Week One

We started off our new school year by going straight into a show. We had two days of rehearsal before we performed ‘Blood Brothers’ once more. This time we would be performing at The Globe, Stockton for their Globe Festival. Our first task was to read the script and cherry pick the key parts of the performance. The significant plot points that would allow an audience to understand the story, as well as all the key points and themes in our short amount of time. Our slot would be thirty minutes long, or so we first thought. Sadly, in this week Queen Elizabeth also passed away. The theatre we were performing in, then decided to pay respect to the Queen’s passing and in doing so reduced our performance time to twenty minutes. The night before our show all of the cast came together on a call to try and figure out our new show layout. We eventually did so by cutting a couple more scenes, before it was looking good and something we were capable of performing well.

Upon the day of our performance and my turn to play ‘Mickey’ was one of the first shows of the day at 12:30. This was slightly nerve wracking, but I knew I could do it; I had already done so before a couple of months previously. The performance was going swimmingly, apart from some microphone issues, nothing a little voice projection couldn’t solve. However, halfway through our performance, after we had just finished the scene in which our characters were teenagers, we realised we only had two minutes of our time left. Due to this we had to skip to the end scene quite quickly and this meant that it didn’t really make sense. Nevertheless, I felt like it was still a valuable experience to have everything suddenly go completely wrong. Some performances will never be perfect or as we wish them to be. Yet still being professional enough to continue, to go back on stage and do the best you can, will stand us in good stead in the future. Considering all of this I feel our performances went very well. In fact, my fellow cast mates were unaware that I was about to reappear on stage and perform a completely different scene, the final scene. The rest of the cast went along with this unexpected change perfectly, bouncing off of me and making the scene work, which was fantastic.

We had another show at 3:30, which went well now that we had worked out the bugs. This show was performed by our other cast. During this performance I helped this cast with their props and costumes. Every second counted, we only had twenty minutes to perform an entire play while we were at The Globe.

Overall, my first performance at The Globe was full of ups and downs. Our performances themselves went well, apart from our technical issues. But we got through it, we made it work, together. We were great at improvising; we didn’t just panic and fumble our way through. We stayed strong, kept going and showed how as a group we are exceptionally good at working together. No matter how many things go wrong we can always pull it back. I loved being able to perform at such an amazing theatre. A theatre that had seen so many different and remarkable performers before me, it was an honour and a great learning experience for me as an actor to make the best out of a tough situation. 

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