So Easter beckons and temperatures plummet. Again. Snow. Sleet. Biting winds. I realise I mention the weather in most of my blogs, but when in the countryside I tend to notice it much more and it can make so much difference to my cycle ride into rehearsal. (yesterday’s cycling involved a lot of swearing at the wind as it threatened on a few occasions to blow me off the path right onto the A49. I took it personally.) As well as going into tech, this week has been all about cars. At the beginning of rehearsals, we were all hit with a horrible cold; every morning we arrived to find yet another person coughing and spluttering, I don’t think anyone escaped. Nasty. And now, it seems our cars are catching car plague. My battery keeps dying, Sarah’s car has exhaust problems, Claire’s car hit the garage to get some bodywork replaced….. who will be next?

Anyway. Back to the show. We have just finished tech-ing this very morning and are about to do our first official dress rehearsal, a brilliant way to end before the Easter break. It has been a full on few days, but very exciting to see everything come together. Alex’s ideas for lighting are truly beautiful and Benet’s music fits the world so perfectly. The creative team and stage management have been working all hours (Alex even slept at Pentabus HQ the other night. Commitment indeed. Nothing to do with the fact he had been accidently locked out of his digs. Oops.) and James has pretty much emptied the charity shops of Hereford in order to put the finishing touches to the set and the seemingly hundreds of costumes. We had a bit of a costume parade on Monday, where we went through every costume and every costume change for every character. Matt and Sarah, who play Brian and Jane have it fairly easy as they are the only ones who do not change characters. The most Matt has to do is take off his jumper and Sarah has to wrestle with some slightly too tight rubber gloves, but this is nothing compared to what others have to do during the course of the play. Iain I think wins hands down for most costume changes, as he plays over 15 characters. I don’t think he has much of a chance to breathe during the show, as soon as he walks offstage, it’s off with one costume and on with another, sometimes having only seconds to change. The challenge for everyone has been not to bring the total frantic-ness of these offstage transformations onstage with them-otherwise all an audience will see is a slightly out of breath actor with half a coat on. They have to make it all look easy and effortless. And by the time we reach Shrewsbury next week, they will have it nailed.

Backstage is a whole other show, what with the costume changes, offstage animal noises, packing, unpacking and repacking the various boxes that become part of the fete. At one point, Titch and Sarah form a two person band, banging drums, blowing whistles, ringing bells to support the onstage action of a march in London. Experimenting with just how enthusiastically they need to bang those drums has been an important (and pretty funny) part of getting the balance right-there was one point where the offstage banging and whistling threatened to become just a bit too entertaining! Probably only for us though, not sure an audience would feel the same….

Cake has also featured heavily this week, particularly yesterday, where not only did we manage to comsume hot cross buns, chocolate and lemon cake and donuts, but Nick, the writer, had very kindly sent us a box of delicious Chelsea buns. Strangely we had room for them too. Oh, and some fish and chips. Well. It is hard work being in tech. Gotta keep those energy levels up for all those quick changes. Not sure what my excuse is, but anyway…..
There was also a brilliant article published in a local magazine about Brian Viner, where Pentabus get a good mention. Excellent.

At the end of the day today, everyone will head back to their various corners of the country for easter and we will all return on Tuesday, ready to throw ourselves back into a final day of rehearsals before our big move to Shrewsbury. Happy Easter!