I.D Essay Book - I met 'Les Mis'... (part 2 of 6)

Read the previous part here.


I.D Essay Book - I met 'Les Mis'... (part 2 of 6)

It began…

The first day of rehearsals. I was so nervous that I don’t really remember what happened.

The real thing was more than half a year away and I didn’t really feel like I would actually be playing Eponine. Furthermore, I’m extremely shy in front of strangers and I felt like I couldn’t breathe from the pressure of being swallowed up in this narrow room full of people I didn’t know. From my point of view everyone there was impressive, overflowing with confidence. Oh no, everyone is totally thinking ‘who the hell are you?’, aren’t they…Even doing warm-up exercises there were so beautiful, like they were dancing. I felt sorry for myself, being so out of place. I started to want to apologise loudly to everyone there.

For this production there were several actors cast for each role and we would appear on rotation. Including both the principle and ensemble casts there were about 80 people in total! Even remembering names and faces looked challenging. Most of the staff had been working on the Japanese production since it began. Honestly, they seemed intimidating. Will I get used to all this someday?...I can’t imagine being able to at all.

By the way, generally rehearsals for a show will run for three months before a show opens at the most, at the very least they will last about a month. Rehearsals starting half a year before the opening like this are rare. Well, normally for a new production quite often you can’t rehearse even if you want to because the script isn’t finished until just before the actual opening. But Les Mis is a work that has been improved upon again and again over a number of years. The script is fixed, the rough movements of each character, the lighting, costumes, everything down to the props is already decided.

You might be tempted to think that it’s easy for the actor because everything that they are to do has been decided for them, but for us this was yet another difficulty. For most of the actors, like me, this was their first time performing Les Mis, and until now we had been in the audience watching the action. Because we were fans and knew it well we each had an image of ‘it has to be like this’, caught up in our preconceptions. It was necessary for us to have this almost too long preparation period of half a year so we could search for a way to become our own version of Les Mis while fighting those preconceptions.

In the beginning, the rehearsals were just like stage school. Two hours of singing practice, then after a short break there was a two hour class for moving our bodies – so four hours in total. During singing class everyone sat on chairs lined up in front of the piano and were taught by a singing instructor while we read the Les Mis score which was divided into two thick volumes. Each solo part was given out right there “Next, Mr./Ms. so-and-so”, and we would have to stand and sing in front of everyone. This really made my stomach ache. For starters, I can’t read music. If someone says “This is a semi-quaver,” or “Here you need to use ritardando,” I have no idea what they are talking about; I had to start by learning the vocabulary.

If you were to ask what the movement class was like, it started with stretches and yoga, then went on to things like workshops on walking techniques and practising how to waltz.

However, I’ve never learned to dance. People are shocked at how stiff my body is. For someone such as myself who was born with zero athleticism doing yoga and waltzing was pure torture. Why the waltz? Because in the show there is a scene of a wedding ceremony and most of the cast pair up boy-girl and waltz. My character Eponine does not appear in this scene. So even though I was thinking to myself that ‘I don’t really need to be doing this, do I?’ I couldn’t bring myself to say it so I desperately danced the waltz, stepping on other people's toes all the while.

On another day we were given a lecture by a professor who had been invited to come in. As Les Mis is set in the 19th Century this was a class for us to gain knowledge of the minute customs and culture that we would have been intimate with. Textbooks were duly given out and we studied the minutiae of the period’s fashionable clothing, the market price of labour wages etc. This was really useful for us to understand the roles that we would be playing.

Another time we had a women only rehearsal.

Towards the beginning of the story there is a scene inside a brothel. I play one of the prostitutes in this scene and this women’s only rehearsal began with a debate connected with how we would build our characters.

If you are asked by someone to “Please play a prostitute,” I imagine everyone imagines the same kind of thing. Generally they would try standing with their legs parted, or try swaying their hips in a seductive way, smirking as they gesture invitingly to customers. That kind of image pervades but without personal experience it is difficult to imagine a real prostitute. Despite that, because there is a reward in playing the so-called ‘role of social outcast’ as an actor, we tend to want to put all of our effort into these things. So ultimately we have a tendency to portray a prostitute as nothing but a ‘coarse woman who still seems to somewhat be enjoying herself’.

We gathered together and sat down in a circle, just the female actors and staff members, and tried to delve into the issues afresh.

What sort of person was a prostitute at that time? How much did she earn? We talked about sexually transmitted diseases, contraception, abortion; the personalities and jobs of the men who would come to buy a woman; how the women would make themselves appealing to the customers. While we were talking, there were people who got upset and cried.

Women who were sold by their parents to brothels, accommodating many men who they didn’t even necessarily like all day, using painful methods to have abortions over and over again. There were probably also women who just loved having sex and enjoyed what they did, or women who went mad after contracting an STD.

From that starting point we began to rethink the image of the prostitute we would play. After the debate each of us was able to come up with an individual interpretation.

After that the male actors came into the room. The women were in the centre of the room, representing the brothel. Then we performed an etude where the men walked around the outside as they made their decisions, and if they saw a girl they liked they would come forward and lead her out. This is apparently a famous rehearsal technique which they used for the first Les Mis production all those years ago, but when you try it in real life, no matter how many times you tell yourself it’s all a performance, it is truly exhausting. That I would feel so insulted by it. Treated like an object, my hand pulled without any affection at all, it was really hurtful. Despite that, having to put on a smile for business, having to use my sex appeal on the men passing by so I would be able to eat that day, or for the sake of a family I have to provide for.

But over time you even get used to that sadness…The women would be taken by strong alcohol, their deaths gradually closing in. This scene is truly exhausting, even though I’ve done it countless times.

So the rehearsals began with basic practices like this but little by little became proper rehearsals and then continued on to full-scale rehearsals using the revolving stage.

On to the next part now...