The Great Acting Blog: “Get It Up, Get It On, Get It Out To The Audience”

The Great Acting Blog: “Get It Up, Get It On, Get It Out To The Audience”

I spoke to Esme Hicks, assistant director at the Jermyn Street Theatre, about their forthcoming production of The Potsdam Quartet.

TGAB: Tell us some general background on the play and what you’re doing….

ESME HICKS: It’s set in July 1945 at the Potsdam Conference, its just before the UK elections, where Churchill loses to Atlee. Truman, Stalin, Churchill and Atlee are all there. These musicians we’re watching are based on the Greener quartet, who were the most famous quartet of their time, and who formed at the Royal Academy Of Music and when the war hit, they had to join the RAF. The RAF had it’s own orchestra with many famous musicians within it. They play for soldiers and entertaining the troops and things like that.  So this is an afternoon based on them, they’re in the ante room at the conference in Potsdam, literally down the hall from the meeting. We see them when they’ve just come back from playing for them, they have mixed opinions about how well it went and there’s a lot of tension in the relationship and it sort of unravels over the course of the play, and the situation there in is that they’re not allowed to leave the room. There’s a lot of reasons for them to get quite angsty with each other and over the course of the play we discover an issue with one of the players which brings into question the future of the quartet. One of them wants to bring down the quartet anyway because he’s sick of it, and for one of the others his whole life is the quartet, so all these things come to fruition over the course of the play.

TGAB: So, it’s real people that the characters are based on?

EH: It’s based on a real quartet, the Greener Quartet, the main guy, Sidney Greener was very determined and drove them on. It’s really unusual for a string quartet to stay together for so long in real life, they were together for 33 years, and I spoke to some friends who’ve been in a quartet and they said staying together for two years is impressive. It was a sort of four man marriage in a way, and two of them are in a homosexual relationship, so it’s not so simple because they always live together. The real quartet, once they graduated from the Royal Academy Of Music went to Brighton and stayed in three train carriages, they slept in two and rehearsed in one, and rehearsed for 12 to 14 hours each day. That’s how dedicated they were. So pretty incredible characters, very interesting for the actors.

TGAB: From the actors point of view, are they having to do research to re-create certain aspects of the real people or have you not gone down that road?

EH: We’ve done workshops for simple things like how to hold instruments which looks a lot more complicated than it might appear, because we’re going to attract musicians as well and lots of experts in their fields, so we need the actors to hold the instruments right and treat them right and manage them and put them away and everything. Our in house dramturg has come in and given us some talks. But we’ve always worked from the text, we’ve not been overly concerned with The Greener Quartet, it’s nice to know about them but it’s a fictional encounter and it’s everything from the material, beasuse as with any play, you can’t just add stuff that isn’t there. So it’s a good reference point but that’s mainly what it is.

TGAB: So you’re just trying to create out of the imaginary world of the text…rather than trying to re-create some of the real events?

EH: Definitely, yeah. I’m the assistant director and obviously I’m with the director as well, and the number one rule of the director is to always come from the text. You can spot it a million miles away when you begin to fabricate things outside the text and put it on. The thing is you always go back to the text and you wrestle with it. If the actors say they don’t get this bit, then they play with it a bit more, when there’s an obstacle, let’s not run away from it, let’s tackle it and that’s when you find something even better.

TGAB: Have you been improvising around the text or has that been ruled out as well?

EH: We haven’t improvised, we’ve stuck to the structure of the script, because they’re based on these real people, but obviously it’s fictional as well to create this tense afternoon. Also we’ve only had three weeks, that’s quite a short amount of time, if we had longer I’m sure we would have. You’ve got to be realistic.

TGAB: You’ve got to stick to the essentials and get the play up.

EH: Yeah, get it up, get it on, get it out to the audience.

 

The Potsdam Quartet runs at the Jermyn Street Theatre from the 29th October to the 23rd of November. They’re currently fundraising via Kickstarter, you can check-out the campaign here.

 

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