For a few hours the bungalow had been beautiful...

Fire in the rehearsal room today. Metaphorically that is. In addition to the daily combustion created by our indefatigable company, today saw the arrival of flaming Lawrence Evans, Theatre Centre Associate Artist, who brought a certain magic to bear on the destruction of the Carters' bungalow. Anyone experienced in the ways of UK health and safety will know that real fire isn't an option for an open stage touring show. (Whereas in most other countries, avant-garde theatre nonchalantly exposes its audiences to naked flame regardless.) From such restrictions creativity can flow, however, and so look out for that moment when it arrives in the show. I shall say no more.

Naked Natives

'Can we go from Naked Natives?' asks Ros. (This is a line from the girls at Maia's school, not a costume decision, in case anyone's worrying...) We seeem to have been rehearsing these schoolgirls for years.

In fact we have. The first sketches of this chorus moment came in Clerkenwell in 2004 with the Drama Centre students. Then more last May in the workshop week. And here we are again, finding more detail every time. 'Melanie's the ringleader', observes Ros, to general agreement. 'She's the one with secret copies of Heat magazine under the bed every night.' 'Just like me' observes Willie, who takes to the role with relish (so much so that he's a little blurred above). Sam meanwhile is doing a magnificent yellow-fever death just out of shot. And within moments, all these schoolgirls will be shanty-singing dockers (assuming they can get their skirts off rapidly enough). The magic of the emsemble.

A footnote on rehearsal periods. I saw a terrific piece in the London International Mime Festival last Thursday which had also beeen developed over more than two years. It had also had twenty-one weeks of rehearsal, fourteen on the constructed set. Just as well we've got such a tremendous team on this show to create this epic journey in just five weeks (which for English children's theatre, however, is positively sybaritic - as Miss Minton might say). And as you can see from Nicci's entry below amazing progress is being made.

John points out to me that one of the lines I've written will almost inevitably come out as 'catshit on your tongue', which justifies a minor adjustment. Sam and Donnaleigh are being heroic about a particularly convoluted section of text where the doubling of the crows (detectives Trapwood and Low) and the twins reaches its peak. And we resolve an ambiguous moment when it had appeared that the Professor was trying to remove Miss Minton's corset during their first cup of coffee together. All I'd intended was that he offered (and was prevented) from calling her by her first name. No wonder Willie and Julie thought the scene implausibly racy...

Patience and a good ear

A piece I've written for the programme about adapting the book.

Patience and a good ear. They are the things Maia needs if she is to write down the songs she hears in the Amazon. They are also what I’ve needed over the years I have been writing this play.

When I have told people I am adapting Journey to the River Sea, the response from people who have read the book has been to tell me how much they loved it. Which is good – and not so good. Good, because it shows how many people think as I do, that Eva Ibbotson has written a wonderful book. Not so good, because it makes the job of adapting it even more daunting. There are an infinite number of ways to disappoint when you change something which people love as it is.

And adapting is change. Take the length of the play, for example. If you simply read the book out loud it would take many hours. The play will last closer to two hours, so some (most!) of the words have to go. As soon as I start to make decisions about what stays and what goes, there is the risk that we lose something which another reader really likes. There is no way to avoid that, particularly as I want this to be a play which can be enjoyed by people who have not read the book as well. (Although I’ll be thrilled if we inspire people to read it as a result.)

One difference between coming to a play and reading a book is what your imagination has to do. When you’re reading (or being read to) the pictures are ones you create in your head. That’s why people can have strong feelings about what actors look like in a story they love. When I talked to Ros, the director, we both wanted to make sure our audiences got to use their imagination as well. That gave me the freedom to create places by what the characters say and do. There are some early scenes set on a boat for example – I hope you will ‘see’ that boat where Maia and Clovis meet for the first time as vividly as you would if you were reading about it.

This way of telling stories goes back to the very beginnings of theatre. In film and television we ‘cut’ from one location to another mechanically – two events which did not happen in the same time and place can be recorded separately and pasted together. On stage, we will also be switching rapidly from one place to another – and at some points there may be two places on stage (and in your imagination) at the same time.

What I have tried to do when writing the play is to be true to the spirit of the book. I feel there is something special about the ideas and emotions and ‘feel’ of the book. I have tried to be faithful to that, rather than try and fit in every detail. But every change I have made has been done with the aim of giving our audience an experience as rich and funny and thrilling as the book is. Like Eva Ibbotson I was fascinated by the image of an opera house in the jungle – a huge theatre built deep inside the Amazon rainforest. The contrasts in that image are some of those I have explored in writing the play.

I travelled to the Amazon to find out more about the world Maia would have known. The people who paid for the opera house to be built were incredibly rich, but that wealth came from the work of people who were paid miserably if at all, and treated in appalling ways. The opera which was seen in that theatre, with its extravagant scenery, vast orchestra, and huge voiced singers is in one sense the opposite of all that is ‘natural’: the spontaneous living world of the rainforest untouched by technology. I walked through the rainforest and I sat in that theatre and both experiences were extraordinary. I hope the play manages to give you a sense of both worlds.

Look out too for how we decided to tell the story of what happened before Maia came to the Amazon. This is one of the ‘new’ elements – something which happens in the play which does not happen in the book. I knew I wanted to include the story of the ‘curse’ on the place the Carters live, but it would have taken a long time to act out the events, and meant introducing new characters who never had anything to do with Maia. My solution came from what I discovered about how people in the Amazon tell stories. I researched the rhythms and styles of traditional storytelling there and thought about what kind of language I should use to write that section. In the same way as it felt right to make the Goodleys an opera company in the play, and bring the peculiar wonders of opera on stage in the adaptation, I wanted to give a sense of another type of theatre, one which has its roots in Amazon life. I hope that comes across in the writing and the design and staging of that part of our story.

In the end, however, what I want is for you to go on a journey with these wonderful people which is as fulfilling as the journey you take with Eva Ibbotson’s book. It’s a different route to the same place, that’s all.

Will I have to stop being your little boy?

One week in and work is non-stop. I arrive this afternoon to find on one side of the rehearsal room Matthew working with John on Clovis's opera scene. For those of you who don't remember that from the book, that's another change. Little Lord Fauntleroy is now an opera performed by the Goodley Company, which gives even more tension to whether Clovis's voice can survive. But it does mean for poor John that he's got to sing the beginning of the song in a demanding falsetto.

Willie meanwhile has been working on Mr Goodley's show-stopping (or at least show-stealing) numbers, and I passed David sat in the Unicorn stairwell practising on his guitar. On the other side of the rehearsal room, Ros and Nicci are with Liam and Lucy discovering what goes on for Maia and Finn when they first meet in the jungle. Can Maia trust Finn, can Finn trust Maia?

The rehearsal room is now lined with fascinating spiders - not jungle creatures but diagrams created by the actors connecting names to aspects of each characters' personality, her or his inner life, desires and wants. Tony drops in for a bit of rehearsal and in the break we talk about how rare it is for directors to see how each other work. Ros talks about how over the last two years she's been physicalising more of the process of actors discovering what is going on for their character at key moments of the play. Each section is discussed and those big moments of tension, or change or emotion identified. For example, looking at Clovis singing there was: when Clovis misses the note and his voice cracks; when Clovis regains his voice; when his voice goes irrevocably deep and when he runs from the stage. All of which may happen in one or two minutes, but everyone present (Mr Goodley, Sergei and the twins as well as Clovis and Maia) expresses in a word and physically what they want at each point. It's a version of a process many actors and directors use in exploring text, but Tony, Ros and I have an interesting discussion about the possible variations. Here it's a looser and more pragmatic process than the one I sat in on as an Assistant Director to Max Stafford-Clark. As you might know from his Letters to George, he works with actors assigning a (strictly transitive) verb to every line, which can do your head in. But it gives a ruthlessly specific framework for a scene and forces action to take place on stage. Which isn't so far from the aspirations of the various improvisers I met at the weekend's Devoted and Disgruntled event brought together by Phelim McDermott. But it's too late for more on that now.

The life-cycle of the moth...

It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence.

Not my words but Harold Pinter's, from his Nobel lecture Art, Truth and Politics which is a tremendous exploration of what it is to write a play as well as a condemnation of the 'tapestry of lies' which sustains our politicians' power. It has a fantastic account of how the openings of Old Times and The Homecoming emerged, so fits with today's title, the opening line of our play. It emerged from a very different place - I'm conscious that the profoundly good things which we've heard yesterday and today in the first two readthroughs come from Eva Ibbotson's book. Not just some of the best lines and situations but the passion and the humour too. Although the surface of the script has moved further and further from the book, I hope the core of both remains the same. I'd be interested to hear (so do post comments or entries) on how people who know both the book and play feel about all that.

We hit one of the areas of departure today when Sam rightly pointed out that The Mayfair Academy for Young Ladies, the Edwardian girls' school where both book and play begin, is in the novel rather a good place to be. In contrast, I've picked up on the comment that 'even the best teachers have trouble trying to make the Rivers of Southern England seem unusual and exciting'. It feels to me a better way to contrast the ideas of education in the story if Maia begins in a Gradgrindian environment of facts and rote learning. But I also realise that from the very first line I'm therefore shaving away complexities which exist in the novel. We've lost the marvellous sisters Miss Banks and Miss Emily for example, but in getting down to a manageable number of roles to be divided between eight actors, some characters (lots!) were always going to disappear.

The challenge is for the texture of the production - physical, vocal, visual, musical - to create its own depths. Like the lovely relationship which emerged this afternoon between Anna (Sam) and Dora (John) - Anna eager to enjoy conjuring the horrors of the Amazon for Maia and exasperated by Dora's softness. Who knows if that moment will find a place in the production - or how may people will consciously notice it if it does? But like a beautifully crafted sentence - and Eva Ibbotson has many of those - it adds depth and layers which an audience can absorb, as readers do good writing.

This was going to be a brief entry. I'm hugely behind with everything else I should be doing, in part because of a coffee spillage all over the keyboard as I was typing up the rehearsal draft last week. But then maybe I should have got it done before Christmas like I planned. I wonder how Harold Pinter is with deadlines?

And We're Off!

A new chapter today. Ros sent Tony a copy of Journey to the River Sea in Summer 2002, which must be about when I first read it. Three and a half years later we're starting rehearsals in the new rehearsal room at the top of the new Unicorn Theatre, which was just a hole in the ground (if that) when we all first read Maia's story. The climate in the room may be computer controlled, but it's hardly Amazonian. A vigorous warm-up seems to have befuddled the machinery and left it gushing icy blasts down one side of the room. But the building is wonderful.

If you want to find out some of what's happened so far, have a look here where the blog begins.

As we work, you'll meeet some people again: Ros, Matthew, Nettie and Jeanefer from the creative team as well as Ceri the lighting designer who will be juggling this with being father of a new baby. Julie, Lucy, Sam and Willie are in the company from the May workshop, joined by David, Donnaleigh, John and Liam. Marijke from Theatre Centre has Nicci and Joseph on the Stage Management team, Beatrix is working with Nettie on design, as is someone else who arrives on Friday. Plus the Theatre Centre team, including Michael who's continued the adventure of collaboration in Rio with Nós do Morro. And the Unicorn team, who meet us all tomorrow morning. All of whom have been invited to contribute to this blog.

So rather than it being just my side of the story, everyone gets to put their point of view as we start the final journey upriver to the first performance on February the Ninth. Another new departure...

End of Part One

A mammoth sharing of the week's work this morning which seems to have both excited and alarmed. Lots of enthusiasm for the richness and depth of the actors' performances as they whirled from capoeira to string playing to mime to singing to acting the words on the scripts bravely clutched in their overworked hands. As well as various speaking parts they ended up being schoolgirls, dockers, boat passengers, market traders, Xanti villagers, masked waltzers, rubber tappers and forest creatures...

It wasn't brief, however, in part because certain sections were still improvised. So there's some concern about how long the show is going to be. It's interesting that one of the comments when we first read through the script pages on Monday was how fast the play goes compared to the book. Too fast? Too slow? When Ros, Tony and I met Suzanne Osten of Unga Klara, she said theatre was all about rhythm. Well, we've got about six months now to try and get that rhythm right.

They have wise feet

Julie, Natalie and Richard are standing in a blue plastic paddling pool, while the others wrap them in huge polythene sheets. This is - trust me - a transcendent moment in the life of the Xanti. Water, face paints, coloured paper leaves, and lots of laughter, but also hard work trying to create a vivid and appropriate world for these characters in the last sequence of the story. Matthew's work with singing on the in-breath paid off - suddenly everyone went into the piece on which he'd worked with them yesterday. And it felt it might be possible to create this place where 'everyone's life was like a river' on stage (although the paddling pool didn't cope with some vigorous fish-spearing with the bamboo poles and sprang various leaks.

So it looks like we will want to have real water, which creates various logistical challenges. As does the trapdoor for Finn and Clovis (there are no trapdoors in the new Unicorn stage - the floor of one theatre is the concrete roof of the other). Not to mention the crashing megatherium skeleton which appeared in the script today.

Five days work and we've travelled a very long way. Let's see what everyone makes of it at the sharing tomorrow - there's always the danger that what seems thrilling in the rehearsal room doesn't communicate to anyone else: 'you had to have been there'.

I had acquired the habit of walking in time to my breathing.
The narrator of Alejo Carpentier's The Lost Steps, following his time in the jungle.

Some beautiful moments today. I still haven't seen the market scene, but everyone was full of that excitement when I arrived. Then a terrific round for the Carter family by Matthew and a breathtaking piece for actor Michael on the cello, as Richard playing Finn poled along a creek. Plus some good physical exploration and discussion about the Xanti - how do we create a community of characters so remote from us without falling into stereotypes, both negative and over-romanticised? The discussion, in which all of us drew on things we had read or seen or experienced, was a great example of what a group's creativity can bring to a piece of theatre.