Being part of the first night of a new play definitely makes you indelibly part of the event of it, and critics have long played a variously honourable (and sometimes dishonourable) part in the recorded history that results. But a comparatively undocumented fact is the history of the first preview – the first time a play is ever put up for public consumption – that’s a sometimes fraught part of the process, but traditionally witnessed only by those either closely connected to the production or particularly avid theatregoers who like to be in at the beginning of something (or mistaken ones who don’t realise they are in so early). Sometimes in the case of new (and particularly potentially disastrous) musicals, early previews attract the ghouls who want to get a headstart on the rest of the world.
On Saturday evening, I paid for a ticket to see the first preview of Tom Stoppard’s new play, Rock ‘n’ Roll, that receives its world premiere at the Royal Court this month. In this case, there was a purely pragmatic reason for going in so early: obviously it wasn’t possible to see it for reviewing purposes yet, but I go to Australia on Wednesday and so am away when it opens next Wednesday, and wanted to have a sense of what I will be missing so that I don’t read the reviews from a distance and have to discover the play through them. But I will then see it again to review it myself after I get back.
But what was interesting about Saturday evening was that in the final rush to bring it to a public audience that night, they apparently ran out of time to actually run the show straight through before we saw it. I asked a member of the creative team before the show what the running time was likely to be, and he said he couldn’t honestly say, as it hadn’t been fully run yet.
Comprising numerous scenes that are intercut with musical extracts – the rock ‘n’ roll of the title – these took rather a long time on Saturday, and by the interval, I wondered aloud whether these were deliberate (to give the music its due weight) or were simply taking longer than usual in order to cover set changes. It turns out that it is important that the music is heard, though not for as long as we were doing so; but I also discovered the next day, in an interview feature in yesterday’s Observer, that Stoppard’s script calls for “smash cuts – changes of lighting and scene which have to be instantaneous rather than faded”.
I have seen this one dazzlingly achieved on Broadway in another Stoppard play, The Real Thing, that Mike Nichols directed there in 1984, and I wonder if that is what Stoppard was hoping for here. But as it happens, the play felt, in the early condition of Saturday’s preview, quite staccato. So there’s obviously some work to do.
But then that’s precisely what previews are for. I therefore don’t intend to use this blog to offer any critical judgement on the event, but merely to report those facts, including the one that the answer to my earlier question about running time turned out to be close to three-and-a-half hours.
In fact, I could have guessed as much as director Trevor Nunn frequently works to a larger canvas in previews, and then cuts down to size as he goes. I previously blogged about how Disney’s production of Tarzan on Broadway specifically used their extensive preview process to learn, watch and grow their show through, taking days off between public performances to implement changes that the performances had shown them were necessary.
But in a week and a half preview process that Stoppard’s play is having, there’s going to be a far greater intensity to getting the production finished in time, in every sense.
