Our earliest discussions on possible ‘structures’ for our performance have involved, what the RSC ‘training manual’ affectionately calls, a WHOOSH! The ‘Whoosh’ enables a potted play to take place in approximately 20 mins! David and I ‘Whooshed’ The Merchant of Venice together during our summer training sessions and, despite it’s name, I found it to be a rather clumsy, disjointed device, that neither informed my understanding of the play nor engaged me in any meaningful theatrical sense. It is a ‘useful’ rehearsal device, but I fear, not our solution to a possible performance scenario.
To be fair to the ‘Whoosh’ we only tackled the first 8 of a possible 24 scenes, but even so, those 8 short scenes didn’t seem to sufficiently stretch the talents of the group, or enable us to explore a broad enough range of theatrical devices and techniques. I am quite clear in my own mind on this key point – our focus during the project should be on the theatre making process and not the end product. In this way I feel we can ‘frame’ our different performance (and educational) interests in a way that both excites our ‘audience’ and stimulates our individual delivery of Shakespeare in the classroom.
To be fair to the ‘Whoosh’ we only tackled the first 8 of a possible 24 scenes, but even so, those 8 short scenes didn’t seem to sufficiently stretch the talents of the group, or enable us to explore a broad enough range of theatrical devices and techniques. I am quite clear in my own mind on this key point – our focus during the project should be on the theatre making process and not the end product. In this way I feel we can ‘frame’ our different performance (and educational) interests in a way that both excites our ‘audience’ and stimulates our individual delivery of Shakespeare in the classroom.
Gordon Duffy-McGhie
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