The British Theatre Guide: Directing Godspell

School & Youth Theatre

Directing Godspell

This was originally part of a series of guides on various aspects of school theatre, which could be downloaded from the School Show Page. They were intended to encapsulate my experience of school theatre built up over about thirty years. They are reproduced here as web pages for the first time.

They are long!

At the end of the last chapter we left our hero confronting the waiting masses, everyone ready to embark on the adventure called Godspell. What happened next? Would our hero dazzle the assembled company with his brilliance? What crises would he have to face? Would the company hearken to his every word or
trample him underfoot?

Nail-biting stuff, eh?

What actually happened next was six weeks of hard slog, for a tiny fraction of which time the company loved him, but for most of which they wanted to kick his head in, which was only fair because that's how he felt about them.

It is worth mentioning at this stage that, as in every aspect of teaching, those who look for popularity will not find it, and they'll make a mess of the production too. Don't be afraid to work your cast very hard. Yes, they'll complain, but they'll do so for form's sake: after all, you're a teacher and they're pupils, so they've got to put up a fight. It's the nature of the beast! It's a problem you'll only have the first time: after that they'll be used to it, and when newcomers complain they'll be put in their place by the old hands!

Interestingly we once worked with another group who were joining our production, for its second outing, as chorus. They were used to working in a far less intensive manner than is normal for us and they had real difficulty in handling it. They couldn't concentrate for the length of time we were used to and began to get restless and even to misbehave. At the end of the first rehearsal, at least a dozen of my cast of twenty made it their business to get me on my own to let me know how worried they were that "they'll wreck our show, sir. Can we not get rid of them?"

It's easy to say what steps you take to get rehearsals started, but to describe how you actually operate during rehearsals is next to impossible. A professional director may be able to use the same approach in every production but you can't do that with kids. Of course every actor is different, and requires different handling, but at least professional actors have, as a general rule, the same background of technique and expectation: the director may have to allow for this one's temperament or that one's slowness at learning lines, for delicate egos or even more delicate relationships, but everyone does have the same basic grounding, the same professional underpinning as it were.

With schoolkids, however, you start off with a much greater mixture. Some will have some experience, others none; some will have a lot of talent, others very little, if any; some will be totally dedicated, others just there because their friend is. There'll be those who will probably end up as PhDs, and those who have difficulty writing their own name. Some will have a deep love of the theatre, and others wouldn't recognise one if it stopped them in the street. Most will be well-behaved, but the occasional real villain does creep in. There is only one thing that you can be absolutely sure of, and that is that you can take nothing for granted.

You can make some generalisations, however, so long as you do realise that they are generalisations and will not apply in every case. One is that you will have to teach the majority to act. That's why I always think that you are more likely to be successful in directing a school play if you have acted yourself. If the worst comes to the worst - and, believe me, there are times when it does - you can always get one or more of the kids to imitate your own performance. It's far from satisfactory, but it's a damned sight better than letting them go on-stage in front of a whole load of their friends and relatives and make fools of themselves. They will never forgive you for that, nor, if you are any sort of a teacher, will you!

Another generalisation: their egos are going to be much more delicate than even the most precious of professionals. That doesn't mean that you should never hammer them hard: you should, if they need it, but as a group, not picking on individuals. I remember in one production sinking theatrically to the floor and whispering - yes, whispering - "Just go away. Go away. Please." and remaining crumpled there until they had all left the building. It was one of the most ham performances I have ever given - I wouldn't even have got away with it in a melodrama! - but it worked: the next rehearsal was two hundred percent better. None of us ever mentioned the incident again. I suspect they recognised that I was being theatrical but had enough respect for me not to want me to make such a fool of myself again! Whatever the reason, it worked, and that's all that matters

Moral: you may have to make a fool of yourself to get the best out of your cast!

But don't ever pick on an individual in that way. Be critical, yes, but supportively so: "It's difficult, isn't it? Let's see if we can play around with it a bit....".

But even here there can be exceptions. I always thought there couldn't, but I did discover one: the kid who is really into theatre, who is a member of lots of groups, and has begun to think (s)he knows it all. Then you can attack on an individual basis. However you don't knock the performance - that would be counterproductive - but the attitude. And once you've done that and won the attitude battle, you backpedal a bit and meet him/her halfway on the point of performance at issue. You have to tread a delicate balance between maintaining your role as the director (in school plays you have to work on the "director as god" principle) and bolstering the kids' self-esteem. It shouldn't be too difficult: after all, most teachers are doing it every day!

For me, at any rate, there are three types of rehearsal: blocking, talking and performance, each with its own aims and methods of achieving those aims. The blocking rehearsal is not, I believe, always essential, although many amateur directors seem to feel that it is. What you are doing is moving the actors around the stage with two aims: to create the requisite picture and to stop them masking - or even bumping into - each other. These moves should not be carved in stone, but should serve as the basis for the real moves which will emerge as character, motivation and relationships become clearer. There probably won't be a great deal of change (well... possibly not that much... oh, alright, it'll all change!) - after all, you will have thought endlessly about these things in preparing the production - but there will be some.

By the way, do make sure that every member of the cast has a pencil and writes down the moves, otherwise they - and you! - will forget them. Your assistant should, of course, write them down in The Book. And insist on a pencil, not a pen, because as sure as God made little green apples the moves will change.

This sort of rehearsal is vital when there are large numbers on the stage but otherwise can vary from useful to useless. Personally I won't block a small cast play until after a few of the next type of rehearsal, the talk.

The worst directors share one common fault - a contempt for their actors. They would never admit it, of course. In fact, they probably don't realise that they feel that way, but what else can you call it when the director treats his actors as pieces on a chessboard, telling them their characters, the tones of voice to use, their moves - everything? In my time as an amateur actor I worked with one or two like this and hated it: you were afraid even to mention that a move felt uncomfortable, let alone ask to change it! The best directors, however, encourage their actors to bring their interpretation to the part so that what finally emerges is a real fusion of everyone's ideas, but a fusion which follows the director's guidelines.

Watching Bill Alexander working on Julius Caesar with the Tyne-Wear Theatre Company was a real revelation for me: two hours were spent whilst he and the cast tossed interpretations of just one short scene back and forth until finally a consensus emerged and when they ran through the scene, for the second time that day, it came alive and had real significance, in sharp contrast to the first, almost throw-away version.

I can already hear voices raised in protest, suggesting that you can't possibly do that with kids. To an extent that's true - they don't have the experience or the knowledge to be able to explore a text as throroughly as professional actors - but if you guide the discussion, ideas will emerge and the scene will be much more natural because it will be theirs, not something imposed from without.

I mentioned previously the piece from Richard III which I included in a compilation show. I said then that, for many adults in the audience, this scene was the highlight of the show, and it wasn't just the quality of the acting which pleased, but the interpretation, which was very mature. We had three two hour rehearsals on this scene alone, two of which were talk rehearsals in which we explored the feelings of the
characters. It was only in the third rehearsal that we actually got down to moves and most of them (apart from a kind of tableau towards which I was aiming at the end) came from the girls and arose from our discussion of the characters and their motivation.

(Perhaps I can mention here something I will talk about in greater depth later - the importance of the text. I firmly believe that we must make the text the centre of our work on any play. It's far more important than setting, movement, costume, or any other aspect of the show.)

They were, clearly, intelligent kids, and I made sure the discussion followed profitable lines by asking leading questions, but, by the time we got down to taking the text from the page and putting it on the stage, they had a clear idea of who they were and what they were doing, so the moves came naturally. What was also obvious was that, between rehearsals, they had thought about the scene and discussed it. Working like this is time-consuming, of course, and to the uninitiated it looks more like an English Literature lesson than a play rehearsal, but it works. And then again, what is putting on a play but a practical lesson in Literature?

Incidentally, the more experienced your actors, the easier this kind of rehearsal becomes. The show just mentioned was only the second I had done in that school; when I came to do another compilation show some three years later and was working with year ten and eleven pupils who had been in shows and had attended the Drama Club since they were in year seven, there was a tremendous difference. Included in this show was the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, and I confess that I expected some problems in the first rehearsal. There weren't any! I'd given them their scripts beforehand and it became very clear from the outset that they had read and thought about the lines. I had to explain a couple of words - gyves wasn't in the dictionaries they were used to using! - but apart from that they clearly knew what the words meant and had the basic structure of the scene sussed out.

These rehearsals are not always talk: sometimes we use improvisation, setting, for example, an historical scene in a modern context, or changing the mood of a character to see the naturalness or otherwise of a move or a tone of voice. There are plenty of tricks that can be used to illuminate the text. It is sometimes useful to play the scene out getting the actors to say, not the words of the text, but the thoughts going through the characters' minds (thought-tracking, one of those theatrical means of exploring a text which "progressive" Drama teachers have elevated to something of value in its own right), or perhaps to imagine it all happened some time ago and that the character is justifying himself to someone else. I also make use of what I call the "Why?" game: I interrupt to ask a character "Why did you say/do that?", then follow up their answer with another "Why?", and so on, peeling away layers of motivation or justification.

This kind of rehearsal is also useful for breaking down inhibitions. In Godspell we had a real problem with the Wailing Wall scene where the cast are supposed to wail in accompaniment to the words of Jesus. It is difficult: I know of at least one amateur company which simply left out the wailing. The problem in our case was twofold: the cast were embarrassed at making what was, for them, a silly noise (after all, wailing of this nature is not part of our culture: it would have been easier to do in some countries), and everyone waited for everyone else to start. As a result a long embarrassed silence was followed by some hestitant moans that tailed off into silence. In order to break down these inhibitions I sat the cast on the floor and asked them to close their eyes. I then told them to breath deeply in time to my instructions and gradually I lengthened the time for breathing out. After some three or four minutes (yes! as long as that!), I asked them to make an "Ah" sound as they breathed out. We did this for a further five minutes, gradually increasing the volume. When I was satisfied with the way it was going I tapped the actor playing Jesus on the shoulder and signalled the start of the Oh Jerusalem speech. We had no problems after that!

One word of warning, though. It is easy to get carried away with talk rehearsals and spend most of your time on them. That may work with professionals (although I doubt it!) but kids will find it frightening if they don't get sufficient time in the normal performance rehearsals. They need that time, if only to build up their confidence. I have come across one director who worked that way and his cast, even though they were experienced and loved the theatre, hated not only the rehearsals but the play too - because they were scared stiff.

Performance rehearsals are what most people think rehearsals are: going over and over the play. There are two ways of doing this: you can either start at the beginning of a scene, go through it to the end, then talk about it and begin again; or you can interrupt whenever anything is not going exactly as you want it and go over and over until you're satisfied. As in everything else, I am rather eclectic. In other words, I do both! When we first start rehearsing I'll keep going back and back until I'm reasonably happy - I've been known to spend thirty minutes on a couple of lines! - but when the rehearsal period is well on (in other words, when the play is little more than a week away!) I'll move on to scene by scene rehearsal because by that stage the flow of the whole thing becomes important.

This leads to a very vexed question: how long should the rehearsal period last? I am very aware that I frighten my Assistant Directors somewhat (I used to worry the M.D. but she's got used to me now!) because they think that the play will never be ready on time. They always think I am leaving things far too
late. The thing is, I am firmly of the belief that you can over-rehearse kids. They produce their best peformances under a certain amount of stress, when the adrenalin really flows, and if you rehearse for too long they become over-confident. I try to judge it so that they feel not quite ready and that little bit of fear gives them the boost they need on the first night.

I can't really give any actual timings because there are far too many variables: the talent and experience of the company, the number in the cast, the play itself, the possible number and frequency of rehearsals in a given period - these are just the most important. I have been fortunate in every school in which I've worked in that the Head has given me the full week before the show to rehearse throughout the day.

There are always restrictions, of course: with examination classes the members of staff concerned have to agree (fair enough, and I have been known to sit with kids during lunchtimes so that they can do supervised assignments and still attend rehearsals) and I can expect no cover for my lessons - my classes must come into the theatre with me (something which I don't mind at all: after all, I am a Drama teacher and this is an aspect of Drama which they ought to see. And anyway it helps sell tickets!). I have always fought for this concession because I believe that as the kids give up so much of their own time they are entitled to some school time; and so am I, given the amount of unpaid overtime I put in! The same applies to the MD when we do musical shows.

Perhaps an example would help. With Godspell we rehearsed for six weeks: for the first three we did two hours one night a week and then did two nights in the fourth week. For the last two weeks we did three nights but came in to do four hours one Sunday afternoon. Thus, prior to the actual rehearsal week, we did 22 hours.

For Godspell every company member was called for every rehearsal, but this was an ensemble production. For most shows I call specific people for specific rehearsals, so, although I may work three or even four nights, the average member of the cast will only be called for one or, at most, two. Music rehearsals are usually done on a lunchtime or at times when a particular kid is not needed for the main rehearsal.

The rehearsal week consisted of five hours a day (or thirty hours altogether), making a total, including the Sunday rehearsal, of 56 hours. Compare this to the average amateur company: the one I know most about, where I was a member for many years, used to rehearse three nights a week for two and a half hours per night for six weeks, a total of 45 hours, plus a dress rehearsal on the Sunday afternoon lasting about three hours, making 48 in all. Leaving aside music rehearsals, which would have been extra for the amateur company too, we only did eight hours more, in spite of having a company which, in general, was less experienced. I must say that had I had more time I would merely have lengthened the period by keeping the number of nights per week to one or two, not pushed in more rehearsals. As I said earlier, you can rehearse too long with kids so that they become over-confident or, even worse, stale.

I must confess that I rely on that rehearsal week. This is when we do all of the whole act performance rehearsals. Because we have more time we are able to have a long run at the play and the kids' attention is wonderfully concentrated by the proximity of the performance.

And that week (or whatever) of performance goes by all too quickly leaving behind it a wonderful feeling of euphoria, the like of which you can get from no other aspect of teaching. It almost makes the day-to-day grind worthwhile.....almost!

I do call other types of rehearsal too. When lines are proving to be a problem I find "babble" rehearsals very useful. These are rehearsals in which the cast run through their lines as fast as they can, quite literally babbling the words. It is amazing how this concentrates the mind! If only one or two are having lines problems I will combine the babble with an individual rehearsal. Here I will read in the other characters' lines whilst the individual babbles through his/her part. To concentrate the actor's mind more fully I will only read the cue sentence: everything else becomes "Di-dah di-dah di-dah"!

In fact individual rehearsals are very useful. I usually have at least one individual rehearsal with every member of the cast who has a speech of any length. The ostensible aim of these rehearsals is to work on any problems of interpretation or performance the kid might have - and they are useful in that way - but I will also have them with those who are not experiencing any difficulties, because the hidden agenda for these individual rehearsals is building confidence. Kids' egos need massaging as much as any professional actor's and the thought that the director is devoting time (even if it's just fifteen minutes) to you helps enormously. I use lunchtimes for these rehearsals, even taking kids out of music rehearsals for quarter of an hour or so. But I always clear it with the MD first - not to do so would be a hanging offence! Quite rightly, too: directors sometimes come really to believe that they are God (mea culpa! mea maxima culpa!) and need to remind themselves (or be reminded) that they too are mortal. And music or dance rehearsals, costume fittings and so on are an integral part of a play.

And then we come to the dress rehearsal! There's an old superstition that a bad dress rehearsal means a good first night. It's not true, but it does help. If the cast goes away feeling that the dress was pretty awful, then they are more likely to psych themselves up effectively than if everything went well, for then over-confidence can set in. Actually first dress reheasals usually are pretty bad, for it is then that everything comes together for the first time: lights, costumes, props, make-up, sound, even the set.

I do try to lessen the strain somewhat by having a technical rehearsal before the dress. Here I will go through the lighting and sound cues with the technical staff only. I don't call the actors but most of them are usually so strung up that they want to be there, so I can put them on the stage just to make certain that the light is falling where it should. Major errors in the lighting plan tend to show up at the Tech. so that only minor "tweaking" is required after the actual dress. No professional production would go on without a Tech. and who am I to argue with the professionals? They have the experience, after all.

Having said that, I didn't have a Tech. for Godspell, simply because there were only three lighting states: a full-up state which we used for most of the play, a state in which we had the centre front at half and the rest at about point three, and a red state. To call a special Tech. would have been a waste of time: instead we simply ran through the cues about fifteen minutes before the first dress.

I do prefer to have two dress rehearsals. You may have gathered that I believe in putting my casts under pressure so I try to make sure they have an audience for the first one. When the play is suitable (and it isn't always) I invite our feeder junior schools to send their Year 6 pupils to come and see the dress. It puts the cast on the qui vive and has the additional benefit of making the juniors tell their mothers and fathers that they want to come to our school so they too can be in a show like the one they saw this afternoon!

Actually it's amazing how many turn up on the first night with parents and friends, so it sells tickets as well! The audience is warned that what they are seeing is a dress and that I might have to stop and restart the show if things aren't going as they should. This makes the cast determined they are not going to be shown up in front of the little 'uns and they work even harder than they would ordinarily.

This first dress is usually on an afternoon and the second starts the same evening at about 7.00. It begins with the dreaded notes: what was right or wrong during the afternoon. Giving notes is an important part of any rehearsal but is particularly vital at the dress. Don't be afraid to tell them how bad they were, just so long as you find something good to say, even if it's just "I know you can do it. Why didn't you?". You probably will need to stop and start the second dress. The kids will be tired but you do need to sort out any problems - and, believe me, there will be some!

One final point: you can't just wash your hands of the show the minute you've given your last note at the final dress, which is what happens in the professional theatre: then the stage manager takes over full control, including any rehearsals that may prove to be necessary. Kids need encouragement: I always speak to them five minutes before the show goes up. On the first night it's words of encouragement (and, of course, Don't forget....) but on subsequent nights you must push them to guard against complacency and over-confidence. To be honest, the only time my pre-show words are unalloyedly positive is on the last night: "This is it! the last night. Be brilliant! Go out them and sock it to them! Enjoy yourselves!"

And be sure that you are there every night as they come off-stage and that you speak to, shake hands with, hug or whatever, every member of the cast. All you're doing is saying "Thank you" and showing your appreciation of their hard work, even if all hasn't gone as well as it should. If you've rehearsed the show properly they'll know if they weren't as good as they should have been; they won't need you to tell them. But they will need some reassurance that you're still on their side!

And it's also a good idea to have a party a week or so later when all the photos have been developed. We spend some of the profits of the show on pop and food, and a tradition has grown of both staff and kids sending each other up in specially written songs or scenes, all, of course, based on the show. Again, it shows your appreciation of their work and it help weld them into a real company which will have real benefits in future productions.

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