Rehearsing in a foreign land

My first week in Georgia is over – and I’ve been so busy I haven’t really seen much of the place! We (4 actors, one Production Manager, one Producer and me – the stage manager) landed at around midnight and were taken to our accommodation in the centre of Tbilisi. I and two of the actors are staying in a 3 bedroom flat with a small kitchen and a large sitting room. It’s an enormous apartment, and very lavish. We are very pleased with our new home!
The following day we were taken to the Marjanishvilis Theatre for an introduction and a tour of the theatre. We met the puppeteers and the puppets – amazingly lifelike things controlled by rods attached to their heads, backs, hands and feet. We were then all taken up to the hills outside of Tbilisi to the director (Levan)’s summer house for Georgian banquet!

Some of the puppeteers and various Marjanishvilis staff came too and we feasted outside on a huge variety of local foods – salads, pickles, breads, delicious barbequed pork and much much more. The Georgian wine was flowing and the ‘tamada’ (toast master) made sure everything and everyone was toasted – the hosts, us the visitors, Georgia, Great Britain, our production, the dead, the future….
It was a fantastic evening.

Rehearsals started the next day and have continued everyday since – no days off for us! Our typical working day is 11am till 2.30pm/3pm with a long afternoon break and then 6pm till 8.30pm or 9pmish. Rehearsals over here are very different to anything we have in the UK and we’ve had to adapt to this way of working very quickly. We rehearse on the stage with the set (although in our case the set is 5 tables on wheels and some screens), the lighting and the sound effects. The sound and lighting is incorporated as we go, so there are lots of long pauses whilst the director shouts his requirements at the lighting technician. It’s a bit like a technical rehearsal back home, but at least back home the lights would have already been rigged in the right place and pointing in the right direction, and the special effects would have already been experimented with and tested! Another huge difference is that my role of Deputy Stage Manager doesn’t exist over here – at home I would be passing information from rehearsals to the production staff who would be building the set and finding props, but here the production staff are in rehearsals and if a prop or piece of set is suddenly needed they will run off and produce it!

And when the show final is performed, I would be calling all the lighting, sound and effect cues from my ‘book’, but here the technicians take their own cues from their own notes. So I am fairly redundant at the moment, except for making as many notes as I can for myself, so that when we do return to the UK I am ready to run the show as I normally would.

As we have been rehearsing so much we haven’t had much time to explore Tbilisi, so I will write again when I have something more interesting to say. But for now – it’s hot, pretty dusty from the road works and building improvements that are taking place, there seem to be no rules of the road, the people are friendly, and the food is yummy!

Rehearsing in a foreign land

Tbilisi, Georgia