Week 1: 31 August – 3 September 2004 Peter Reynolds, the Creative Director of Stagework, kept this diary during the rehearsal period for The Crucible. Unanswered Prayer On a bright, sunny, late summer morning the white-painted cinder-block walls of the large and airy rehearsal room at the Birmingham Rep form a cool backdrop to the heated scene now being enacted there. A middle-aged man is on his knees next to a small simple wooden bed, covered in a grubby light brown coverlet. On the bed lies the still body of a young woman, her long hair flows over the pillow, her tiny feet extend over its foot. The man says nothing, mumbles, then holds his head in his hands, rocking gently forwards and backwards, unable to keep still. There is total silence in the room as he rises and paces about as if fearful of something, before returning to his prayer, emitting as he does so a half-surprised, suppressed, animal-like wail from his throat. It is the third day of rehearsal for Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and the first time in which the actors have begun to work on their feet. Pip Donaghy is rehearsing the play's opening scene. He plays the Rev Parris, a man who, at the start of the play, is desperately praying for the recovery of his inexplicably silent and comatose daughter Betty; he prays as if he would use the words like a kiss of life to literally breathe back warmth and vitality into this small and unresponsive body, but the stubborn resistance of the child to the adult pleading is total. | | |
