Section 10 of 14 · The work of getting it right

Rehearsals

The rehearsal record: actors at work, scenes taking shape, and the making-of evidence across every department as the production came together.

In this section

Write-ups on how scenes developed1 item →

Rehearsal Video Recordings7 items →

Write-ups on how scenes developed

1 item · write-up →

noteRehearsal

Write Up

Our first draft was basically Rome with a night market painted on. We read it through once and most of us were checking our phones by Scene 3. Scene 4 took the longest to fix. The original version had the conspirators just confront Jalil and it looked like a canteen fight. Someone pointed out that hawkers don't stab people, they stop paying rent, and we rebuilt the whole scene around that. The loan sharks came in as the ones who actually do the violence, so the conspirators keep their hands clean. Jalil's "choke me with my own contributions" line went in that same session. We later split the scene in two so the first, friendly rent collection sets up the second. Marco's speech got rewritten more than anything else. We tried keeping "honourable" seven times like Shakespeare and it died around the fourth. Now it's twice, and the second one is "capable". Moving the forum to a press conference helped because the journalist can ask how the "overthrow" happened, which is what exposes the lie. We argued about whether Marco is being calculating. We decided no. The cynical version made the ending feel cheap and none of us liked it. Language was a running problem. Draft one was in proper English. Nobody talks like that at a pasar malam so we let the cast speak how they'd actually speak, and the eavesdropping in Scene 1 and the betrayal in Scene 4 suddenly sounded like real conversations. Some things we found by accident. The shadow scenes after 3 and 5 started as a way to cover a costume change. The thunder has to run a second early or it lands after the line. Bao's sampan speech used to be addressed to the police; we turned him to the audience with Cai nodding beside him and that gave us the closing image.