We produced Blush of Dogs 10 years ago this year. In our last post about our journey, we remembered the process of leaving drama school, solidifying the company we had loosely formed while studying, and finding a venue for our first professional production. In this blog, we explore some of the processes we went through to get the next pieces of the puzzle in place.
“When Anna’s foot went through the rehearsal room door,” Roland remembers, “everything stopped. She didn’t stop but Ben, Mike and I stopped. You’re not supposed to pause during a rehearsal exercise. The music was loud, the room was hot and sweaty, the discoveries were intense. And then Anna kicked a hole through the door, spun round, sprinted across the room and jumped out the window onto a building site. One blink and the boys recovered. They carried on the work. It was just another everyday rehearsal room occurrence. She was on her own journey. She would come back when she was ready. But I knew then, this show was going to be amazing.”
The story of making theatre is the story of meeting people. In every project, you build a family. A disparate group comes together for the most intense burst of creativity, during which everything is exposed and nothing is left off the table. You laugh together, you cry together, you eat together. In the end, you display your combined creativity to the public and you are judged together. And then, like ships in the night, you part, as though nothing happened. As Shakespeare reminds us, theatre is a dream.
In the last blog post about our journey, we explored how we evolved from a loose drama school group into a professional theatre company and secured a venue for our first run in London. It took time to decide what work we wanted to make and to polish our pitch, but having developed a way of working, we were secure in how we imagined our next piece of work ought to be.
Once we had the venue, all the hard work started. Raising the money for the various elements was, and still is, one of the hardest aspects of the process, and we were phenomenally fortunate to develop relationships with some philanthropic souls who continue to help us to this day. Anyone who works in Fringe theatre knows that this is a labour of love. You better not come into it with grand visions of huge profits, or else you’ll suffer a rude awakening.
Once we had money in place, the needs kept mounting: performance venue, rehearsal venue, marketing, insurance, design budget, crew fees and actors’ salaries. For many years, we’ve observed how, when funds are tight, the actors are the first people asked to take the fall. And actors accept this too often, because it’s so hard to secure a job. The economics are not on their side. But we have always made it a point to pay our actors, even if at times that payment seemed nominal, because artists cannot be expected to live off passion alone.
Gathering the cast was a case of mixing the devils we knew with the devils we didn’t. The play, published by Oberon Books in 2016 and which you can still purchase on Amazon here (https://shorturl.at/unDPt) was designed with multi-roling in mind, where each actor would be asked to take on multiple parts.
The characters are sharply divided into an Ancient hierarchical structure as is common in Greek theatre. A revolving chorus of slaves comments on the action of the aloof nobility, King Atreus a lonely fool, his brother Tiresias, a sex-crazed deviant, and Queen Aerope, trapped in complex feelings between these feuding brothers. Caught in the middle was the blind, gender-shifting prophet, Tiresias. We were looking for three actors who had the energy and range to each play a noble, and one of innumerable slaves, and then to take turns playing the prophet, whether male or female.
Ben Alderton returned after Planter’s Island to take on the role of King Atreus. He’s one of the most hilarious and skilled comic actors that we’ve ever seen, so he fit perfectly into the ridiculous scenes of the chorus and old Tiresias, just as he had excelled in transforming between the nine characters he played in Planter’s Island. But there is also a striking core of emotional honesty and vulnerability that Ben has always brought to his work. He so subtly brings truth up close to the surface of each character he plays, yet seems to hold something back, something not quite given, which makes the audience lean in to discover more.
Along with Ben, we were overjoyed that Anna Procter wanted to join the team. Anna was in our year at Drama Centre and, though Roland our director hadn’t worked with her before directly, she had always impressed with her raw power, her strength, her towering presence. It has been our dream to work with her ever since, though it hasn’t happened yet, because Anna is a rare actor, a true original. If you ever need an actor to embody a goddess or an Amazonian of myth and legend, Anna is the one.
Last to join us was Michael Corsale. He and Roland had been at Drama Centre at the same time but somehow never met. He was good friends with Ben, though, who recommended him, and when they got to know each other over beer and camomile tea at the Hour Glass, sadly gone now, near South Kensington, it was as though soulmates had collided. His brass baritone voice, along with his brand of trickster south London rogue, combined with his animal instincts and indomitable will made him perfect to play the devious Prince Tiresias, the King’s brother, returned from exile over the waves.
Having assembled our dream cast, we began rehearsals. Never in our lives have we been through a process more intense, more energetic, more soul-searching, sublime, and at times downright dangerous as that, and we wish we could do it again. Doors broke. Punches were thrown. Windows smashed. Blood spilled. It was great.
Part of the Fragen rehearsal method relies on exhausting actors, as though they’re playing a sports match. You take them to the very edge of collapse and in that place, allow them to perform, so that the stakes take on an intense edge of catastrophe. When it works, it can create an effect that audiences have never seen before. But to get three such fit, athletic actors to the point of exhaustion took a lot of work and all the imagination they possessed.
Such creative and brilliant minds brought infinite variety and opportunity to the room. During that rehearsal process, we honed so many of the techniques and exercises we still use today, such as animal transformations, embodied non-verbal backstory and relationship history workshops, and athletic aerobics combined with song and dance.
The final pieces of the puzzle were to bring on board the design and stage management crew who would see the production through on its journey from rehearsal room to the stage. For this, we teamed up with the incredible Isabella van Braeckel, a designer we knew well from Central Saint Martin’s days, and with whom we have worked many times since.
Issy has a penetrating eye for detail, which is invaluable when she is tasked with bringing to life worlds which are surreal or dystopian in nature. Such worlds, especially on a low budget, can run the risk of coming across as cliched and generalised if you’re not careful. But Issy always finds a way to secure one or two essential design pieces that bring the world to life. We’ll keep stories about the fake blood, the orange peel and the cannibal feast back for the next blog, so be sure to check back in with us then.
Rounding out the crew came our great friend Helen “Dwayne” Thomas, nicknamed “Dwayne” because she is the Rock on which many of our productions have been founded. A stage manager, turned producer, par excellence, Helen is one of our favourite collaborators, and her role in running the show in the venue is that of one of theatre’s unsung heroes.
Our rehearsals over, our marketing working its magic, the buzz was rising, and the nerves with them. By the beginning of April 2015, we were ready to shift our material from our last rehearsal room in Hackney across London to Chiswick’s the Tabard to begin our run.
19.02.25
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