I had somewhat naively penned when creating the script.

I am starting to see now why script writers are told "never put in stage directions". Stage directions, to make any sense in the real world, must be created in the venue. They need to be a part of the physical reaction of the cast to the words they are saying, and they need to grow organically out of that physical reaction. Otherwise the play becomes 'and now the actor walks to the front of the stage'. That's not theatre, that's a puppet show, with the writer attempting to pull the strings from some distant historical place called 'script creation'.

The two hours I spent talking with Jan on stage design has saved me hours and hours of wasted rehearsal time. Without them I would have been left trying to figure out how to stage the play to the directions I wrote in the cold isolation of the scripts genesis...

After that meeting came the first ever staged rehearsal.... but that's another blog entry....

Paul