SK8 ANGEL

Tuesday 2nd Week

I have no idea what day it is, what time it is, or what year we're in. I haven't seen daylight for over a week (ok, apart from trips to Tesco Metro for fuelling up on snacks. Every little helps). Life during rehearsals is always a mixture of school and Big Brother. You get up in the dark, long before your body can cope with being vertical, run for the bus, try and learn your script on the way in (this never works. Last thing at night is my best time for absorbing lines. Pity that's when I'm asleep with my face in my bowl of pasta). You emerge from the rehearsal room long after it's dark again, run for the bus, try and learn your script on the way home, collapse into bed, or more accurately, bowl of pasta, and get up again in the dark again and set off again. Probably with pasta still stuck to your face.

Every time you start a new job, your life revolves around a new set of people - a new director and stage manager, who basically own you for the next few months, and of course your fellow actors. You have to establish workable relationships fast. Luckily that means talking about ourselves, which is always fascinating, at least for the one holding forth. We spend a lot of time between scenes sitting around on saggy sofas sharing our life stories and (Brad has a carrot for an arm! Grant tunnelled his way out of Peterborough with a spoon! Danny runs on biofuels!). This is interspersed with the actual work of putting the play on stage, which is pretty much like a series of Big Brother tasks...

Day Three and Jeremy has asked Grant to do a cartwheel into an arrow spring whilst expressing grief and loss. If he fails, the cast will not be getting a coffee break for a week.
Day Five: Alys has been told by Jeremy to speak in second generation Irish London immigrant accent when playing Aunty Eileen.
Day Seven: Alice and Alys are discussing how to complete the challenge of guessing which of them Jeremy is calling for as both their names sound exactly the same. They have only thirty seconds to resolve the problem before one of them is summoned.

Rehearsals are all about trying things out, failing, getting back up - literally in Danny and Grant's case, as they send their boards sailing off into the projection screens or when available, the photographer's head - and trying again. That's how we find out what will tell the story and what gets in the way. You have to be open and playful. That means that even with a gripping, lyrical, intense play about traumatic events, there is plenty of laughter in the room. Brad dons a fake beard, I use a skate park as an ironing board. So despite the long days, and the Vitamin D deficiency, Sk8's more fun than a play about cancer and bereavement should be. As the ad man says, every little helps.

Alys (Actress playing Ethna & Eileen)