So here we are a couple of days on. It’s been a rainy week here in Chacombe which has been terrible news for the tennis fans among us. On the other hand it’s probably been quite conducive to our work ethic not being able to dash on down to the court in every five-minute break.

As we’ve said it’s very early days and as such, most of what we’ve been doing has been about creating a big bundle of characters to play with for the rest of the R&D. This has become how we work with the last couple of shows we’ve done and it will probably remain how we work for the foreseeable future. It’s hard to talk about this as a method without feeling like we’re blowing our own trumpets but it serves us very nicely as an ensemble company to create the peripheral characters in a play very early on in the process. It means that by the time we actually end up in a proper rehearsal room they feel like comfortable old shoes that you can slip straight back into. It’s also an invaluable tool for the writers as at the moment we only have maybe 15 pages of script and the exercises we do this week will inform their work for the next few months.

This is a big part of our company ethos, using the ensemble to build the show from the ground up, thus giving them a tremendous sense of ownership over the piece. We’re very happy with it, we hope you like it too.