The Wounded Performance

Wednesday 31^st October 

After Snow Queen rehearsal, Ruth drove Alex N. and I to see a performance of The Wounded, the ‘wounded soldier story with a twist’ we’d been to see during the rehearsal process.

This visit created a great deal of mixed emotions for me: nostalgia, irritation, sadness, nerves, fascination and awe.
The play was put on in the activity hall of the local Territorial Army centre, although I was in the Navy and not the Army, all MOD installations are carbon copies of each other so from the minute we passed the Corporal guarding the gate I found myself going into ‘sailor mode’, my posture and behaviour changed and I had to stop myself from standing to attention and saluting every time a ranking Officer or NCO walked past.

We selected our seats on the stage right side of the staging area as recommended by a member of the production staff. Due to being set up in the activity hall of the base, the performance area had been set up on a level with most of the audience in a ‘Thrust stage’ format, creating a great sense of intimacy to the performance.
The start of the show created even more nostalgia seeing the first two characters on stage fully kitted up in the typical squaddie patrol gear that is so familiar to me. The script and characterization were so real that I started to become irritated with the behaviour of the characters and how they got into trouble as it reminded me so much of certain ‘characters’ in my own Navy Training Division who through similar behaviour were always getting us into trouble.

All the way through the performance I found myself utterly fascinated and in awe of the ingenuity of the production. The simple stage, lighting and sound set up were used to maximum effect, creating the perfect ambience for each scene.
Right down to pumping the smell of disinfectant into the hall at the start of the hospital scenes.
Turning over the hospital beds to create WWI trenches.
The use of projection and sounds to create the nightmares and hallucinations of the ‘Shell-shocked’/PTSD suffering patients.
Great acting/characterization and costumes turning a relatively small cast of five actors into multiple different people, to a point that it took me about ¾ of the show to realise that there were actually so few actors.

All in all the show was very good, entertaining even if it did dig up a few un-expected emotions from me, (but isn’t that the point?), interesting from a technical point of view and utterly fascinating from an artistic/engineering point of view.

Production

Tuesday 16^th October 

In the morning we visited The Rep. Theatre at St. George’s Court (SGC) to sit in on rehearsals for ‘The Wounded’, (a war story with a twist).

Ruth showed us around the rehearsal space, it was fascinating to see how this process works at the top level of the business and I appreciated how very organised everything was.
The stage area had been set out exactly to the size and shape of the space being used at the TA Centre in Kings Heath where the show will be performed. All the props and set were set out in an organised fashion and to as close a standard as will be used in the performance.

It was then that I was re-introduced to an old friend (and sometimes enemy) of mine: the LA85 assault rifle, (aka the SA80), the standard issue British Armed Forces rifle, albeit in air-soft replica form and therefore about a third of its real weight.

We also noticed that posted around the room on the walls were a series of diagrams, Ruth explained that these were character bios that the cast had drawn up during the first rehearsals, describing certain aspects of their characters that weren’t necessarily brought up during the actual show but helped to add to characterisation and make more realistic ‘3D’ people on stage.

We then moved on to the stage management office to speak to Ruth about course work and our jobs on Snow Queen, whilst the Alex’s took turns sitting in on The Wounded rehearsal session.
Ruth explained how I should go about the SQ paperwork, how ‘The Book’ should be set out, how rehearsal notes should look etc. She then provided me with copies of examples from previous Rep Shows. That will be a great help to me to get it all set out straight.
By the time midday rolled around I hadn’t had an opportunity to sit in on The Wounded but Alex N. and I had to leave to get over to MB campus for the SQ rehearsal that afternoon.

Ref. - The Wounded at The Rep. :
http://www.birmingham-rep.co.uk/event/wounded/