Rehearsal plan:
- Recap
- Ashes to Ashes
- Holocaust Humour
- Improvisations
Our second rehearsal was shorter and less intense than the first, but still gave us some interesting things to look at.
Having re-capped the previous session for Daisy who couldn’t make the first rehearsal, we moved on to reading Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes, his only Holocaust play, if it can be called that. It’s filled with allusions to the Shoah, without any real direct reference (despite the fact that the absent lover is inspired by the Nazi functionary Albert Speer) which I found to be effective. Having warned the cast against metaphor at the previous rehearsal, there was some confusion here as to whether these allusions were exactly the sort of thing we were trying to avoid. My response was that, personally I think allusion is useful and effective, while comparison is dangerous insofar as it encroaches upon the uniqueness of the Shoah. We noted the use of mental illness as a trope, and its use elsewhere (cf. The Model Apartment). The line ‘End once. End Again.’ I took to be interesting insofar as it relates to the intergenerational transmission of memory (i.e. Death as the first ‘end’, and being forgotten as the second). This drew us back to discussions of postmemory given that the memories Rebecca recalls are not her own as she is too young to have experienced them.
We then watched a clip from Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm as a way of looking at how to approach the Holocaust in a way that was thought provoking but less sacred, perhaps. From this clip, the idea of the family dinner was brought up as a potential way in to our piece, insofar as it is the site of Jewish life and ritual in so many ways. We spoke about the idea of the piece being set entirely around a dinner table, with audience members perhaps bringing a dish (health and safety concerns re allergies being taken into account, of course), and telling our stories round the table.
This was a shorter rehearsal, so that was more or less all we had time for. Next week we’ll be watching Shoah during both rehearsals, and the cast will be asked to respond for the following week.
- Recap
- Ashes to Ashes
- Holocaust Humour
- Improvisations
Our second rehearsal was shorter and less intense than the first, but still gave us some interesting things to look at.
Having re-capped the previous session for Daisy who couldn’t make the first rehearsal, we moved on to reading Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes, his only Holocaust play, if it can be called that. It’s filled with allusions to the Shoah, without any real direct reference (despite the fact that the absent lover is inspired by the Nazi functionary Albert Speer) which I found to be effective. Having warned the cast against metaphor at the previous rehearsal, there was some confusion here as to whether these allusions were exactly the sort of thing we were trying to avoid. My response was that, personally I think allusion is useful and effective, while comparison is dangerous insofar as it encroaches upon the uniqueness of the Shoah. We noted the use of mental illness as a trope, and its use elsewhere (cf. The Model Apartment). The line ‘End once. End Again.’ I took to be interesting insofar as it relates to the intergenerational transmission of memory (i.e. Death as the first ‘end’, and being forgotten as the second). This drew us back to discussions of postmemory given that the memories Rebecca recalls are not her own as she is too young to have experienced them.
We then watched a clip from Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm as a way of looking at how to approach the Holocaust in a way that was thought provoking but less sacred, perhaps. From this clip, the idea of the family dinner was brought up as a potential way in to our piece, insofar as it is the site of Jewish life and ritual in so many ways. We spoke about the idea of the piece being set entirely around a dinner table, with audience members perhaps bringing a dish (health and safety concerns re allergies being taken into account, of course), and telling our stories round the table.
This was a shorter rehearsal, so that was more or less all we had time for. Next week we’ll be watching Shoah during both rehearsals, and the cast will be asked to respond for the following week.