Time to introduce the Heaven Burns team…

There they are! From left to right, Kirsty Eila McIntyre (Isobel), Susanna Macdonald-Mulvihill (Christian), Flavia D’Avila (movement director), Daniel Hird (understudy) and Andrew Findlater (John).

I’m so happy that these guys could all be involved. Kirsty, Susanna and Andrew were in the rehearsed reading back in 2015 and they were always going to have first refusal on their roles if the opportunity to stage the play ever arose. Dan is stepping in to cover a performance before he heads off to drama school. And Flavia…

If you know my work, chances are you’re also familiar with Flav. Artistic Director of Fronteiras Theatre Lab, director of the beautiful and award-winning show La Nina Barro, We met during our undergrad at QMU, the hell in whose flames our bond was forged, and we’ve been working together in various capacities ever since. She always encourages me to up my game and hold my nerve, and if I could work with her on every damn thing I ever do, I would.

This particular iteration of our working relationship, with me directing and Flavia as movement director, is new to us. At first glance, Heaven Burns probably doesn’t look like the kind of play that requires a movement director – but that’s exactly why I want one. It’s a dense, texty script that could easily slip into inert staging, so Flav’s job is to help me keep it alive and in the actors’ bodies as well as their brains. She’ll also be helping me to solve the problem of the play’s violent moments, finding a way to make them read effectively in a small space.

Last Monday I handed the cast over to Flavia for a workshop to introduce them to her way of working. We only had four hours together so it was a short, intensive spurt of activity, and I loved watching it. Although Flav and I ostensibly take very different approaches to our work – I’m all about the text, she’s all about the body – we share a lot of fundamental values. We both spend a lot of time at the beginning of our respective processes building up trust and rapport, encouraging actors to work on instinct and bond as a group, and we both find that this speeds up the later stages of the rehearsal process exponentially.

Like me, Flavia makes extensive use of music in her work. Having been in her rehearsal rooms on a few occasions, I’m always intrigued by the pieces she selects for her playlists as she guides the actors through various emotional states. They’re seldom the same songs I would have chosen, they’re often very different in tone and feel, but I can always see where she’s coming from and it’s a constant reminder of how different our cultural influences have been.

The actors had each been asked to bring in an object that they felt represented their character in some way. I love this exercise. It seems to make people so nervous because they know their choice makes a clear statement about how they view the character, and that’s a nerve-wracking thing to do at the beginning of the process – particularly when you’ve got the writer in the room and you’re worried that you might reveal that you’ve completely misread things. But honestly, I’ve yet to see anyone get it “wrong” – for me as a writer, what’s interesting is to find out how the actor sees the character, where and to what they connect, and to be reminded that I’m no longer the exclusive holder of knowledge about these fictional people. By the time we do this exercise, the characters are out and living in other people’s heads, being reshaped by someone else’s life experience, they’re not solely or wholly mine any more. It’s a useful exercise in humility at the best of times, but particularly when I’m directing my own writing.

I won’t share exactly who brought what and why, since I didn’t ask the cast if I could and I would jeopardise their trust if they thought that anything they say in the rehearsal room might end up here. What I will say is that they all made intelligent, insightful choices, and gave themselves over freely to the exercises they did with their own objects and each other’s.

Much of the workshop was spent exploring and responding to objects and the actors’ bodies, creating and recreating sequences of actions and finding ways to link them together and make them correspond. It’s so simple and beautiful. Nothing is choreographed, everything is generated by the actors – yet due to the combination of their instincts, the music and their prior knowledge of the text, I started catching glimpses of the characters and the dynamics between them. It’s exciting, that moment. That’s when it all starts to feel very real, and when I begin to feel certain that the show’s physical language can be found, not imposed.

And that, when it comes down to it, is why Flav and I work so well together. Whatever the differences in our approaches, we both believe in the actor as an artist in their own right, a contributor to the creative process rather than just a tool by which a director’s vision can be realised. We care about the process being collaborative and exploratory, rather than hierarchical. I’m excited about the work we’ll do over the next two workshops and what we’ll find during rehearsals in July. Finding the right collaborators makes the task of theatremaking far, far more rewarding and enjoyable.