And Tigers Mingle 10

Richard and Sir Geoffrey Mander

It has been a very busy couple of days running down to last night’s first performances.

Most of Friday morning – our last concentrated time to actually rehearse in the house - was given over to filming a short piece for BBC Midlands Today. We want to make sure that we sell as many tickets as possible, so it was seen as an important thing to do. As it turned out, the piece was centred around the story of the two Indian princesses and was interesting in itself – and probably good for the whole “Whose Story” project. However, it was less useful to us, it didn’t make much sense of what we were doing and didn’t give much of a plug for the performances.

Friday evening was the time for our first public dress – we had about 8 people along and it gave us a good dry run at preparing the house, after the visitors had gone, for the performances.

Luckily, we were joined on Friday by Deb Justice – who is the Administrator at BCT, but also a good and experienced stage manager. She has slotted in alongside of us providing great discreet support and finding her way around this maze of a house in no time.

The dress rehearsal went well, but threw up a few problems that we needed to address before the performances.

Saturday had its own challenges. To fit in a final run in situ on Saturday was difficult as there were tours going around the house from 10 in the morning. We scheduled a run in between these tours for 11. In practice what that meant was, we were chasing people through the spaces and we had another tour chasing us. In the individual rooms, this wasn’t so much of a problem, the difficulties came when we were in the great parlour.

The great parlour and particularly the balcony is a cross roads of the house, so all through this section we had people crossing through and amongst what we were doing. When we have been rehearsing in the malthouse, we were able to explain what was going on, here, as we were running to time and as for real, so we had no such luxury. So we had people wandering and wondering through the performance.

After the run, we had to go else where to rehearse, as the malthouse had become the overflow tearoom for the weekend. In some ways it was good to go off site, as it all felt a little calmer down at the Newhampton Arts Centre.

At 4 we returned to the house and Deb and I were like cats on hot bricks waiting for the moment when we could get into the house after the last tour and start setting.

Once we were underway, the tours were running back to back and for the next three hours, we didn’t really stop. Sonia and Richard did well, adapting to the different groups and keeping their energy levels high.

There were two moments that people really seemed to enjoy. The section in the great hall, which focuses on childhood, and ends with three white feathers drifting down from the balcony to the floor of the great hall – in complete silence. And then the very end, where everyone gets up and is encouraged to dance the Charleston and play billiards. It works really well – and everyone seems really keen to get up and have a go. A highlight of that bit for me was seeing Kate Organ, the Chair of our board getting those knees swinging!