Directing Shoelace Chaser

What’s a big idea you’re exploring in this play?

The big underlying question of the work is how do you take responsibility for the choices that you make?

There's a version of Thea’s life where she doesn't have a lot of agency or control because of the care work that she does for her mum and helping set up the floristry business – a world where she has had to put away her love of running. However, underneath that is the question of how do you reclaim power in the face of adversity and how do you take responsibility for the work that all of us need to do – how difficult it is just to live a meaningful life. That’s what all three characters are wrangling with – how do they take responsibility for the decisions they make, and how do we make those decisions active rather than passive?

We have been talking a lot about the relationship between choice and purpose, and that actually it's in the choices that we make about the circumstances that we are working within, that define who we are. It's about your attitude to the situation that you're in, rather than the situation itself, that allows you to have agency. The thing that you can exert power on is how you feel about it.

What’s the world of this play and the rules of your direction?

The best way that I can describe the major performance style in the show is heightened realism – it’s real life, but with the saturation dial turned up. It's how we live day-to-day but we’re putting it in a pressure cooker, like when you're on Instagram and you turn the brightness up.

I’m focussing on how we can use performance to bring this internal world – what Thea's experiencing emotionally and psychologically through trying to juggle two separate parts of her life – out into the external world.

One of the ways we're doing that, and a rule that we've set up in the show, is through the two different ways that we use the stage. We've got the living room where Fiona (Thea’s mother) exists and functions, and we've got the running track where Syd exists and functions. Neither of them is allowed to cross over into the other space, but Thea can live in both. That's one way we're signifying that she's the one who’s having to code-switch and move between these two different roles that she inhabits in these two different worlds.

From the turning point of the show, the rules then start to break down. The differences between the two worlds start to collapse – the boundary of the living room and the running track becomes porous. Syd starts to exist in the living room world, and Fiona starts to exist in the running track world, and Thea loses her ability to know which space she’s in.

Director Liv Satchell, Elliot Wood and Leigh Lule in rehearsal. Photo: Matto Lucas

Another way we're exploring this idea is with transitions in the show. I’m really interested in finding somewhere in the play that Thea is totally in control, and we’ve landed on that being in the transitions because that’s when she’s holding both spaces alive. It's in the in-between where she is making her choices.

In the first half of the play, where she's still in control, Thea is in charge of when scene changes happen. Usually a transition is just functional, to get from one scene to the next, but we're dramatising the transitions as a space where Thea can do the code-switching of what role she's going to be playing next. We watch her shift into that role physically – she's putting on her running shirt or a work shirt – so it's really clear that she's inhabiting the work that is going to be required of her.

When we hit the turning point in the play, where Thea starts to lose control, we lose the transitions themselves. Each new scene is going to start from the scene that we've just lived, so the structure of the show is replicating Thea losing her sense of balance, and the events that she's triggered in these different parts of her life are getting away from her.

I think transitions radically underutilised. I think there's so much potential to explore because that's time spent on stage, you might as well use it for storytelling purposes. For this play, dealing with a story about how a character switches between different parts of their lives, the switch itself is the mechanism that we want to dramatise.

Director Liv Satchell, Composer & Sound Designer Tom Backhaus and Set & Costume Designer Bianca Pardo in rehearsal. Photo: Matto Lucas

How you collaborate with the designers in the transition moments of the play?

Collaborating with the designers on the transitions has been about establishing a set of rules for when the transitions exist and for when they don't.

Initially, what happens across the duration of the transition is that we move out of the lighting state of the previous scene, and we build the state of the scene that we're moving into. For the sound, Tom Backhaus has been developing this idea where each new transition that we move through adds a layer of sound, so we’re showing that Thea’s life is an accumulation of her choices. With each new scene that she moves into, she's carrying the set of choices that have come before her, until we start to collapse the transition.

When we hit that turning point, rather than morphing from one scene to the other with slowly changing lighting states, we're using sharper cuts where we snap into lighting the other space. The design starts to feel more angular and more disjointed because it's mirroring what Thea is experiencing internally.

What’s an example of a rehearsal technique you use with the actors?

To create the heightened realism that we're going for, I find it comes from the contrast between the actors’ performance and what we're doing with the design. What that means from an acting perspective is that we're really focusing on the real-world stakes of each scene. Each scene plays out as it would in everyday life, and the saturation, or dialling up, comes from the pressures exerted by the design morphing across the show. The shifts in design act as a pressure cooker for what the characters are going through, which creates more tension for the characters.

In terms of rehearsal technique, we've been focusing on how the tone of each scene is different from the previous one. We've been doing a lot of detailed work around being very clear and specific about what the domino effect is from scene to scene. Asking ourselves what are the stakes that the characters had from the previous scene that they're taking into this new one. What’s the new information they have and how does that affect the flavour of or feeling?

Director Liv Satchell, Elliot Wood and Leigh Lule in rehearsal. Photo: Matto Lucas

How do you explore the conflict in the script?

The way that I've been approaching scripted conflict is to talk through what happens in the scene first. We approach it from a technical perspective to start with, so we talk through what happens and then I get them to do a line read of the scene. One of the best ways to create tension is through rhythm, so a line read allows us to work out how the scene escalates and at which points that escalation happens. If we've clocked that technically, then the actors aren't having to pull that from within themselves. We can follow a shape rather than having to rely upon an emotional resource, which is what is dangerous.

Once we've agreed on what that structure of the scene is, we give it a go in the space. I'll then talk to them about what I've seen from the outside, about the relationship between that technique and what it's doing emotionally for us as an audience. Then we'll make adjustments to the rhythm, for example, as a way to boost or reduce the tension.

There are fundamental rhythms in our lives, like breathing. When someone's in trouble and their breathing gets out of sync, you know that something's wrong. Attending to what those core rhythms are, and disrupting those rhythms, is a really easy way to create tension without relying upon actors having to do all of that work themselves.

Thinking prompts

• How would you describe the big ideas being explored in this production?
• What hints about performance style can you gather from Liv's discussion?
• What predictions do you have about how conflict and space will be manipulated on stage?
• Try exploring a scene from the script using the directorial approach Liv describes above. Focus on how you manipulate rhythm to explore the scene.
• How might aspects of this style be evident in the work of different production areas?
• What are the 'rules' of how the space will be used by different characters?
• How will the transitions be used demonstrate Thea's character development in the play?
• How might the director manipulate this performance style to convey the intended meaning of the script?