Education The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other by Peter Handke from a new translation by Meredith Oakes Workpack The National s production 2 The play 2 The space 3 In rehearsal Journeys Telling Stories 4 Riffing and Observing 4 Variety as a Guiding Principle 5 Narrative Simplicity 5 Technical complexities 6 Putting the performance on stage 7 Interviews Costume Designer, Moritz Junge 8 Actor, Adrian Schiller 10 the hour we knew nothing of each other Further production details: nationaltheatre.org.uk This workpack is published by and copyright The Royal National Theatre Board Reg. No. 1247285 Registered Charity No. 224223 Views expressed in this workpack are not necessarily those of the National Theatre Director James Macdonald NT Education National Theatre South Bank London SE1 9PX T 020 7452 3388 F 020 7452 3380 E educationenquiries@ nationaltheatre.org.uk Workpack writer Jamie Harper Editor Emma Gosden Design Patrick Eley Clare Parker
Introduction The National s production This production opened in the Lyttelton Theatre on 13 February 2008 Ensemble Susan Brown Jessie Burton Pip Carter Paul Chesterton Lisa Dillon Callum Dixon Noma Dumezweni Susan Engel Susannah Fielding Mark Hadfield Amy Hall Daniel Hawksford Tom Hickey Richard Hope Mairead McKinley Nick Malinowski Shereen Martineau Justine Mitchell Daniel Poyser Adrian Schiller Amit Shah Sara Stewart Giles Terera Jason Thorpe Harry Towb Simon Wilson Sarah Woodward Music performed by Mel Mercier, with Molly Sturges (vocals), Chris Jonas (saxophones), Julie Andrews (bassoon) and Melanie Pappenheim (vocals) Director James Macdonald Associate Director Jonathan Burrows Set Designer Hildegard Bechtler Costume Designer Moritz Junge Lighting Designer Jean Kalman Composer Mel Mercier Sound Designer Christopher Shutt Staff Director Jamie Harper The Play The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other by Peter Handke could easily be described as an unorthodox play, so in attempting to describe it, it seems necessary to consider the things that make it different from a more traditional stage play. First of all, the text contains no spoken words. This lack of language presented itself as an interesting challenge at the beginning of our rehearsals when the actors gathered for the usual first day read-through. The question on everyone s lips was obvious: How do we do a read-through of a play without words? The answer to this question came in the form of stage directions. Most plays contain instructions from the author detailing what the action on stage should be, and in the case of The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other Peter Handke has extended the use of this convention to create a play comprising seventeen long stage directions. When the actors sat down for the read-through the director, James Macdonald, asked them to each read out a sentence of the text and in this way we began working our way through the text, with the company members taking turns in describing the action. The second unusual aspect of The Hour is that it doesn t have a conventional narrative. In other words, there is no unified story with a beginning, middle and an end that ties the play together. Instead, Peter Handke presents a series of miniature stories that are begun but never concluded. Similarly, there are very few recurring characters, so it is never possible to follow the story of a particular person over time in the way that spectators can with most plays. Although there is no overarching narrative, however, in the course of our unorthodox read-through we found that we were able to latch onto individual stories. Each sentence in the play represents a discrete unit of action and as each actor read out their sentence we immediately found our imaginations working to visualise the miniature drama being described. In discussing the play after the read-through, James commented that Handke believes the most worthwhile human truth lies in these individual moments, so as long we find the reality of each mini-story the absence of a grand narrative should not be seen as a shortcoming. 2
The space The Hour contains around 450 characters who arrive in a square and quickly disappear. Given the fact that this group of individuals appear so fleetingly, it seemed obvious that the main protagonist in the play is the square itself. At the beginning of our rehearsal process, the set designer, Hildegard Bechtler, and James introduced the set design to the company, explaining how they had created the square for our production and outlining the basic principles of how we might use the space. The main challenge in the design for The Hour is that it is never made clear what city or even what country the play takes place in. At the start of the play Peter Handke provides an example of the type of square he imagines by referring to the square in front of the Centre Commercial du Mail on the Plateau de Velizy but this is only given as a point of reference. In reality the square is not meant to be one location. At times it could be a big city in eastern Europe while at others it could be London or even a small town in the south of France. the modern business world without being especially naturalistic. For the acting company the most important issue with the set design was to gain a clear working knowledge of how to use the space and its entrances and exits. By my count there are in total 15 entrances and exits to the space including five from underground and one from above. This provides the actors with a great variety of ways to get in and out of the square, and they found very quickly that the choices they made in this respect had a big impact on what type of story is told. For example, large groups of people will naturally tend to use large entrances while the smaller alleys provide the potential for characters to sneak on to the square more surreptitiously. This ambiguity of setting poses a significant problem for the design in the sense that it has to be specific enough to make a real and credible square, but not so specific that it limits the play to one particular location. Hildegard s set overcomes this problem by using a very neutral grey/white colour tone which allows us to use light to alter the sense of where we are. For example, if we project blue light onto the grey walls it puts us in a colder place such as northern Europe, but if we project warm yellow light onto the walls we could be in Italy or Spain. The colour neutrality of the set allows great fluidity of setting but at the same time the types of the buildings used in the square do create a very real world. Downstage right and downstage left there are modern office blocks, while upstage are older buildings with rough, crumbling walls. To add cultural flavour there is a cinema jutting into the square along with a church dome rising into the sky. Again, though, the design resists over-specifying what culture is being represented. The church is really only an impression of a church: it does not demonstrate what religion might be practised inside. The office buildings give a sense of Sara Stewart Photo by Neil Libbert 3
In rehearsal Journeys Telling Stories We began our rehearsal process by looking at simple crossings to explore how the basic action of walking across the square could tell a story. Firstly, we looked at people walking away from an event which had happened off stage. This resulted in actions like strolling in happily after a pleasant night out or stumbling across the square to escape a domestic dispute. Secondly, we looked at people walking towards an event, which produced stories like the woman who rushes through because she s late for an interview, or the man who shuffles across slowly because he s scared of the person he s meeting. All of these exercises were conducted in a very loose way, with total freedom for the actors to make up stories related to their crossing, and it was immediately clear that if the actors had a firm idea of who they were, where they were coming from and why they were crossing the square, the spectator would be able to read a story from the simple action of their crossing. This gave everyone in the company a lot of confidence that, in the absence of costumes, props or even words, we could create very clear mini-narratives with nothing more than our journeys through the space. Riffing and Observing When we began working on the play it hadn t yet been determined which actors would play which parts, so in the first two weeks all the actors had a chance to try out all the parts. In practical terms, this meant reading a short section of text after which a couple of volunteers would perform the described action. We would then talk about what we did and didn t like from the miniature performance, then some other actors would get up and do a different version of the same section. This process is what James calls riffing or, in other words, having a rough exploratory bash at it. The important principle that emerged from this way of working was that we should allow our interpretations of the action in the text to remain as open as possible and avoid the sense that there is a correct version of any particular story. By watching many different renderings of the same piece of text it was clear that any number of interpretations could be valid and dramatically engaging. The other benefit of the riffing process was that the whole company were involved as performers and spectators. Having an audience of actors watching the various riffs that were created proved very useful as we were able to share our observations and form a very clear idea of how things work on stage. Jason Thorpe in rehearsal Photo by Neil Libbert 4
In rehearsal Variety as a Guiding Principle Having observed each other during the riffing phase of rehearsals, the company reached a kind of collective agreement that as spectators we tend to get bored if we see too much of the same thing. This may seem like a rather obvious statement but the establishment of variety as a guiding principle was very important in the next stage of rehearsals. As we began looking at longer sections of the play we found that we lose interest in the action if it is played with a rhythmic tempo that stays the same. So, for instance, if you watch people walking slowly for a long time it becomes bland and you stop paying attention to the miniature stories they are involved in and, by the same token, if you watch people rushing around for a prolonged period the high drama which they are attempting to play becomes diluted because there is simply too much of it. By contrast, if the rhythmic tempo is continually varied we are constantly surprised with new things to observe. And, crucially, we see the detail of character more sharply and are able to follow their story more easily if their crossing is set against a contrasting rhythmic tempo. For example, in an early scene in the play, an old woman hobbles across the square very slowly. She is then followed by two fire fighters who rush across the space with their hose apparatus to conduct a drill. In simple terms, we understand much more keenly what it is to be a frail old woman by contrasting this action with the youthful vitality of the firemen. In addition to varying the rhythmic tempo, we also discovered the need to find variety in our use of the space. If we used a particular area of the stage for a long period we would become tired of being there and if the crossings took trajectories that were too similar the action would become visually flat. Again, these discoveries led us to work for the greatest possible variety in the way we used the space, juxtaposing short dynamic bursts across the square with wide looping curves to create visual texture with continual surprises for the eye of the spectator. Narrative Simplicity In the early stages of rehearsal, when we were looking at very small sections of action, our tendency was to build as much narrative detail as possible around the basic crossings in order to try to suggest a clear story to the spectator. By the end of the fourth week, however, when we were beginning to run large sections of the play we found that too much story content can be overwhelming. With the later scenes, in particular, when the journeys of characters overlap at great speed, it became quite a strain to try to follow a large number of very detailed stories at the same time. This issue of over-abundant narrative content led us to look for areas of the play where we could contrast sections that might be played story neutral alongside those sections that did require quite a bit of detailed storytelling. For example, at the end of one scene there is quite a complex sequence where a tourist enters the square to take a photograph which ends up including a hospital orderly smoking, a woman who has just released a scream that sounds like a flock of birds and a girl on skates with a huge sail. Following this complicated episode two people cross with nothing particular about them except that their way of walking has something busy about it. By allowing this final crossing to simply follow the action described in the text without attempting to suggest any greater story detail, we were able to provide the spectator with some light relief from another complex mini-story. The principle of narrative simplicity began to have a progressively greater influence as we entered the fifth and sixth weeks of rehearsals. James made the point that if we are too definitive in signalling what a particular journey means it tends to put a full stop on the story and stops the spectator from being able to draw their own conclusions. By contrast, if the actors play the action simply and allow the possible interpretations of the story to remain open, the spectator is invited to fill in the blanks, which hopefully results in a greater degree of audience engagement. This idea of leaving the story open did create challenges for the actors, though. One member of the company commented that he felt that the attempt to retain openness left him feeling like he wasn t really doing anything other than the basic physical activity that was required by the text. James clarified matters, however, by suggesting that the actors should have a clear idea of their character s story but that they should try to avoid over-articulating this story to the spectator. By this rationale, the actors were able to have a clear sense of what their character is doing in the square while at the same time leaving the audience free to create their own interpretation of the journey being presented to them. 5
In rehearsal Technical Complexities Alongside the work on stage, the latter stages of rehearsals involved a series of complex technical challenges. The most substantial technical issue was the organisation of costumes in the production. With such a large cast of characters (around 450) and a company of 27 actors, the costume designer, Moritz Junge, and costume supervisor, Janet Bench, had a huge task not only to design and make a massive range of clothing but also to plan a system which would allow the actors to change from one costume to another with enough speed and efficiency to get on stage in time to play their scenes. Beyond the practical difficulty of these costume changes, the frenetic nature of the off stage activity also had a significant impact on the action on stage. The actors inevitably brought some of their manic costume change energy on the stage with them, which altered the rhythmic tempo with which they would ordinarily have entered. Over time, however, as the company became more familiar with their off-stage journeys, they were increasingly able to gather themselves before coming on stage so that they could make their entrances with a controlled energy. Top: Jessie Burton and Jason Thorpe Above: Giles Terera and Susan Brown Rehearsal photos by Neil Libbert 6
Putting the performance on stage Entering the Theatre When we entered the Lyttelton theatre to begin our technical rehearsals, the company were faced with a new set of practical challenges. We had a larger amount of wing space for costume changes, which was very helpful to the actors but the added depth of the wings meant that it took longer for them to make their entrances to the stage. Similarly, the stage was about a metre wider than our rehearsal room space and this meant that the crossings of the square took longer to complete. this, the sound of bells underground appears to prompt a boat to float across the front of the stage with two figures in African ceremonial dress. Episodes such as these have a highly magical and dreamlike quality and the use of technical effects like the terrifying animal noises and the booming of eerie bells in the sound design, combined with lightning flashes and the flickering blue off the water from the lighting, were of great benefit in adding the surreal to the real in our production. The results of these slight differences were quite pronounced. The actors entrances felt less dynamic because it took them longer to fully enter the space and the journeys felt slower because they had further to travel. In response to this, the actors focused on trying to make their entrances as punchy as possible and make their crossings with a slightly accelerated tempo. Also, the size of the Lyttelton auditorium meant that we had to amplify the scale of the performances. For example, a casual glance from one actor to another can be easily picked up in a rehearsal room where the spectator is a few metres away from the performer, but in a large space a gesture of this kind needs to be considerably more pronounced in order for the audience to see it properly. In addition to the work of the actors, the introduction of lighting and sound during the technical rehearsals and preview period added a huge amount to the production of the play. In the first half, the majority of the stage action contains quite normal everyday characters, so the lighting and sound remained quite simple and stripped back. By contrast, in the latter part of the play the action is less focused on the mini-stories of individual crossings but centres more around the mass spectacle of all the actors on stage at the same time doing some rather weird and wonderful things collectively. In this area of the production, the lighting and the sound have responded to the strangeness of the on-stage action with a more radical use of effects. At one point, for instance, a storm breaks out accompanied by the cries of animals in pain, and this seems to trigger the people on the square to form a human staircase. Immediately following on from Susannah Fielding and Jason Thorpe Photo by Neil Libbert 7
Interviews Costume designer Moritz Junge interviewed by staff director, Jamie Harper How did you begin working with James Macdonald on the costume design for The Hour? We started talking about very general ideas of how we would like to see the play in the theatre. Realism is the wrong word, but we did a lot of thinking about what real things you need on stage to get away with such a difficult piece. At first it was very general about what kind of world we re in, whether it s in England or somewhere more continental, or maybe it doesn t necessarily have to always be the same square. The setting is indeed ambiguous. It s set on a European city square but it s never possible to establish which city or country it might be. How did this fluidity of location affect your approach to the design? I think you need to be true to the fact that you ve got 27 British actors and the play has to work for this country. Sometimes we might be over in Europe somewhere but maybe we re even in the square in front of the National Theatre. Basically, we had to work to try to find the right place for each particular moment. The play contains many characters that Peter Handke describes as nondescript. How have you designed costumes for these characters when you have so little information about them? It s like with an actor when you say Go from stage left to stage right and it s very hard for them to do it without adding detail. You always want to add more things. And with the nondescripts I had to set the bar very low and think about how little detail we need with the costume to make a clear story or a clear character. In the fittings we would get the actor to put something on and ask, Is that enough information? Then we would say, Okay what we have now leads us in one direction but maybe if we put a skirt on instead it makes a different character. And we just decide which one we prefer. We met with the actors and made about twelve or maybe even fifteen of these nondescripts for each of them. The actors were very involved because they have to believe in what they are wearing so I was always working and hoping for reactions from them to say, Okay, this costume interests me help me to develop this character further. James was there for a lot of it as well and sometimes it was quite magical because people would just appear in the mirror who you wouldn t have expected. Inventing such a broad array of characters through the nondescript process must have given you a great feeling of flexibility in terms of what you put on-stage. Yeah, it gave us the freedom later on to create instant moments, like saying, We ve got that bunch of people in the scene, how can we mix them with other people on stage to make an interesting story? And you can have any number of different combinations of characters. Some of the characters in the play are very flamboyant like Papageno from The Magic Flute or Moses but the majority are very normal. What is it like combining the real with the surreal onstage at the same time? In a way it s much easier to do extreme characters than normal ones. I don t do so well on things like old men so it s been a challenge for me to do something very understated and something very bold when they have to exist together on the same stage. The way to do it is to make sure that whatever you do it s the real thing. So if it s Papageno even if he s only on-stage for a few moments it needs to be real so that you re not suddenly interrupted and left saying I don t believe that. The Hour has around 450 characters. How daunting is a project of this size? It was frightening and it s still frightening, even tonight when I watch it in the theatre. Sometimes you think, I wish I could do that or even turn it all over like you do with some shows. Sometimes you can sit there in rehearsals for a show and you think, Alright now I ve seen it I want to totally change it and turn it inside out and do something else, but in this show you can t because with so many costumes its logistically impossible! So it is quite scary but it s been fun from day one to take on such a big task and pull through it. Some things are easier and some things are harder but I ve loved every minute of it and I d do it again. Maybe it s even a once-in-a- 8
Interviews lifetime task, so you do it and compare yourself afterwards and feel your creative muscles and say, Maybe I was weak there but I m stronger here. So the show has flexed muscles that you didn t know you had? Maybe. (laughs) (At this point Moritz s mobile phone rings. It s costume supervisor, Janet Bench, summoning him to another fitting.) Hi Janet. Yeah alright. I m coming. For The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other the process of costume design never really stops, it seems Top: Director James Macdonald in rehearsal Above: Justine Mitchell and Jason Thorpe Photos by Neil Libbert 9
Interviews Actor Adrian Schiller interviewed by staff director, Jamie Harper. The Hour could be described as a fairly formally radical play. Has this radicalism altered your usual approach to the acting? Not really, it s just that with this kind of piece you have to pay greater attention to detail. It s all about the detail of how to do something very simply and very accurately. And, actually, quite a lot of the things we ve concentrated on during rehearsals are the sorts of things that would be regarded as incidental in other rehearsal processes. Normally, if a couple of characters are talking to each other, the way they look at each other or the way they walk into a space would just be taken for granted. Unless it s thought to be critical you might not pay attention to it. But The Hour is made up of little things like that the detail. Does this attention to detail ever feel burdensome or do you see it as an opportunity? It s an opportunity. It s a very talented company and I think I ve seen some of the best acting these people are capable of. Because we re looking at the detail, and because everybody s individual bit is pretty small, we ve been able to put a lot of effort into very short segments of detailed work. Peter Handke often describes the crossings of characters with very little information about who they are or what they re doing. That puts a lot of responsibility on the actors to invent stories to fill in the blanks. What s it like having to invent things in this way? Interpreting Handke s script is not altogether different from other scripts. I mean, yes, it s without lines to be said but he writes in a very evocative way. If he did it in a Samuel Beckett style of stage direction where it s very, very specific and precise that would possibly be easier but it would be boring. He seems to try to conjure things up with great brevity so that you have to re-interpret the text in the way you would if you were reading a novel; and by writing in this way your imagination is fired much more strongly than if he was to just tell you directly IT IS THIS. So the fact that it s quite open allows you a lot of freedom. In order to be able to perform it, you use all the instructions he gives you and then you have to fill in the blanks, as you say, to find a full story. And what you re performing isn t necessarily what the audience will read from it or what the author intended, but the openness is sort of the fun of it. You play many different characters in the production. How do you go about making them different without making them caricatures? A lot of the work is done by the costumes, inevitably. If you put a different load of clothes on then people will see you as being somebody different. I also don t think there s really enough time to make a caricature. A caricature would be where you signal something very specific about the character you re playing, but in the short time you re on stage in this play there s very little opportunity to signal something that strongly. The play s a fruitcake anyway (laughs) I mean it s got masses of stuff in it already, so if your job is to play a raisin you don t need to make it into a pickled raisin if that makes sense Daniel Hawksford, Jason Thorpe and Adrian Schiller Photo by Neil Libbert 10
Interviews The play contains no spoken words. Has it been difficult to resist the temptation to speak? Not for me, actually, but I know other people have found it difficult. A good example of this is towards the end of the play. There s a section that I do with Amy Hall that involves a couple that exchange something at lightning speed. We came up with an idea that these two people had been lovers and the reason they re exchanging something at lightning speed is that they ve broken up and they ve both left something at each other s houses, and they didn t want to see each other, they didn t want to speak to each other but he wanted his guitar back and she wanted her bag back. So they agree to meet in this place and as soon as they see each other they exchange their things at lightning speed and immediately they re off before they can say a word. That s the sort of process you go through. Under those circumstances they really don t want to talk, so the absence of words makes perfect sense. The production is very technically complex with a huge number of costume changes. Can you describe the practical rigours of performing in The Hour? It s a fantastically smoothly-oiled machine! It needs to be well organised. It needs the expertise of stage management and particularly the dressers and the wigs department to know exactly what they re doing and when they re doing it, in order to be able do it effectively. We had to have all the costumes in rehearsals to be able to get used to what our offstage journeys are. You gradually work out that you come on through one entrance wearing this, you come off then you ve got to go on again in a minute s time wearing a completely different costume. Sometimes you might have a lot of time before your next entrance but then you have to make sure you don t get in the way of anyone else in the wings while they re doing their change. So you ve got to try to do your own changes but also try to accommodate everyone else. the most enjoyable thing about doing it is the real feeling of esprit de corps. There s a whole bunch of people working together and there s no star, everyone s got as much to do as everyone else, everyone s working as hard as they can and everyone wants everyone s bit to be as good as possible. As a performer, how conscious are you of the audience reaction to the play? It s exciting to be part of something that s so surprising to an audience and inevitably slightly controversial. You can already hear a bit of uninformed whinging: Oh, it must be rubbish because there are no words; why is the National wasting taxpayers money on this crap? But you know it s an abstract play. Plays don t have to have a beginning, a middle and an end. They don t. In this country we often seem to think they do and that s rather a pity. It s lots and lots of tiny scenes, very well observed. Some of them fantastical, some of them less fantastical, some of them completely mundane, joined together with a great deal of skill and acted by some very, very fine actors. I m delighted to be a part of it. The play has a very large cast. How important is the role of the ensemble? Enormously important. When we originally worked on the play in rehearsals it hadn t been decided who was going to play what, so we would just volunteer, and two or three people would jump up and have a go and everyone else would watch. By doing it like this we could see what was working well and we came to a kind of collective understanding of how to approach the play. And, actually, probably