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.