‘Oliver’ Diaries: Act 2, Scene 1 Rehearsal (6th March 2018)

As it was a Tuesday, Mrs. Culkin was holding her weekly year 11 revision sessions. This time, we were trusted to direct the scene ourselves, which was pretty cool!

Raess, who is playing Bill; Megan, who is playing Mrs. Sowerberry; Tahreem, who is in the chorus but stepped in for others to help us rehearse and I rehearsed in the Music room together (the studio was needed for the revision session).

The scene that Raees and I needed to rehearse was the same one that Frankie, Ben and I had rehearsed with Miss Bell, so I already had a rough idea of what it needed to look like. As we only had two characters that were needed in the scene and Tahreem hadn’t yet joined us, Megan read for Fagin for us while I read as Dodger until it came to Nancy's lines. None of the others were at the rehearsal we had with Miss Bell, so we started off with me explaining how we'd made the scene look then.

Throughout the hour, we continuously made adaptations to the scene with me changing my mind every two minutes (bet they loved me!) and eventually reached a final decision together. We tried our best to dramatise the scene as much as it deserves, while staying completely true to our characters.

Then it was time for the punch. I knew there was a lot of violence inflicted upon Nancy by Bill in the musical, and I had wondered how we were going to go about replicating it on stage... We decided to take it upon ourselves to figure that out. As a team, and with the help of YouTube, we helped each other figure out how we could make the punch look realistic to the audience – it took me a while to get the hang of it but I think I got there in the end!

Once we had rehearsed our scene a few times, we ran through Megan’s lines with her as the actor playing Mr. Sowerberry hadn't been in school all day. Though we didn’t act the scene out, Megan’s characterisation was clear through her voice – she’s fantastic!

With approximately ten minutes left to spare, Raees and I ran through our scene again. Tahreem, who had joined us as we ran through Megan’s lines with her, read for Dodger for us this time. I felt bad for the amount of times we had to get her to say the word “Bloomsbury," because we kept changing our minds on the staging, meaning we needed to start again from that point several million times!

When it turned 4 o’clock, we left the Music room, having reached final decisions on how we would stage the scene and make the punch look realistic. Just before we went to get the bus, Megan and I went to the Drama studio to let Mrs. Culkin know how we’d gotten on - she was excited about the fact that Raess and I had started to rehearse the punch!

Mrs. Culkin asked if we could show her what we'd worked on during the next rehearsal – I really hoped we'd remember what decisions we'd landed on!

Next up, one of my favourite rehearsals so far!

-Zahra♥


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