Rehearsals for
Coram Boy started at the National Theatre on Monday 12 September 2005 and continued in the rehearsal room until Friday 28 October when a four-day period of technical rehearsals in the Olivier Theatre began. It had been, for almost everyone involved, an unusually demanding schedule. Because the 20
actors were playing multiple roles, they were needed in rehearsal throughout the six weeks, and even when they were not there, they were in demand for costume and wig fittings, and for lengthy and intensive music rehearsals (including
vocal improvisation) led with panache by Derek Barnes. In the final week, the tempo increased still further with rehearsals on the final two days starting at 10.00 in the morning and going on until 9:30 at night. You can read about the progress of the rehearsals and see photographs of the company at work by accessing the rehearsal diaries.
Many dramatically-effective moments developed during the rehearsals but perhaps none more so than the scene in which the loathsome Otis Gardiner (Paul Ritter) compels his unfortunate son Meshak (Jack Tarlton) to bury the corpses of babies entrusted to his ‘care’ by their distraught mothers. The pair stops in woods outside Ashbrook House to do their dirty business. As Meshak buries the tiny bodies, he discovers to his horror that one of them – the child of Miss Price (Inika Leigh Wright) to whom Otis promised “on my son’s life” to take him to the Coram Hospital – is still alive. There is a terrible moment when the child’s fate hangs in the balance before Otis condemns it with the command: “drop it in”.
In the rehearsal filming (
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3) you can see how the actors used their bodies and voices to create the wood, the sound of the dying children, the furious mad rage of the mothers of the lost babies, and finally the magnificent death-defying singing of Handel’s
Messiah as the children are resurrected and borne aloft into heaven. In rehearsal, the whole scene lasted just over eight minutes, but by the time it reached the stage of the Olivier, the scene had been
radically cut and edited. Compare the rehearsal films with
Act1 Scene7 and
Act2 Scene29 from the actual performance.