'Why have I got myself into this?'

Paul Arendt witnesses the inspired mess of the Old Vic's 24 Hour Plays, where writing, rehearsal and performance are crammed into one day

Wednesday June 22, 2005
The Guardian

10.15pm, Saturday The actress Nina Sosanya is leaning out of a top floor window, smoking a cigarette and watching the crowd. Nick Moran is telling an anecdote about Noel Gallagher and tugging at his enormous, ginger mutton-chops. Greg Wise and Jonathan Cake gossip in the corridor. We are on the top floor of the Old Vic theatre, and the room is humming with talent: veteran stage players and newly minted film stars, directors, writers and producers. You could cast a trilogy of blockbusters from this group and still have change left over for a mini-series. In just under 22 hours, they will be performing six new plays to an audience paying up to £500 a ticket. As Sosanya tartly remarks: "They all look like they're cacking themselves."

11pm We sit in a circle. Every actor has brought a prop to inspire the writers. Saffron Burrows has a guitar that she can't play. Gael García Bernal, a small hairy ball of Tiggerish energy, has brought a portable television: Mexico play Brazil on Sunday night, and he wants to watch the match on stage. Joseph Fiennes has forgotten to bring a prop and offers his half-eaten Burger King meal instead. He looks bewildered by the whole process.
The 24 Hour Plays were first staged in New York 10 years ago. Since then they have grown into a theatrical event that crosses continents, trailing exhaustion in its wake. The US producers decamp from city to city, from Broadway houses to high schools, always sticking to the same tightly structured formula. Now they work the room, taking Polaroids and handing out call sheets.

Kevin Spacey, the artistic director of the Old Vic, rallies his troops. "For those of you have never done this before, I am not here to give you any sense of comfort or ease," he says, grinning. "An event like this doesn't really happen unless there's a little blood on the floor."

He's immediately proved right: producer Kurt Gardner calmly informs the company that they won't necessarily get to run their plays through on the main stage before curtain-up. Eyes widen around the room. Fiennes puts his head in his hands.

1am, Sunday The actors have been packed off to bed, and the production moves to a nearby hotel. Confined to their rooms, the writers sweat over their laptops, while downstairs the producers kill time, drop names and swap war stories: the film star who insisted on going to hospital just three hours before the show began; Brian Cox screaming blue murder backstage - "they've given me fucking speeches!" - and refusing to go on without a script; the audience booing Neil LaBute's play.

I wonder how they manage on so little rest. "I've found it good training for having children," says Tina Fallon, one of the company's founding members. "You learn how to put yourself to sleep when you get the chance."

1.30am One of the playwrights, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, calls down to the conference room, requesting a dictionary. There isn't one to hand. A few moments later she calls again. Would it be possible to locate the section dealing with the letter B?

2am The night wears on. I take a trip around the hotel to speak to the writers. For all the luxurious surroundings, it feels like making the rounds at an asylum. There is a lot of nervous laughter. Samuel Adamson, who will eventually produce one of the night's most successful shows, has run into difficulties.

"I can't stand the clockwatching, and it's amazing how quickly the time is going. It's really not fun at all. It's very stressful, and I don't like it."

Adamson's play - just an idea at this stage - is called Petronella. It concerns two women who share the same unusual name, and the man who has been sleeping with both of them. Photographs of his chosen cast - Fiennes, Jemma Redgrave and Hermione Norris - stare down from the wall. "I keep thinking they should be inspiring me but in fact, they're just terrifying me."

3.30am Enda Walsh is writing about social climbing. "It's my feelings of inadequacy in seeing all these famous people," he sighs. Walsh's play, Conservatory, is set in a Reigate drawing room, where a group of friends discuss efficient vacuum cleaning, National Trust membership and the quality of Little Chef chips with evangelical fervour.

A few doors down, Roy Williams is making a titanic effort to ignore the minibar. He's working on a sad little comedy about a convalescent pop star, to be played by Nick Moran. The piece appears to be loosely based on Brian Harvey, the former East 17 star.

8am It's already hot. Downstairs at the Old Vic, stage management are handing out bottles of water, but we only have eyes for the coffee. The actors arrive, freshly slept and showered, to receive their assignments. Next to the haggard producers, they look as crisp as a row of lettuces. Jimmy Nesbitt quietly admits that he hasn't stepped on to a stage for 11 years. He appears to be vibrating very slightly, like a tuning fork.

9am Rehearsals begin. To see the actors in this vulnerable state, stumbling over lines and tentatively sketching ideas, feels oddly voyeuristic. Miriam Margolyes, playing the blousy mum in Willliams' play, talks ferociously, making each point as if it were the final sally of a long dispute. In the next room, Michael Sheen is already jumping out of his chair, testing poses and tuning jokes. Everyone swears like mad.

11am Little by little, themes and structures begin to emerge. The peculiar mix of pragmatism and mysticism by which plays are born - the constant doubling back, tweaking and blocking - is compressed from four weeks into a single day. It's like time-lapse photography, flowers zooming towards the light.

12.30pm The assistants have been run ragged locating obscure props for their directors. Champagne flutes, sun loungers, a karaoke machine, a shotgun - all tricky items to obtain on a Sunday afternoon. Spacey presides over a tense production meeting. The running order must be thrashed out. Two of the plays, Conservatory and Steve Waters' The Gates, are suburban horror stories, and he wants them to bookend the evening. But there are practical difficulties. If Bernal is to catch his football match, his show must be placed to avoid half-time. The final moments of Conservatory require a crowd of extras - the entire cast, in other words - and thus Walsh has guaranteed himself the final slot. "Cheeky fucker," a producer mutters.

3pm Outside, the temperature is nudging 33C. In the erratically air-conditioned rehearsal rooms, the work is hotting up. Someone is teaching Saffron Burrows to play the guitar via a telephone. She and Bernal are playing glamorous honeymooners in David Nicholls' After Sun, a sweet, very funny poolside vignette, like a miniature Private Lives. The actors swap obscenities in Spanish. Their director, Josie Rourke, exhorts them to be dirtier. In another room, Brooke Shields sums up the mood of the actors: "You're thinking, why am I here? Why have I got myself into this? I'm never going to remember my lines."

4pm Sleep deprivation is taking its toll. My notes for this period are barely coherent. "Jemma Redgrave has beautiful feet," reads one. Next to it, the word "logorrhoea" is underlined twice, but I have no idea to whom it refers.

5pm Each company gets an hour to work on the stage, and another 20 minutes for technical rehearsals. After the hairdryer heat of outdoors, the auditorium is wonderfully cool and calm. Vaughan Williams plays gently on the Tannoy. Efficient-looking women wearing headsets bustle back and forth. Everywhere you look, there are actors, clutching their colour-coded scripts and murmuring their lines like rosaries.

The company for Tell Me the Truth About Love, by Lenkiewicz, are running through their moves. It has the feel of a tone poem; a quartet of misfits in a late-night diner, tying themselves in knots with language. Spacey is prowling the stalls, giggling at the jokes.

8pm Curtain up. The audience is a strange mix: friends of the cast, die-hard theatre hounds, the famous and the fabulously wealthy. Kate Pakenham, who runs the theatre's Old Vic New Voices programme, is feeling optimistic. Tonight's show will raise £65,000, all of which will go towards discovering and nurturing new writers. It's a toss-up as to whether there is greater star power in the seats or on the stage. Stephen Fry has been drafted in to introduce the plays. "You can almost smell the vomit backstage," he twinkles.

The show itself is halting, messy, and thrilling. Several actors fluff their lines or dry up completely, earning themselves enthusiastic applause. Suddenly, there is a whoop from offstage. Mexico has scored.

10.40pm The theatre has been transformed into a five-storey stack of celebration. The VIP lounge is wall- to-wall with exhausted, sweltering, very happy glitterati. I know that I will never, ever, get invited to a party like this again, but it has been an awfully long day. Time for bed


http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,,1511713,00.html

             
   Rufus and Ginny after the Plays                        Rufus with Alison and Kath  (thanks, Alison!)
                                                                            

                            
   Rufus and Sir Ian McKellen in the VIP              cast photo, again courtesy of Ukelelehip              
    Lounge - photo coutesy of Ukelelehip