Six performances down, two to go.
This is the stage of the production when you’re spending a lot of time with your fellow cast and crew members. And I mean a lot. In the week before opening night, the rehearsals usually come fast and furious – a weekend of full runs, followed by a line run, tech, and dress. And then into production… You’re together most every day: at the theatre and then often afterwards, too, at the pub to work off the after-show adrenalin with that famous ‘just the one’.
This is also the time when about seventy per cent of what you say to each other is a line, or modified line, from the play. And the directors can be pleased that everyone finally knows not only their own lines, but everyone else’s too! And no wonder: after doing five performances in the space of forty-nine hours, we’ve pretty much been living and breathing nothing but the show. You can’t help but become a clique with it’s own private language of in-jokes and intuition for in-cues – we seem to be able to pick up the cue for an in-joke quicker than we can pick up our cues on stage!
Having fun with the lines really does help you become comfortably familiar with the show as a whole. The only thing you have to careful about is saying one of your modified joke lines on stage! Which I almost did once, but I don’t think anyone noticed 
And if you have to do an accent for a play, like we do, this is also the stage when you start speaking in your character’s accent during the course of your everyday life.
After Saturday’s performances, we spent the evening – and a reasonable chunk of the early morning – terrorising the other patrons of William K with teasers from the show: football and rugby songs, college antics, and mock insults in our Northern accents.
The bouncer was, however, pleased to see a group of people having such fun. Fortunately for us, we weren’t doing a Russian play 
