Assistant Director on Mrs Klein, Oliver Baird, gives us a week by week update about progress in the rehersal room.

Week Two

Working on a play means largely working through a play. This week we continue to work through the scenes very slowly, answering questions both abstract and practical, and trying out moves and variations on the delivery of lines, establishing the intentions and motivations of the characters. Thea is rigorous in asking the actors to try new approaches to a line or scene, reminding them of aspects of the given circumstances that might help them, suggesting reasons for why certain events or attitudes occur. The actors too are working hard to explore their roles, aware that if everything is fixed too early on then it can restrict the performance later on.  There is a lot of detective work, and I am often busy researching facts that are unknown or unclear - does Melitta Schmideberg appear in The Psycho-analysis of Children? Was it common knowledge that Klein analysed her own children? How much is the cab fare in modern currency? Any questions about the text itself, I note down and send to Nicholas Wright, who is extraordinarily quick and helpful in his replies.

I have never seen a stage management team work so fast. Someone - anyone - just has to mention that they might quite like to try a small table here, or a vanity case there, and within what seems like seconds Alice, our Deputy Stage Manager who runs the rehearsal room, has relayed this request to Laura, our Assistant Stage Manager, who locates the rehearsal prop in the store and brings it to the rehearsal room. It is enormously helpful as it means we can try out ideas then and there, rather than simply ponder the possibilities.

Another issue that has come up is that of accents. The characters in the play are all speaking German to each other, but it is written in English. Because German to a German person would sound like English to an English person, i.e. native, the first instinct was for everyone to have English accents. However, Clare observed a somewhat teutonic phrasing and choice of words in Melanie Klein’s dialogue, and Nick Wright did tell us that when he was writing it he did hear a slight accent in his head. Because of this, we are trying out accents, with Jan Haydn Rowles working closely with the cast to develop them accurately. All the accents will be light in the end, and not intrusive - what Nick called ‘the ghost of a German accent’ - but Jan has asked them to be quite strong with them initially, to bed them in the brain, and then pull back later. She and Thea have come up with clever ideas of how the accents can be subtly modified for each character to give a sense of their history - Paula has only just come from Berlin, for example, whereas the other two have been in English for eight years or so. The effect of using the subtle accents opens up a world of characterization, especially for Paula and Melanie, as it is not just the sounds that change, but the phrasing of the lines and it fits beautifully with the text. Jan will be monitoring the actors over the rehearsal period. Some of the exercises she gives to the actors to get the German sound right are ridiculously catchy - Nicola has become a particular fan of the phrase ‘hot potato’...

We have a photographer in one day, to take rehearsal shots for publicity. The actors all seem very used to it, but I always find it a bit odd - it’s astonishing how protected a rehearsal room can feel, after all it’s a space in which experimentation has to take place without fear or self-consciousness - so when someone comes in to document it, it makes whatever happens feel more like a performance, despite it being only the second week.

On Friday we have a particular treat. Dr David Taylor, a Kleinian psychoanalyst, comes in to talk to us and answer our questions. He is immensely knowledgeable, and has the ability to explain complicated ideas simply and patiently. He knows a lot about the real people the play is based on, and knows many people who met them, which helps us no end. He identifies the moment the play took place, 1934, as being absolutely pivotal in the lives and professional careers of all three women, and that while Melanie, mourning her son, moved from great ebullience to what he called ‘a reserved nobility’, and that Melitta was just starting to display the paranoia and overwhelming hatred of her mother that would dominate the rest of her life. From Dr Taylor we also get to understand why Klein is not better known by the general public, but is still read widely and admiringly by psychoanalysts and psychologists.

Week One

The first day of rehearsals always has that feeling of a first day at a new school - that mixture of great excitement and slight trepidation faces both familiar and new. We all gather, cast and crew, in the Almeida’s rehearsal room in Islington, where we are welcomed to the theatre by artistic director Michael Attenborough and almost all the theatre staff. It is a wonderful reminder that although there will only be a small number of people in the rehearsal room day-to-day, there is a large team of dedicated people outside also working to make the play a success - from box office to marketing, development to accounts - and since our paths may not always cross, it’s lovely to gather everyone together at least once.

Michael tells us how excited he is to be putting on the play, how perfect it is for the Almeida, a space that responds well to the combination of what he calls ‘the epic and the intimate’. It is a play set 1934 in one room with a small cast, but the ideas and emotions are universal and unfold on a grand scale. Thea Sharrock, the director, then says a few words about how she came to discover the play through her friend and colleague Peter Gill, who had directed the original production at the National Theatre twenty-one years ago, and enthuses about the cast and crew that have come together to put it on.

Then Tim Hatley, the designer, takes us all through the model box, a scale model meticulously crafted and painted to represent the finished set. The stage will be raked (sloping), which is something we cannot recreate in the rehearsal room, but our stage management team can create a scale representation of the set using rehearsal furniture, and coloured tape on the floor to mark the boundaries. Unusually, this is already the case - the rehearsal room from day one has a complete mock-up of the set, including all furniture and props, which is hugely impressive. My experience of most rehearsal rooms is starting with an empty room, and gradually adding props as they are sourced. But this is a very prop heavy play - there are countless objects specified in the script, from wine glasses, sherry glasses, typewriters, proofs, notebooks, tea things, poppy-seed cake, letters, salami, four sets of keys, and many more - so it is hugely helpful to the actors to get used to dealing with them from the beginning.

After this, all the Almeida staff leave, and the remaining cast and crew sit round a table for the read-through. We are lucky enough to have Nicholas Wright, the author, with us, and he is listening out particularly for the small changes he has made to the script prior to rehearsal. And so the actors read, and it comes in at a rather encouraging 90 minutes. This will naturally grow during rehearsals as actors add movement and action, but it highlights how beautifully tight the script is - there is not a word wasted.

After the reading, we start talking about the play - from the small details such as how to pronounce names and place-names (’Ruzomberok’, ‘Vago’, ‘Paula’ - the latter having the German pronunciation ‘Pow-la’, which takes everyone a few days to remember to use), to the big ideas, such as the history of psychoanalysis and Melanie Klein’s role within it. One of the main points arising in rehearsal is that all three characters - Melanie Klein, Melitta Schmideberg, and Paula Heimann - were real people, and almost all the events in the play happened in real life, if not always quite at the same moment in time. All the actors, Clare Higgins, Kate Ashfield, and Nicola Walker, feel some responsibility to those people, and we have a stack of books in the room that everyone refers to help them discover more about the characters. In addition, we talk about their work, and some of the braver souls in the room have attempted to read Klein’s original papers on child psychoanalysis. Everyone finds them hard-going, filled as they are with very specific technical language and dense argument, and while there are some good overviews (all of us eagerly reach for the volume entitled Melanie Klein for Beginners) to give us a broad idea, we are looking at asking some professional Kleinian analysts to come to talk to us in rehearsal. To start us off though, I am asked to précis Klein’s short paper On Criminality as it is specifically mentioned in the play.

The questions continue as we work through the play on its feet, scripts in hand, during the next few days. Thea reiterates how important it is to keep asking questions all through the rehearsal process, and that there is no question too big or two small. As a result, the rehearsals have a very collaborative feel. Thea also reminds the actors that although they are dealing with complicated ideas and issues, they must remember the basic facts - that Melanie Klein has a son who has just died, and whose funeral she is missing - so as never to lose sight of the narrative. But just going through the lines in situ, reading aloud the stage directions, opens up fascinating observations about the characters. Clare, for example, notes that none of them are embarrassed by big emotions - the crying, the silences, and the anger - as analysts it’s part of their job. But a small realization like this can hugely affect the way the characters relate to each other, and the actors play the scenes. Other times, the observations are more prosaic but just as essential - such as establishing exactly where the offstage front door is.