THE WAR OF THE ROSES - NOTES FROM THE REHEARSAL ROOM

“So, when I spit the blood, should it be like a sudden spurt or should this one be like a splatter?”

Rehearsal rooms are strange places; they can be banal, workmanlike and filled with repetition. Actors wander through scenes over and over under fluorescent lights. The rooms can get close, airless, strangely oppressive. But they are also extraordinarily fascinating, particularly when the moments of banality come up against something weird and unearthly.

The rehearsals for The War of the Roses have been going for two months. Such is the scale of the project that sometimes scenes can only be rehearsed once a fortnight; the concentration required of cast, stage management, designers to remember and note their work is prodigious. But this is the STC Actors Company so they are seasoned at works of scale and the needs of rooms like this. I’m in a privileged position, I can come into this room and watch them work. They arrive and all change into crappy old clothes, for good reason; by the end of a session’s work most of their bodies are like a Pollock canvas, drenched in blood, dripping water, dusted in flour.

“This is a very very very very simple murder. The knife should just slide into his ear. Slowly. No emotion.”

The room has an enormous blackboard on one wall. On it Pamela Rabe (who’s playing Richard III) has drawn an elaborate family tree of the kings, queens, dukes, earls who make up this sprawling epic. Every character on stage over the eight hours is a cousin, wife, brother, aunt of someone else. The diagram is so complicated it folds in on itself, like a collapsing spider web. The plays are about history, but actually they feel like a vast family, a tribe, tearing itself apart, from the inside out. The characters lie to each other, kill each other, love each other, often soaring into some impossible poetic height. Then, the spell pops like a bubble, the rehearsal stops. There’s a problem over where a veil should be left. Or someone can’t see because the blood’s clogged their eyes. Or director Benedict Andrews wants a change, from something that seemed perfect already to some other form of perfection.

“No, don’t recite it. Tell us. Make eye contact. Describe it.”

And a speech that was a rarefied, exquisite wisp changes in an actors’ mouth into a report, a testimony. But it has lost none of its grandeur, none of its poetry.

“..and just look at the crown. As if you’re seeing it for the first time: ‘What on earth is this band of gold?’”

No-one can describe the whole of this production at the moment; the saga is too big. But it can be sensed. This isn’t an easy version of these plays. The truncated edit makes it hard work, but it also liberates it from, well, feeling like Shakespeare you’ve seen countless times before. It’s now a condensed quartet of poems about power and death. And at the end of a day’s work, actors shower and rinse the flowers and viscera from their hair, and mull on their odd dreamlike other selves over a beer. And the Stage Managers scrub the blood and flour from the boards, so the whole bizarre rite can begin again tomorrow.